Biopolitics and Recombinant Architecture

Meghan Froehlich and Lyssa Hulsebosch

3 Systems of Power1) Sovereignty2) Discipline3) Society of Control

1.Sovereignty

2.DisciplineProcess of discipline:1) Analyze and break down2) Classifies according to objectives3) Establishes optimal sequence4) Fixes process of permanent control5) Divides normal from abnormal

3.Society of Control

Biopolitics

‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.’

- Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The will to knowledge.

Biopower

‘Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it and rearticulating it.’

-Antonio Negri

Biopolitics at work

Is the door open for unchecked modification?

Cells genetically modified to produce protien

Summary of the systems of power

Sovereignty Disipline Society of control

Biopolitics in Architecture

Recombinant Architecture

“Are we populating the early years of a eugenic century with a nightmarish biotechnological singularization of humanity?”

3 Figures of Recombinant Design1) Architectonic forms in the image of genetic, biomorphic corporeality

2) Genomic bodies in the image of architecture

3) application of artificial biomaterials in the construction of the built environment

1. Genomic Bodies Architectonic forms in the image of genetic, biomorphic corporeality

Embryological House

Neo-Plasmatic Design

“When bodies and buildings are made of the same stuff – then the first premises of their interactions are reopened for design”

2. Exo BodiesGenomic bodies in the image of architecture

Mythological recombinant figures

Liger

Contemporary Fictional Recombinant Figures

Renovation of our first habitats

“the contemporary body is already under siege by an agenda of recombinant transformation and redesign”

“architecture as body, and body as architecture”

Artificial bones

Genetically modified embryo

“the Ear Mouse, as much as the being-thing itself, is an icon of a culture of radical tissue engineering in emergence, of the creative violence of science, and of the biological body now recombinant architecture form”

-Bratton

Ear Mouse

3. Genomic Spatial Systemsapplication of artificial biomaterials in the construction of the built environment

Aziz & Cucher’s “Chimera”"My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.“

Biosteel

Pig wings

What are the limits of these biomaterials?

Do these hybrid materials share the same mortality as their biological contributors?

I will leave you with a quote from Bratton, “As ever, these integrations and disintegrations point designers toward even more monstrous modes of experimentation, that leaves us without adequate ‘expert systems’ to arbitrate them, and without certain capacity to adjudicate in advance our own risky, inevitable involvements as both producers and consumers, of both each other and our habitat.”

-Bratton

Questions:

In a governing system where control is faceless, can anyone/thing come to the controlling side? Does a dichotomy exist in biopolitics between the controlled and the controller?

If your home was more like you would you feel more at home?

As bodies and architecture become more like each other will there be a point of balance?

Or will each by-pass the other?

Will there be a point when we do not need architecture and architecture doesn’t need us?

Why does architecture designed to be sympathetic with our bodily systems seem alienating?

How much longer till the figure like the one in splice becomes reality or will we always intervene?

Bibliography

Bratton, Benjamin H., “The Premise of Recombinant Architecture, One”, in Sessions, 2006, 94-111.

Foucault, Michel, “25 January 1978”, in M. Senellart, ed. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, 2007, 55-86.

Keim, Brandon, “The First Genetically Modified Human Embryo: Advance or Abomination?”, Wired Science. May 12, 2008, 30 Oct, 2010, <http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/the-first-genet/>

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Print, pp22-41.