Subnatures: Architecture's Other Environments

by David Gissen

We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these 'subnatural forces' are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice. The exhilarating and at times unsettling work featured in Subnature suggests an alternative view of natural processes and ecosystems and their relationships to human society and architecture. R&Sien's Mosquito Bottleneck house in Trinidad uses a skin that actually attracts mosquitoes and moves them through the building, while keeping them separate from the occupants. In his building designs the architect Philippe Rahm draws the dank air from the earth and the gasses and moisture from our breath to define new forms of spatial experience. In his Underground House, Mollier House, and Omnisport Hall, Rahm forces us to consider the odor of soil and the emissions from our body as the natural context of a future architecture. [Cero 9]'s design for the Magic Mountain captures excess heat emitted from a power generator in Ames, Iowa, to fuel a rose garden that embellishes the industrial site and creates a natural mountain rising above the city's skyline. Subnature looks beyond LEED ratings, green roofs, and solar panels toward a progressive architecture based on a radical new conception of nature.

Genres: Architecture, Design, Science, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published November 1, 2005

Reviews

[Timmytoothless · Rating 4 out of 5]

An illustrated history of how the undesirable byproducts of building and urbanization have been framed in architectural theory and engaged with in architectural practice. The early 21st projects included in the book attempt to recover utility from the various these ‘subnatures’, suggesting a novel subgenre of architectural inquiry that is bursting with potential but frustratingly unrealized.

[Juliana · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, dirty; architectural theory for those of us who think banning smoking in restaurants is fascist

[Ichor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nature is a governing feature of postindustrial architecture and planning. Few would contradict the notion that living in harmony with nature—with greenbelts, sunshine and beautifully-landscaped parks enhances our lives. In prioritising this mode of living we adopt an exclusionary definition of nature, one which favours certain elements of the natural and vilifies others. David Gissen explores Subnature, those forms of nature deemed undesirable.

Subnatures are those forms of nature deemed primitive (mud and dankness), filthy (smoke, dust and exhaust), fearsome (gas or debris), or uncontrollable (weeds, insects, and pigeons). We can contrast these subnatures to those seemingly central and desirable forms of nature—e.g., the sun, clouds, trees and wind. These latter forces are generally worked into the forms, practices and ideas that constitute the primary realisation of nature within architecture.

What follows is an investigation into the ways contemporary architects and planners have tried to work various types of Subnature into their work. Gissen looks into dankness, smoke, gas, exhaust, dust, puddles, mud, debris, weeds, insects, pigeons and crowds—furnishing his expositions with examples and historicising each element to show the process by which it shifted from natural to subnatural.

Pigeons—to take one of the most interesting pieces in the book—were not always considered vermin which had to be forcibly kept out. They were once encouraged to breed inside of buildings and elements of their natural form were incorporated into the mouldings of ancient and modern classical architecture. This embrace of pigeons was typified by the rise in construction of dovecots for feudal lords and later by the admiration of their ability to adapt to the new industrialised cities in Europe in literature and popular culture.

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

A wholly different take on the relationship between nature and architecture. By looking at the elements usually viewed as problems to the
built environment (smoke, dust, mud) and recasting these (sub)natureal elements to be a positive, transformative force for architecture.

The book is very readable with a number of interesting historical notes and contemporary projects. Gissen's writing is both popular and academic like Cabinet Magazine.