Structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata

Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscoqw will largely erode into sands and gravels, to be spread by wind and water into unreadable expanses of desert. The coastal cities of new York and Amsterdam, those claimed soonest by the rising sea levels, will be packed more carefully into soft-settling sediments. It is the invisible cities – the undercities – that will be preserved most cleanly, embedded as they already are within bedrock. The above-ground structures we have built will collapse to form jumbled urban strata: medleys of concrete, brick and asphalt, glass compressed to a milky crystalline solid, steel dissolved to leave trace impressions of its presence. Below ground, though, the subways and the sewerage systems, the catacombs and the quarry voids – these may preserve their integrity far into a post-human future.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) pp. 170-171 

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere

All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere.

 

Robert Macfarlane, Underland (Hamish Hamilton, 2019) p. 138 

The street migrates into the living room

So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the faculty of making their bodies tables). Housekeeping utensils hang from balconies like potted plants. From the windows of the top floors come baskets on ropes for mail, fruit, and cabbage. 

Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room. 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 174 

Building and action interpenetrate

As porous as this stone is the architecture. Building and action interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation appears intended forever, no figure asserts its "thus and not otherwise". 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 169

There is no house or interior without a door or windows

In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world [l'etrangerl. There is no house or interior without a door or windows. The monad of home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home, habitable at-home in the relation of the self to itself.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 61 

Nature as such is a twleve-thousand-year-old human product

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn't just a term – it's something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-year-old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one's brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a sipping point.

The Anthropocene doesn't destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as catastrophe.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) pp. 58-59

Inhabited space transcends geometrical space

Come what may the house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world. The problem is not only one of being, it is also a problem of energy and, consequently, of counter-energy.

In this dynamic rivalry between house and universe, we are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms. A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 46-47

The house shelters daydreaming

If I were asked to name the main benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.6

An entire new concept of the urban

Just as architects read the city as a historical palimpsest produced by social forces that become coded into material form – layers upon layers of ruins constituting a living fabric of social relations – Amazonia must be interpreted through the syntax of urban design, or else the concept of the urban must be crafted anew to incorporate the constructed nature presented by the forest. The relation between figure and ground is subverted, insofar as that which was defined as the surroundings – the antithesis to, or outside space of, the civic – are incorporated as a constituent part of an "expanded polis," within which humans and nonhumans cohabit in a common political space. In this process an entire new concept of the urban is made visible, one whose contours encompass a multi-species polity that we may initially find difficult to recognize because for too long our perspective has been confined to the epistemic enclosures of the Western city.

Paulo Tavares, 'The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archeology of Genocide' in The Word For World Is Still Forest (K. Verlag, 2016) p. 151

Stanza of the organic bunkers

Weed, beasts, insects, birds, and legions of organisms unseen: the most promiscuous republic ever declared was here in the urbanic air.

Even plague and pox were never passive folks: invisible architects, they redesigned streets and houses, shaping also our institutions, the form of hospitals and prisons.

Any wall is populated and consumed by the invisible food chains of microbes and mould, where the border between organic and inorganic life blurs.

Buildings breathe and ferment — architecture is the bunker of life.

Wietske Maas & Matteo Pasquinelli, 'Manifesto of Urban Cannibalism' at http://urbanibalism.org/Manifesto_Urban_Cannibalism_Berlin_notes.pdf (2013) p. 4

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling. Not only because architectural form drowns in it, but, because glass, when so used, renders visible those who seek shelter within it. [...] The language of absence here testifies to the absence of dwelling – to the consummate separation between building and dwelling which no heterotopia is capable of remedying. The "great glass windows" are the nullity, the silence of dwelling. They negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis. And reflection only is permitted to these forms.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 114

To build is to know oneself as a dweller

To build, for Eupalinos, was to know oneself – since building is dwelling and dwelling is being, being-in-peace, being-at-home. To build is to know oneself as a dweller. And homes are cherished by the dweller as beloved objects.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 109

The neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture

The neo-military syntax of contemporary architecture insinuates violence and conjures imaginary dangers. In many instances the semiotics of so-called 'defensible space' are just about as subtle as a swaggering white cop. Today's upscale, pseudo-public spaces – sumptuary malls, office centers, culture acropolises, and so on – are full of invisible signs warning off the underclass 'Other'. Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the built environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups – whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females – read the meaning immediately.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 2006) p. 226

The problem of crowd control

Ultimately the aims of contemporary architecture and the police converge most strikingly around the problem of crowd control. As we have seen, the designers of malls and pseudo-public space attack the crowd by homogenizing it. They set up architectural and semiotic barriers to filter out 'undesirables'. They enclose the mass that remains, directing its circulation with behaviorist ferocity. It is lured by visual stimuli of all kinds, dulled by musak, sometimes even scented by invisible aromatizers. This Skinnerian orchestration, if well conducted, produces a veritable commercial symphony of swarming, consuming monads moving from one cashpoint to another.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz (Verso, 2006) p. 257

Architecture seems to restore the meaning of time to us

What is true of the past is perhaps also true of the future. To perceive pure time is to grasp in the present a lack that structures the present moment by orienting it towards the past or the future. It arises equally well from the sight of the Acropolis or of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Both structures have an allusive existence. So it can happen that architecture, against the grain of the current dominant ideology of which it is part, seems to restore the meaning of time to us and speak to us of the future.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xvii

The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers

Jacques Attali has recently suggested that it is the image of the labyrinth which nowadays comes to dominate, even if surreptitiously, our thinking about the future and our own part in it; that image becomes the principal mirror in which our civilization in its present stage contemplates its own likeness. The labyrinth as an allegory of the human condition was a message transmitted by the nomads to the settlers. Millennia have passed, and the settlers have finally acquired the self-confidence and courage to rise to the challenge of the labyrinthine fate. 'In all European languages', Attali points out, 'the word labyrinth became a synonym of artificial complexity, useless darkness, tortuous system, impenetrable thicket. "Clarity" became a synonym of logic.'

The settlers set about making the walls transparent, the devious passages straight and well signed, the corridors well lit. They also produced guide-books and clear-cut, unambiguous instructions for the use of all future wanderers about which turns to take and which to avoid. They did all this only to discover in the end that the labyrinth is firmly in place; if anything, the labyrinth has become yet more treacherous and confusing owing to the illegible tangle of criss-crossing footprints, the cacophony of commands and the continuous addition of new twisting passages to the ones already left behind and new dead ends to the ones already blundered into. The settlers have become 'involuntary nomads', belatedly recalling the message they received at the beginning of their historical travels and trying desperately to recover its forgotten contents which – as they suspect – may well carry the 'wisdom necessary for their future'. Once more, the labyrinth becomes the master image of the human condition – and it means 'the opaque place where the layout of the roads may not obey any law. Chance and surprise rule in the labyrinth, which signals the defeat of Pure Reason.'

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 138

Outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them

Somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed form the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2002) pp. 23-24 

A civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments

We can take the original meaning of the word—in late Latin, civilisatio—as a workable starting point; it means “having or establishing settled communities.” A people known to the Romans was civilized if its members lived in civitates, cities or towns. We can generalize this further, and say that a civilization is a form of society in which people live in artificial environments.

John Michael Greer, 'The Cimmerian Hypothesis, Part One: Civilization and Barbarism' on The Archdruid Report, URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/07/the-cimmerian-hypothesis-part-one.html (15/07/2015)

Urban space is the means of confrontation

Urban space is more than just the theater of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this case for the party of insurrection) that the future insurgents of Paris take over the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 58

To cover the planet with glass

The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 54