Tectonics of Perception
Author: Cristina Parreño Alonso Journal of Architectural Education, 2019
- Title
- Deep and Shallow Timescales of the Builtsphere
- AUTHOR
Cristina Parreño Alonso
- PUBLICATION
LOG No. 54, Coauthoring (Winter/Spring 2022), pp. 145-149
- READ
"The unprecedented global challenges we are facing today demand radical and new temporal accountability. This entails a paradigmatic shift by which what we call “the globe” (home to our ever-globalizing cultures and economies) and “the planet” (this very old cosmic entity we’ve been inhabiting of late)are seen as entangled and unfolding in shallow (human) and deep (planetary) time simultaneously" READ FULL ESSAY HERE
According to Uexküll, every organism inhabits its own distinct perceptual universe, or Umwelt, which integrates the perceptual world and the action world. The Umwelt can be thought of as a broader instantiation of agency, one that presents perception as a critical factor in the act of world making.
In the 1790’s geologist James Hutton conceived the Earth as a superorganism, a sort of macro-perceptual system which—in light of Uexkull’s theories—would then be embedded in its own Umwelt that, as with every other Umwelt, has its own time.
In deep time, the shallow six-to-12-hour lifespan of Cyanobacteria intersects with a deep 3.5-billion-year timeline, back to the time when these bacteria became the first organisms to populate the Earth. In deep time, therefore, these microorganisms ought to be seen as a major agent in architecture, not because they are actors, for instance, in the deterioration of building facades but because without them there would be no oxygen in the atmosphere and therefore no life – no humans, no buildings, no facades.
Consider, for example, the bedrock of Manhattan. About 450 million years ago, a collision between the continental plates formed the supercontinent Pangaea. The impact of this deep time material event folded the bedrock that is now Manhattan into dips and folds, becoming a major agent in the coproduction of the city’s skyline.