The Materiality of Air
At The Sixth Sphere
Log 60
Log 60: The Sixth Sphere Winter/Spring 2024
“The architecture we inhabit, the urban systems we rely on, and the landscapes we transform are all part of the technosphere,” write Albert Pope and Brittany Utting, guest editors of Log 60: The Sixth Sphere. For them, the sixth sphere is the technosphere, an emergent man-made system entangled with the Earth’s five natural spheres: the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere. “Taken as a whole, the technosphere includes our feedlots and sewer systems, factories and housing, tarmacs and croplands, and every modification we have made to the ground, the glaciers, the sea, the air, and the biosphere. It is a vast and often banal landscape. . . . Almost everything we do – prepare a meal, buy a shirt, message a colleague, fill a prescription, take a bath – we do through the technosphere.”
Log 60, a 208-page thematic issue, explores the technosphere as “a planetary enmeshment of bodies, environments, and technologies” by examining the Earth’s natural spheres through the lenses of architecture, science, and philosophy. Geologist Peter K. Haff defines the technosphere; architect Rafael Beneytez-Duran, philosopher Emanuele Coccia, and historian Ingrid Halland each consider how we occupy and breathe the atmosphere; architects Alexandra Arènes, Daniel Jacobs, Brittany Utting, Lydia Kallipoliti, Andreas Theodoridis, and Neyran Turan take on the scope of the biosphere; architects Margarita Jover, Marina Tabassum, and Maggie Tsang wade through the history and challenges of the hydrosphere; anthropologist Dominic Boyer, landscape architect Leena Cho, and architects Billy Fleming, Joyce Hsiang, and Bimal Mendis take stock of the possible futures of the cryosphere; and climate researcher Holly Jean Buck, architects Rania Ghosn, Ang Li, and Marina Otero Verzier each dig into the possibilities in the lithosphere. As the guest editors write: “Log 60 positions the technosphere not only as a geophysical condition to understand and critique but also as a collective site in which to construct alternative social, technical, and environmental futures.”
Article Abstract
The Materiality of Air" asks how architecture might act on the atmospheric crisis of the Anthropocene by reconceiving domestic space as a site of planetary agency. Drawing on Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson's account of Earth's material revolutions, the essay frames the accumulation of CO₂ as the contemporary counterpart of the Great Oxidation Event, a potential "Great Carbonization Event." It adopts their call for "Gaia devices": natural, technological, or hybrid apparatuses made of recyclable matter and open to material flux, able to recycle waste as efficiently as the biosphere.
The essay treats air as a complex, heterogeneous materiality that dissolves boundaries between bodies and scales. Through Anna Tsing, Gilbert Simondon, Daisy Hildyard, and McKenzie Wark, it argues that the domestic scale is where the planetary becomes tangible: a trans-scalar assemblage in which humans and nonhumans negotiate cohabitation.
Alejandro de la Sota's Alcudia houses (1983–84) are read as a premonition of this thinking, and their drawings as an unwitting record of the Great Acceleration. From there the essay traces a lineage through recent projects by Husos arquitecturas, HOME-OFFICE, and OFFPOLIN with Miguel Mesa del Castillo, each of which cultivates multispecies interdependence within the home.
It concludes with the Irritable and Tobogán houses by Z4A Architects in Madrid. Both are conceived as carbon sinks and oxygen wells: native-grass gardens that resist herbicide-treated monoculture lawns, wrapped in a fully recyclable, microperforated membrane that mediates air, light, and temperature. These projects suggest that Gaia devices require new architectural-environmental equations and also the active participation of inhabitants in the interdependencies of the Earth system.