The Garden and the Breathing.
A Narrative about the Architecture of Air amid the Fears of the Anthropocene.
Full paper at:The Garden and the Breathing.
Material Arquitectura 22: Aire
Through Feral Atlas, anthropologist Anna L.Tsing tells us terrible
stories of the Anthropocene without overwhelming or paralyzing us. Tsing
confronts us with it, not with the immensity of Timothy Morton's hyperobjects,
but with accessible proximity that invites curiosity and action on the
ordinary. From Tsing's methodology and through a biological and technological
intertwining, this essay explores the ecology of the air and concludes with a
brief story that shows the technical alliances of architecture and landscaping
towards the construction of an architecture of membranes and bodies of air.What we call “air” is an actual hybrid plurality of real substances, including all the chemical evolutions of the gases of the early and present atmospheres, the exhalations and inhalations of humans and non-humans, and the emissions of volcanic crystals, dust storms, seawater sprays, as well as micro-plastics, pesticides, particles from extraction processes, manufacturing, including also those coming from the forms of combustion that we have invented, -heating or cooling our living and working spaces, driving or cooking- , as well as those other substances that return to the atmosphere after the permafrost thawing process. What we breathe is the result of the relationships of the immediate environment - the vehicle waiting for the traffic light to turn green, the pollination of grass in the garden, the radon gas emanation of the ground, the water evaporation on the metal surface, etc. - and it is also a deep and millennial substance afar on time and space that carries the signature of a vast number of events such as the massive eruption of life-producing oxygen from the oceans 520 million years ago and the pics and valleys of carbon emissions we have pumped into the atmosphere since James Watt patented the steam engine in 1784. Somehow, all these objects remain united in a reality that we call air; a gas that exists by virtue of the millions of living organisms and interconnected events of the planet as described by Alexander von Humboldt anticipating what James Lovelock would later explore in his article Planetary Atmospheres (1968) to define the planet as the ultimate unit of life.
Air belongs to the family of multiple, heterogeneous, and massively distributed objects in time and space. Air is not only life support, it is also the archive of all signatures of humans and non-humans and their physical and temporal undulations. Air is what Timothy Morton has defined as "hyperobject.”