p/ F_ ADDRESSING OURSELVES
The contemporary mindset is divided against itself. Today, we live in two unrelated worlds. The first world is local in scale and, following the conquest of covid, is apparently in fine shape. We can fly long distances again, eat a lot of meat, and drive gasoline powered cars with little concern for the immediate consequences. The second world we live in is global in scale and is apparently in dire shape. Each year is hotter than the last, a disruption in weather patterns keep floods and fires constantly in the news cycle, a sixth mass extinction of species is underway, and all beaches, everywhere in the world, will disappear within two generations due to sea level rise. Except in times of climate-induced chaos — heat-waves, floods, wild-fires — the two worlds fail to integrate with each other.
In The Second Body, the British writer Daisy Hildyard writes that climate change brings about a “derangement of scale — a sense of confusion that is caused by the huge gap between the immensity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of your own private everyday life.” She argues that this derangement disrupts our understanding of the built environment “in that our tiny homes and even tinier bodies are bearing down on distant, huge, unknown things, and vice versa.” With climate change, the smallest half-conscious actions “such as turning on the kettle, or turning down the thermostat, are transformed…into momentous political decisions which have global impact.”
Hildyard argues that this drastically increasing global impact effectively gives us a second, incorporated body that is global in scope and far more destructive than the first. (As we collectively draw down natural resources and change the chemical composition of the atmosphere, each of us is counted as members of a large, statistical body that is simultaneously unrelated to our quotidian existence and a direct threat to it.) Hildyard argues that, in order to solve our most pressing environmental problems, this second body must ultimately be integrated into the self. “I want to incorporate the second body with the first. Because the body exists at different scales, I need to close in on it, starting from its most expansive expression. I want to start by talking about the whole world.”
At this point in time, we remain comfortably seated in what Hildyard describes as our first body and are apparently in no mood to make concessions to the massive, aggregate impacts caused by our second. In order to address these impacts, it will be necessary to confront this quiescence and expand our individual purview by integrating this second body into who we are and what we do. Despite the fact that living in two, separate and unreconciled bodies is reckless, if not self-harming, there are no clear ways to integrate them. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the ways in which design can help.
Hildyard’s description of a conflict between the two bodies is extremely useful to design in that the conflict is both human and scalar. The expansion of the local (intimate) scale toward a metropolitan, regional, national or international scale can be cast as a specific design problem. The act of stepping out into a crowded living room, or out onto a public street, or arriving at a train station or airport or merging onto a major freeway or taking off on an airplane (or a rocket) are each They are foundational acts in that they are about a mastery of modern spaces that cannot be convincingly simulated on a screen.
In the contemporary city, thresholds of expansion are a key ingredient of the built environment allowing us to escape the parochial isolation of the first body while simultaneously engaging with the powerful planetary impact of second body. If this interaction between the first and second body can be physically negotiated, it follows that the scale of design must go beyond the limitations of single buildings to address broader urban conditions.
Yet, as designers, we have no urban project, or even an urban idea and we have not had one since Pruit-Igoe hit the ground as rubble in 1972. Up until this time, design discourse was animated by projections of new towns (not old towns) and there were concrete design proposals that could animate those projections. If, however, we were asked what an American city looks like today and what it should look like tomorrow, we would be reduced to merely pointing at what exists. We have simply accepted the city in which we site our architectural projects as a given, as if the possibility of urban reform was simply beyond our imagination.
In our not so distant past — in the discourse of the first generation of modernists, of Team Ten, of the Metabolists and of the Tendenza — answers were proffered to these questions. Some of them were utopian, some of them were objective( sachlichkeit ), while others were what today we might call “explicative” — based on an explication of dwelling as it was met in the second decade of the twentieth century. Considered as a whole, the modern project was unique in the history of the built environment in that large scale urban ideas actually drove design at the local level. It is time to recover its expanded conceptual boundaries of the modern project and to transcend the alienating, parochial limits of local, first-body problems. It is time to address ourselves, through design, as we exist in the world.
