ABSTRACT
This is a slightly altered chapter taken from Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition, published in 2006. It was difficult to resist making changes—although I ended up making only a few—because I am now writing another book on the subject of architecture and biological life, more specifically on second order systems theory and biomodernity. Architecture, Animal, Human's aspiration was to re-pose and re-vivify the question of life in architecture because life, per se, is now a radically different cultural-biological complex than it was even fifty years ago. Our assumptions about both the figure and fact of life in our work are based on humanist paradigms that date back to the Renaissance. The purpose of admitting animals into the room, so to speak, was not to pass beyond humanism into some post-humanist condition that emancipates us from these paradigms. Instead, it was to trouble architecture with animate forms—animals—that could not be easily assimilated into these traditions, which define so much about architectural work. Animals occupy the existential place of all that we desired to leave behind in our human dominions and this has drastically delimited our understanding of biological life. The book attempted a suggestive critique of the relation of architecture to new theories of nature and life.
