ABSTRACT
Despite the considerable eorts of centuries of architectural theory to unify nature and extract material concerns from the core of the discipline, architectural design has never treated nature as an abstract, silent and unied entity, distinct from design and technological experimentation. A cosmopolitical perspective would possibly constitute a more adequate theoretical framing for an architectural discipline which accepts a multiplicity of natures and keeps the material concerns at the core of the practice, by accepting that the common world cannot be mapped onto a unied nature, which is “out there.” Nature is to be done, created, instigated; it is to be composed, and this happens with every new project. The history of façade assemblages is a perfect example of a complex of technologies that did not require a single, specic way of dominating nature, but rather oered ways of creating new alliances with the forces of nature (solar energy, vegetation, temperature, ventilation, and so on), resulting in new compositions, new assemblages, and new “façade species.”
