Maya’s intelligence is its condensation of architectural mediations (section, plan, program) into the specific convolutions of force-animate surfaces and physiognomic formal complexities. At first this revealed a hypertrophic formal imaginary, but emergent in today’s design generation is a renewed exploration with intrinsic and extrinsic structure, both as systemic operation and has a performative criterion. At issue is not the re-application of structural precepts to the fabrication of such architectures, but the induction of a specific machine-physiology of form, assembly and habitation.
This seminar, a belated exercise in ‘becoming-animal,’ is not about the mimetic career of biology into and onto architecture, but of the transference of multiple physioiologic scales into the systemic intelligence of the involute surface-dwelling, and back again.
The ocular nerve of the owl, the locomotion of the giant jellyfish, the pack logistics of the rat(s), the program of the frog’s anus, are not just forms, organic symmetries and baroque geometries. They are machines, they are solutions, partial grammars to take shape for us, and we for them. Maya already shifts our thinking and clicking away from the wedge, volume, void, plane and into the joint, organ, cavity, skin: hardly blobs, rather fleshes.
What is the language of armature, of anatomy to be derived? Mere undulation is primitive, curvation per se is passé. Iteration is intrinsic but autonomic. What is emergent, already before us here and there, is a biotechnological and biopolitical shift in the vocabulary of tectonics: ingestion, circulation, digestion, expression, reproduction, prolapse, affinity. speciation, locomotion, armature, orifice, membrane, interface, biomimicry and its immolations, software and its latencies, and perhaps most of all, camouflage.
This seminar is to be taken in conjunction with Hernan Diaz-Alonso’s vertical studio of the same name. Seminar readings, discussions and crits will focus on the program and projects developed for that specific studio, and will also depart from them on regular occasion.
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Schedule
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Required Readings
Biomedia by Eugene Thacker
The Elementary Particles by Michel Houllebecq
Reader to be available in student store.Including works by Critical Art Ensemble, Greg Lynn, Georges Canguillem, Felix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben, Mark Wigley, Roger Friedland. Maurice Meleau-Ponty, J.G. Ballard, and others.
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References and Recommended Books
Biopolitics
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scary
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Death, Dismemberment and Memory: Body Politics in Latin America by Lyman L. Johnson
Visions of Excess, Selected Essays by Georges Bataille
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life by Georgio Agamben
The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them by Eugen Kogen
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklos Nyiszki
The Foucualt Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Selected Writings
Vermillion Sands by J.G. Ballard
The Haraway Reader, Donna Haraway
Zoomorphology
Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed by Harold Koda
Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Biomorphic Architecture: Human and Animal Forms in Architecture by Gunther Feuerstein
Folds, Blobs and Bodies: Collected Essays by Greg Lynn
Next Generation Architecture: Folds, Blobs and Boxes by Joseph Rosa
Mood River, ed. By Jeff Kipnis et al.
Holy Terrors: Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings by Janetta Rebold Benton
Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots by Eduardo Kac
Atlas of Formal Flesh
Animal Physiology by Richard W. Hill et al.
Vertebrates: Comparative Anatomy, Function, Evolution by Kenneth Kardong
Atlas and Dissection Guide for Comparative Anatomy by Saul Wischnitzer
Hyman’s Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy by Marvalee H. Wake
Cephalopod Behavior by Roger T. HanlonCephalopod: A World Guide by Mark Norman and Helmut Debelius
Invertebrates by Richard C. Brusca et al.
The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine by Catherine Waldby
Atlas of the Visible Human Male: Reverse Engineering of the Human Body by Victor M. Spitzer and David G. Whitlock
Kinesiology of the Musculoskeletal System by Donald A. Neumann
Essentials of General Surgery by Peter F. Lawrence, et al.
Principles of Anatomy and Physiology by Gerard J. Tortora, et al.
Zoontologies
Representing Animials by Nigel Rothfels
The Postmodern Animal by Steve Baker
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal by Cary Wolfe
Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory by Cary Wolfe
The Open: Man and Animal by Giorgio Agamben
Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
On the Origin of Phyla by James W. Valentine
Acquiring Genomes: The Theory of the Origins of the Species by Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagen
