Air: From Bodies to Breathable Skins.
Full paper at:Air: From Bodies to Breathable Skins.
CENTER 23- AIR
If the composition of the air we breathe depends on living beings, the atmosphere is no longer simply the environment in which living beings are located and in which they evolve; it is, in part, a result of their actions. —Bruno Latour
The fields are parched; the grass dries up, dying by the foulness of the air.
—Virgil (70BC–19BC)
Commenting on or trying to represent environmental “air” is a different endeavor than implementing it as an element of architectural design. People might enjoy untreated air along the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, where the temperatures and humidity levels sustain a flourishing natural environment and the aroma of warm seas or exuberant wild gardens fill the air. Far north or south, however, the air must be warmed and humidified; and nearer the equator, cooled and dehumidified. Around big cities or industrial sectors, the air is filled with toxic particles, whereas in desert or high agricultural regions, the air often must be filtered before
it is breathable. When we design with or for air, we do not design objects; instead we design permeabilities, relationships, symbioses. John Evelyn described London’s air in just this way in his Fumifugium: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated in 1661. “It seems absurd,” he wrote, “that men, who owe their lives to air, are not able to breathe it freely, but instead are allowed to live in misery.” 1 For as Jonathan Hill explains in Weather Architecture, the coals used for industry in London during that period were loaded with sulfur dioxide. 2 The combustion of this matter caused the dispersion of sulfuric acid throughout the London area. It covered every surface, from buildings to monuments, from plants to lungs, from eyes to clothes. At a more theoretical level, Evelyn in his Fumifugium re-imagines the relationships between territory and subject, between air and body. Evelyn presents the body as a breathable skin rather than as an object equipped with a respiratory system. Air is to humans, he implies,
what water is to jellyfish. Air fills every square millimeter of our living space, yet at the same time remains in a state of flux throughout our bodies. Fumifugium is a prescient assessment of questions regarding air quality today. This paper aims to sew together the relationships between biological bodies and productive environments via the air that circulates through them both. The project will involve questions of politics, economics, and ecology. In fall 2018 I directed a research project based on Fumifugium with graduate students Taylor Hanttula and Josh Hafel at Texas Tech University titled The history of air: On territory, urban and architecture. The project developed three documents: one, a cartographic representation of historical events and systems of thought related to air and drawn from Fumifugium; two, a set of three maps designed to represent the relationships between the hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere surrounding London, in order to explore the concept of “constructed air” from 1661 to the present day; and three, the design of a jellyfish tank that represents both Evelyn’s paradigm of the body as a skin rather than an object, and the sense in which the body is a medium or setting. The jellyfish is a prehistoric animal, of course. Here it evokes the biological origin of our bodies. It represents an intimate relationship between form and environment, and it helps us understand their essential continuity.
The relationship between these three maps intentionally evokes the limited and yet multi-disciplinary knowledge that John Evelyn used to discuss the air of London in 1661 in order to approach the problem of air as an element of architectural design.