Deep Time Architecture. Building as Material Event
Author: Cristina Parreño Alonso Journal of Architectural Education, 2021.
- Title
- The Builtsphere. A Broken Geological Paradigm
- AUTHOR
Cristina Parreño Alonso
- PUBLICATION
Volume 76, 2022 - Issue 2: Pedagogies for a Broken World
- READ
Bruno Latour elaborated on the concept of blackboxing as the “process that makes the joint production of actors and artifacts entirely opaque.” The concept is illustrated with the example of a projector that, when working properly, is a “silent and mute intermediary, taken for granted,” becoming visible only when it breaks down. While the phenomenon of malfunction “remind us of the projector’s existence,” theacts of the repairmen are what reveal that “the projector is made of several parts, each with its role and function.” In other words, it is the act of reparation that releases the epistemic power of the breakdown, by displaying the object as a set of actors and actions.
But if the real potential of the breakdown is only released in the act of reassembly, what happens when repairability is seen as an increasingly outmoded virtue by a society that has become more inclined to throw something away than to repair it? In today’s culture of planned obsolescence, we not only design technology to fail prematurely, but we also prioritize compactness and efficiency over repairability.
While certain agents and actions where activated yesterday to repair what was broken, others, are put in motion today to ensure that the malfunctioning object is swiftly replaced. These acts of replacement respond to a desire for smoothness, the same desire that keeps things hidden in order to avoid friction. Replacement wears the mask of the effortless, concealing all actions, actors, processes, and flows of material, energy, and labor.
Replacement displaces the critical role these actors and actions serve in the correct functioning of the object itself.
Replacement is a violent abstraction that externalizes everything that is uncomfortable, keeping it beyond our perception by locking it inside the black box.
It perpetuates existing hegemonic forces and power structures by keeping them murky and deliberately unknown.
Repair and reparation are born of other desires. They come from a willingness to struggle, to face friction and conflict; from the courage to confront and to overcome.
To repair requires a profound desire to know and to translate that knowledge into“subtle acts of care.
And yet paradoxically, it may be this very sense of urgency—to care for our world—that is preventing us from seeing all the ways in which our world takes care of us. We cannot see all the ways in which our planet “embodies the traditionally maternal value of ‘care,’” or all the ways in which the Earth behaves as “a self-regulating complex system that works to perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.” We cannot see all the ways in which we have not been taking care of our world, and much worse, we have been actively preventing our world from taking care of us. Indeed, we cannot see any of this because we have place it all in a planetary big black box.
Our planet’s marvelous infrastructure of care has been called the Earth System, and has traditionally been subdivided into four main geological paradigms: geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Each of these systems is characterized by four common traits whose correct functioning is essential for world-care and self-repair: (1) far reaching dynamics, (2) interconnection with other spheres, (3) autonomy of operations, and (4) appropriation of resources sustained by cyclical activity.
The complexity of the interconnections that makes the system work in balance is also its Achilles’ heel: it takes only one sphere to break for the entire system to be compromised.
None of these older geological paradigms, however, is compromising the planet’s health. Instead, a giant baby sphere, born broken, has begun to shift the Earth out of its equilibrium. In the 19th-century, Austrian geologist Eduard Suess introduced it as the anthroposphere, “the total mass of human-generated systems and materials, including the human population.”