The Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance

BRIEF DESCRIPTION Recent discourse in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium A Geologic Turn: Architecture’s New Alliance, which I am curating as part of the Research Fellowship at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan, aims to bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the centre of this fecund transdisciplinary research trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are: first, to allow new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and second, to expose the students and faculty of the Taubman College to these new transdisciplanary ideas and projects. BACKGROUND In 2002, the chemist Paul Crutzen coyly suggested to a group of fellow scientists that our current geological epoch should be renamed the Anthropocene to reflect the decisive impact humans have on their environment, including its geological features. Following Crutzen’s comments and a paper published the same year in the journal Nature, the Anthropocene began to circulate within hydrospheric, biospheric, and pedospheric research and their attendant scientific publications. However, it was not until 2007, when the British stratigrapher, Jan Zalasiewicz, then serving as the chair man of the Geological Society of London’s Stratigraphy Commission, asked his colleagues about the merit of the term that it began to register as a formal geological question. While the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) continue to debate the relevant scientific merits of this diachronic shift, in the visual arts, theoretical humanities, and architecture and landscape architecture we have witnessed a turn to the geologic. SPEAKERS With publications such as Smudge Studio’s Geologic City: a field guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, and their forthcoming edited collection Making a Geologic Turn, as well as Stan Allen and Marc McQuade’s edited collection Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, Sanford Kwinter’s forthcoming Soft Systems, and Peter Galison’s forthcoming Building Crashing Thinking, it is clear that a productive new alliance among geological research, the visual arts, science and technology studies, and the design disciplines is under construction. The symposium aims to clarify three lines that inform this geological alliance: historical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and contemporary practice. Of course, these three lines are sometimes quite productively tangled, and the symposium participants have all been invited for their unique abilities to entangle research, theory and practice, and thereby produce important hybrid models for contemporary scholarship. In order to avoid the false claims of novelty, the relations amongarchitecture, landscape, and geology will be discussed in theirhistorical context (Jane Hutton, Seth Denizen, Amy Kulper, MeredithMiller). The theoretical component of current affinities betweenscience and design research, and their potential relation to theAnthropocene, will comprise a second line of discussion (Edward Eigen,D. Graham Burnett, Paulo Tavares, Rania Ghosn). The third line ofinquiry regarding contemporary practice would take up geologiccommitments through a discussion of current practices in architectureand landscape architecture (Stan Allen), the visual arts and culturalproduction (Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of smudge studio), andscience and technology studies (Peter Galison). The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship, Taubman College, and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan. The poster for the event is available here. SCHEDULE OF EVENTS __________________________ Tuesday, January 10, 06:00 PM Wastelands and Wilderness Peter Galison A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104) TCAUP Description As they are usually understood, the designations "nuclear wasteland" and "pure wilderness" are opposites; when they converge we often describe this circumstance as "paradoxical" or "ironic." Taking stock of plans to handle lands that will remain saturated with radionuclides for tens of thousands of years, I argue that the categories of wastelands and wilderness are far from dichotomous; that their relation is far more intriguing than a binary of purity and corruption. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity - for reasons of sanctification or despoilment - alters a central feature of the human self, presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are when land can be classified, forever, as not for us humans. Biography Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. His work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics -experimentation, instrumentation, and theory, focusing on the role of visualization and materiality in scientific work. Among his books are: How Experiments End(1987), Image and Logic (1997), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps (2003), and, with L. Daston,Objectivity (2007). Among other co-edited volumes are Big Science; The Disunity of Science; The Architecture of Science; Picturing Science, Producing Art; Scientific Authorship; and Einstein for the 21st Century. To explore the relation of scientific work with larger issues of politics, he has made two documentary films: with Pam Hogan, "Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma" (2000) and, with Robb Moss, "Secrecy" (about national security secrecy and democracy), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 200 8. At present, he is completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking (on technologies that re-form the self) and has just begun a new documentary film project on the long-term storage of nuclear waste, “Nuclear Underground.” Professor Galison’s recent interview with smudge studio on secrecy and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Carlsbad, New Mexico, is available here. _________________________ Friday, February 10, 06:00 PM Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain Stan Allen A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104) TCAUP Description TBA Biography Stan Allen became the dean of Princeton University in 2002. He is a practicing architect and principal of SAA/Stan Allen Architect. From 1989–2002, he taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he was also the Director of the Advanced Design Program. After working for Richard Meier and Partners in New York and Rafael Moneo in Spain, he established his own practice in 1990. His built work to date includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Stan Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of urbanistic strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of urban design. His urban projects have been published in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, reissued in 2004) and his theoret ical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation, reissued in 2008 by Routledge. Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, a 450 page book based on the conference held at the School in 2009, was published by Lars Muller in 2011. From 1999–2003 he worked in collaboration with James Corner/Field Operations. The work of this interdisciplinary collaboration was recognized with first prizes in invited competitions for the re-use of Fresh Kills in Staten Island (2001), and the Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California (2002). In 2000 they won the competition for a garden at the French Consulate in New York (now complete), and were finalists in the competition for the 320-acre Downsview Park in Toronto. In 2007, SAA/Stan Allen Architect won the international competition for the redesign of the Taichung Municipal Airport in Taiwan, which is now being implemented. Recently completed buildings include the Sagaponac House, Salim Publishing at Paju Book City and the CCV Chapel in the Philippines. The firm has recently been recognized with P/A Awards for the Taichung Airport and the Yan Ping Waterfront in Taipei, AIA Awards for the CCV Chapel and Salim Publishing, and an Architecture Award from the American Academ y of Arts and Letters. The recently completed Taichung InfoBox won both AIA andP/A Awards. In addition to design awards and competition prizes, he has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Graham Foundation Grant, a President's Citation and the 2009 John Hejduk Award from The Cooper Union. In a ceremony held in New Orleans in May, Allen was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. _____________________________________ Saturday, February 11th, 10:00AM - 04:00 PM All sessions A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104) TCAUP Immanent Histories 10.00-11:30 AM Seth Denizen Jane Hutton Amy Catania Kulper w/ Meredith Miller Description TBA Making the Geologic Now 11:30-01:00 PM Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth of smudge studio w/ Rosalyne Sheih Description In this session, smudge studio collaborators Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth will announce early sightings of an emergent and expanding cultural sensibility: the increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for understanding and responding to conditions of the present moment. Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. Artists, designers, architects, and cultural producers have begun to explore and creatively respond to the geologic depth of "now." smudge will trace some of these developments, and present their own work as a test site for what might become thinkable or possible if we humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer—as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. Hard and Soft Evidence 02:30-04:00PM D. Graham Burnett Edward Eigen Paulo Tavares w/ Rania Ghosn Description TBA For more information about the Symposium, to receive email updates, or for a poster or mailer with additional details, please contact sturpin (at) umich (dot) edu. Additional session abstracts coming soon. www.anexact.org