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