ABSTRACT
In 1995 Jennifer Bloomer remarked that the new wave of digital architecture was a ‘subjugation of matter by form’ – an implicit rejection of ‘that dirty place, the matter of mater’. Where architecture once emerged from the material mess of its site, twenty years ago the new frontier of architectural form-making looked clean, light and virtual. Matter was left in the garden. In the intervening years, digital technologies have advanced to engage more closely with material systems. The growing body of experimental designs that enlist non-human biological and technological actants as co-creators with taglines like ‘protocellular architecture’, ‘material ecologies’ and ‘hylozoic grounds’ will be the focus of this paper. These digital-material architectures are what Guattari might call ‘animal-, vegetable-, Cosmic-, and machinic-becomings.’In light of contemporary concerns about the extent and consequences of human transformation of the earth during the Anthropocene this paper will explore the uncertain borderlands that these architectural experiments occupy. With reference to theorists such as Guattari, Andermatt Conley, Haraway, Rawes and others, this paper will ask to what extent do they model an ‘ecosophy’ of hope that reconfigure the social, the mental and the environmental? And to what extent are they simply new practices of anthropogenic subjugation of non-human material systems that continue the environmentally destructive modernist industrial project?
