Posts filed under ‘Articles’
Commemorating COVID
A worldwide event as consequential as the COVID-19 pandemic deserves to have a memorial. How can compassionate architects and designers confront our understanding of memorial design in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic?
“Commemorating COVID,” with Mitchell Joachim and Paul D. Miller, in The Pandemic Effect, Braine Brownell (ed.), (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2023), 44-45.
Archiagape
Perhaps the architecture profession needs a new name? How about replacing “architecture” with “archiagape”? This is the lecture I gave at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in May 2021. Published as “Archiagape” in Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural, Chris Perry (et.al.) (eds.), (Barcelona: Actar, 2022), 298-302. [PDF]
Ukichiro Nakaya’s Sense of Snow
“Ukichiro Nakaya’s Sense of Snow” with Sverker Sörlin, in Letters Sent from Heaven: Frozen and Vaporized Water: Ukichiro Nakaya and Fujiko Nakaya’s Science and Art, Jonatan Habib Engqvist and Marianne Hultman (eds.), (Oslo: OK Book, 2022), 125-131. [PDF].
Greenwashing a Nation
Norwegians like to think of Norway as being an alternative environmentally sound nation compared with the rest of the world. They fashion themselves and their country as a microcosm for a better macrocosm. The reality is that this greenwashing of a nation is powered by the money from the oil, and that my native Norway has little to be proud about.
Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine
“Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine,”History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43:89 (2021), 1-39. [PDF]
Nick Hopwood, Staffan Müller‑Wille, Janet Browne, Christiane Groeben, Shigehisa Kuriyama, Maaike van der Lugt, Guido Giglioni, Lynn K. Nyhart, Hans‑Jörg Rheinberger, Ariane Dröscher, Warwick Anderson, Peder Anker, Mathias Grote, Lucy van de Wiel, The Fifteenth Ischia Summer School on the History of the Life Sciences
Abstract
We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circlesonce symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.
Deep Impact
Terreform ONE, Mitchel Joachim, Peder Anker, Nicholas Gervasi, “Deep Impact: Animal-, Plant- or Insect-Aided Design as techniques to mitigate stress on urban non-human species,” Topos Magazine, 112 (Sept. 2020), 32-37. [PDF]
Get the Topos Magazine here.
Presenting the article at the “Critical Density: Health, Ecology, Economy & Equity” symposium. New York Institute of Technology, Sept. 30 2020, at the 14:20 mark.
Computing Environmental Design
“Computing Environmental Design,” Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945-1980, Theodora Vardouli and Olga Touloumi (eds.), (London: Routledge, 2019), 15-34.
Read Ebook online here (requires library access).
This is the long version of this article. Download PDF of the article here.
Abstract
In December 1964 the Boston Architectural Center organizedthe first conference on the role of computers in architecture – an issue that designers had been pondering since the 1950s. The questionat stake in such debates had been the relationship between artists and machines. Environmental design proved to be an unlikely question that emerged in the discussion, with architect and designer Serge Chermayeff noting that with computers environmental complexities could now come under the purview of architecture. Only a year earlier Chermayeff had published the seminal book Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanismwith Christopher Alexander, wherethe two authors had argued for a humanism that placed environmental concerns at the forefront. At the conference Chermayeff argued that computers constituted a critical tool for analyzing and comprehending environmental complexity, allowing for the integration of the built within the natural environment. “Our survival depends upon our ability to master new complexities” he argued, “with the best technology at our disposal.” This optimism with respect to how computers could help in solving environmental problems was shared among modernist designers, most notably by Richard Buckminster Fuller, but also among ecologists and biologists of the period. Computers could order both the human and natural environment using the same language, thus bringing landscape and architectural design in dialogue. Yet computers of the time were cumbersome to work with and getting access to them was not a matter of course. The architects’ musings about computers ultimately had to do with imagined futures for the design disciplinesand not so much thepractical exigencies of the time. By focusing on Serge Chermayeff’s critical response to the introduction of computers as tools for grasping and communicating complexity, this paper will interrogate the emergence ofcomplexity as an aesthetic and design problem, formative for the introduction of computing to architectural design.
Computing Environmental Design
“Computing Environmental Design,” in The Culture of Nature in the History of Design, Kjetil Fallan (ed.), (London: Routledge, 2019), 44-57.
This is the short version of this article. Download PDF here.
Abstract
In December 1964 the Boston Architectural Center organizedthe first conference on the role of computers in architecture – an issue that designers had been pondering since the 1950s. The questionat stake in such debates had been the relationship between artists and machines. Environmental design proved to be an unlikely question that emerged in the discussion, with architect and designer Serge Chermayeff noting that with computers environmental complexities could now come under the purview of architecture. Only a year earlier Chermayeff had published the seminal book Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanismwith Christopher Alexander, wherethe two authors had argued for a humanism that placed environmental concerns at the forefront. At the conference Chermayeff argued that computers constituted a critical tool for analyzing and comprehending environmental complexity, allowing for the integration of the built within the natural environment. “Our survival depends upon our ability to master new complexities” he argued, “with the best technology at our disposal.” This optimism with respect to how computers could help in solving environmental problems was shared among modernist designers, most notably by Richard Buckminster Fuller, but also among ecologists and biologists of the period. Computers could order both the human and natural environment using the same language, thus bringing landscape and architectural design in dialogue. Yet computers of the time were cumbersome to work with and getting access to them was not a matter of course. The architects’ musings about computers ultimately had to do with imagined futures for the design disciplinesand not so much thepractical exigencies of the time. By focusing on Serge Chermayeff’s critical response to the introduction of computers as tools for grasping and communicating complexity, this paper will interrogate the emergence ofcomplexity as an aesthetic and design problem, formative for the introduction of computing to architectural design.
Anthropocene Architecture: Design Earth’s Geostories
“Anthropocene Architecture: Design Earth’s Geostories” with Nina Edwards Anker, The Avery Review 29 (Feb. 2018). [PDF]
Republished in: Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, (Barcelona: Actar, 2018), 206-213.
A review of the exhibition Geostories: Another Architecture for the Environment, created by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, which was on display at the Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York, October 17, 2017–December 2, 2017.
Untangling Intentions: Teaching the History of Climate Politics
“Untangling Intentions: Teaching the History of Climate Politics,” in Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities, Stephen Siperstein, Shane Hall and Stephanie LeMenager (eds.), (New York: Routledge, 2016), 272-278
Peder Anker 