In the early part of the twentieth century, discoveries at the subatomic scale began to suggest that there might be limits to the degree to which humanity could fundamentally know the nature of the world—limits that exceeded the ability of science and technology to ever resolve. Both Werner Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty and Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity, articulated in 1927, claimed that the measurement of subatomic phenomena could only ever provide approximations of the underlying physical reality, and also that the results of these measurements were heavily distorted by the act of measurement itself. These ideas, while essential to quantum physics, nevertheless represented a tragic indictment of both the authority of science to objectively reveal the full nature of the world and the assumption of human detachment from the environment upon which such supposed objectivity depends. The realization that aspects of reality, at least at very small scales, were fundamentally inaccessible to objective observation and measurement was such an affront to members of the scientific community that even Albert Einstein—whose theories had also articulated the profound degree to which an observer's state affected the perception of physical phenomena—publicly debated Bohr regarding the completeness of the theory of quantum mechanics. For Einstein, the key to his attempt to disprove the theory lay in its concept of entanglement—a condition in which pairs of particles are created whose quantum states cannot be described independently of one another, regardless of their physical and temporal separation.Footnote1 Entanglement therefore describes an uncanny form of causality across time and space—one that Einstein dismissed as an unscientific belief in impossible “spooky actions at a distance.”Footnote2
Today, the spookiness of entanglement has become an accepted scientific reality. However, it does not only occur at the extremely small scales of subatomic particles. The Anthropocene—an era defined by humanity's radical transformation of the planet—is a context wherein human causality with respect to the planetary environment is also uncanny. Although climate change is real, and its effects are scientifically undeniable (sea level rise, ozone depletion, shifts in average temperatures and precipitation, to name a few), specific causes may be separated from their deleterious effects by distances and times so vast that they fall outside of the human frame of reference. Furthermore, the aggregation of human actions (and inactions) produce not just these results, but undoubtedly a myriad of yet unknown, and perhaps unknowable, consequences—characteristic of humanity's environmental entanglement.
Reflecting in 1949 on his debates with Einstein regarding the epistemological implications of quantum mechanics, Bohr observed that “no content can be grasped without a formal frame,” yet “any form, however useful it has hitherto proved, may be found to be too narrow to comprehend new experience.”Footnote3 This observation, like many of the issues about which Einstein and Bohr argued, is more philosophical than scientific. Of course, both science and philosophy grapple with epistemological problems—however, science does so from the standpoint of a presumed objectivity. Many philosophers, meanwhile, have long pondered the speciousness of such objectivity by articulating an epistemological gap between an underlying reality and its superficial appearance—a gap that philosophy sees as fundamental, whereas science seeks to close.
However “entanglement,” which was coined by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935,Footnote4 is a term that finally admits the scientifically unresolvable nature of that gap. It describes physical phenomena and relationships whose true nature is fundamentally inscrutable. Yet it takes advantage of this inscrutability in order to conjure up evocative images in its place, which stand as picturesque approximations or interpretations of the underlying reality. Entanglement is, in fact, an aesthetic description. Moreover, aesthetics are precisely the means by which humanity negotiates the epistemological gap. An aesthetic work, whether literary, artistic, or architectural, exploits the virtuality inherent in this gap in order to realize—in other words, to make seem real—a countless variety of alternative appearances of the world, whose specific differences from the world as we know it make possible new ideas, and new forms of engagement, with the actual world. In so doing, the gap becomes not merely a tragic shortcoming of human perceptual limitations but also, fortuitously, a space of opportunity for the human imagination.
The environment is, of course, just one of many possible “appearances” of reality constructed by humanity to fill this epistemological gap. Whether it is the Umwelt described by Jakob von Uexküll (the idiosyncratic worldview of each species) or the oikos (“house”) that is the etymological root of ecology, the environment is both a space and a representation: it situates humanity within a larger reality and constructs a limited world that stands in for that reality. It thereby defines the manner in which reality is understood, experienced, and engaged. Insofar as it defines the context for human activity, it also defines the limits to which we can measure and predict the impact of such activity. However, its nature as a constructed space means that it could also be constructed differently.
As a discipline with an unparalleled aesthetic and spatial expertise, architecture is unmatched in its ability to realize new environments. Therefore, in lieu of “the environment,” it can be enlisted to manifest other environments—ones that make possible, and desirable, new and possibly more beneficial forms of engagement with the world. Collectively these speculative environments might constitute a manifold description of reality, a plurality that could mitigate the shortcomings of any individual description. In fact, the title of this special issue of the Journal of Architectural Education is intended to underscore such a plurality: rather than framing the discussion around a singular idea of the environment, it specifically calls for the consideration of multiple environments.
The contributions to this issue were therefore selected for their ability to illuminate a diversity of prior, and possible future, ways of architecturally reconstructing the idea of the environment. Opinion essays by Todd Gannon and Wes Jones kick off the Environments issue by delving deeper into the disciplinary implications associated with the epistemological gap between reality and its possible appearances. Gannon's “Strange Loops: Toward an Aesthetics for the Anthropocene” examines both the philosophy of object-oriented ontology as well as Reyner Banham's search for architectural otherness as frameworks for understanding the aesthetic potential of that gap. Jones's “Progress and Representation: Continuity, Discontinuity, Resolution,” in turn, speculates on the potential of technology to close the epistemological gap through increasing resolution—finally rendering the “environment” a perfect representation of the world. Meanwhile, a Guest Curation feature by Christopher Hight, “A Thousand Milieus,” invokes the concept of the Umwelt to examine the social and spatial politics implicit in the construction of environments.
The four Scholarship of Design essays featured in this issue examine contemporary and historical instances of environmental speculation. Elizabeth Keslacy's “The Legibility of Environment: Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum (1968-1976)” recounts the evolution of the Cooper Hewitt from its prior incarnation as a decorative arts museum into a museum focused on design and reveals the agenda of environmental legibility it pursued in accordance with this transformation. Whitney Moon's “Cedric Price: Radical Pragmatist, in Pursuit of Lightness” and Fred Scharmen's “Highest and Best Use: Subjectivity and Climates Off and After Earth” also investigate previous examples of environmentally speculative architecture, and reflect on their contemporary implications. Moon's essay examines Cedric Price's extensive research into the architectural potential of inflatable structures to expand architecture's scope, and to produce spatially and temporally open environments. In so doing, she suggests that Price might serve as a model for an expanded idea of environmental performance. Scharmen's essay, meanwhile, examines the research conducted by NASA during the 1970s into orbiting off-world habitats through the frameworks of Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt and the gender theories of Judith Butler—discussing the limited subjectivities constructed by those supposedly “earth-like” environments, and their implications for the contemporary design of urban and corporate enclaves. Finally, Luke Pearson's “Design by Decoding: Exposing Environments Mediated by ‘Cultural Software’” examines the contemporary manipulation of the physical environment through popular and accessible forms of culture-generating software. He discusses how such software—including Google Earth and video games—affords the public an unprecedented ability to manipulate the virtualities of coded spaces, and thus empowers that public to manifest new environmental realities.
This issue also features six Micro-Narratives that offer unique representations of the environment that reveal previously unconsidered scales and contexts of environmental engagement. Jana VanderGoot's “Considering Dry Rot: The Coevolution of Buildings and Serpula lacrymans” demonstrates that dry rot is not simply a problem for timber construction but is also a participant in an evolving relationship between humanity and the environment—one that serves both as an index of environmental temporality and as a catalyst for a corresponding temporality in architecture. Michelle Laboy's “On Groundwater: Invisible Architectural Environments,” meanwhile, explores humanity's effects on groundwater as a framework for revealing the typically unconsidered subsurface extents of the environment, and humanity's effects on it. Both Jane McQuitty and Kiel Moe, in turn, argue for the stipulation or reconsideration of terms by which aspects of the environment are represented. In “Feralness: A Sibling of Wilderness,” McQuitty argues for the establishment of a new category by which to illuminate and evaluate a form of wildness—one that, in contrast to the term “wilderness,” is dynamic, spatially intrusive, and not yet aestheticized in a manner that might sponsor cultural valuation. Likewise, Moe's “Magnificence: On the Appearance of the Baths of Caracalla” reconsiders the issue of architectural “magnificence” beyond the issue of simple appearance, and thereby suggests that the “appearance” of a work, especially with respect to its environmental fitness, should be expanded to include the micro and macro scales of its perceptual, material, and energy flows. Accordingly, other Micro-Narratives demonstrate the potential of architecture to expand the appearance of the environment—and to reveal, dramatize, and even actualize new forms of human engagement with it. Carey Clouse's “The Himalayan Ice Stupa: Ladakh's Climate-adaptive Water Cache” examines a recent practice among drought-stricken Himalayan agricultural villages of designing and constructing monumental frozen water caches—adaptive infrastructures that not only store autumn and winter glacial meltwater for irrigation use in the spring but, in making that water legible in frozen form, also enable it to serve as a religious and cultural symbol of the community and its environmental resilience. Meanwhile, in “The Itinerant Architect: Toward a Land-based Architectural Practice,” Jacob Mans and Thomas Fisher advocate for a radical shift in design practices that displaces the idea of the environment as a fixed spatial and temporal context for a work of architecture and instead understands it as an evolving set of social, cultural, and physical milieus within which the design and construction of a work is enacted as an open and responsive process.
The two Design as Scholarship essays featured in this issue speculate on alternative environmental engagements through the lens of specific design frameworks. In “Leviathan in the Aquarium,” Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy employ the framework of the aquarium to present a series of enchanting microcosms capable of representing the physical and temporal scales at which climate change occurs, and which are thereby able to not only reveal the otherwise inscrutable environmental effects caused by human activity but also to present new versions of the world in which alternative forms of human engagement are able to be considered. Meanwhile, in “Patent Scenarios for the Mississippi River,” Richard Hindle annotates patent drawings for resilient, bottom-up technologies designed specifically for the Mississippi River Delta that were patented in the early 1900s, but which were never implemented. These illustrate alternative scenarios for the delta in which the river itself is enlisted as an integral and essential component to the invented technology—and thus reframe the scope and character of human agency in relation to natural systems.
Finally, the aforementioned content is complemented by two collections of Discursive Images, each of which provide contemporary reflections on works that have been seminal to expanding architecture's conception of and engagement with the environment. The first is by two members of the Archigram Group, Michael Webb and David Greene, who, respectively, revisit their Cushicle/Suitaloon and Logplug and Rokplug projects. The second features texts and images by Stan Allen, Robert Fishman, Diane Ghirardo, and Lola Sheppard and Mason White that reflect on Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.
In the end, if the environmental crisis is also a disciplinary one, it is not simply because architecture is a profligate consumer of material and energy resources, but also because the recent tendency to frame the environmental crisis in such narrow terms correspondingly narrows the range of architecture's possible engagements with environmental concerns. Furthermore, to understand architecture's environmental performance only as a quantifiable measure of “fitness” is to misunderstand the limits to our knowledge of the environment, as well as to our capacity to accurately measure and predict the effects of our actions across the spatial and temporal scales within which they proliferate. By invoking the Anthropocene, we have finally begun to acknowledge that the environment is not an a priori context but rather is inextricably conflated with and mutated by human activity. Instead of being distinct from the environment, we are fundamentally entangled with it—and the lack of objectivity that this entanglement implies means that the way out of this predicament cannot only be through measurement and calculation but must also come from the speculation and invention of alternative forms of engagement. In that regard, we must finally recognize that the environmental crisis is also a crisis of the imagination. Architecture's unique spatial and aesthetic expertise can therefore be enlisted to stage other environmental performances—ones that stimulate the environmental imaginary and sponsor valuable new ideas about the environment and new forms of engagement with it. And as the content in this issue makes plainly evident, only by being mindful of the environmental performances previously undertaken by the discipline, and by inventing and pursuing new ones, will we be able to increase the probability of a better future while we struggle to deal with the one that otherwise seems imminent.
Notes
1 In a paper presented in 1935, coauthored with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, Einstein attempted to disprove Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics by describing a paradoxical condition of entangled particles separated by a distance so great that they would need to exchange information faster than the speed of light in order to satisfy Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty. This supposed impossibility became known as the EPR Paradox, named after the initials of the paper's authors. See A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Physical Review 47, no. 10 (1935): 777–80, doi: 10.1103/physrev.47.777 (accessed June 1, 2017).
2 Einstein's exact phrase was spukhafte Fernwirkung, translated as “spooky actions at a distance”; Albert Einstein to Max Born, March 3, 1947, in Albert Einstein, Max Born, and Hedwig Born, The Born-Einstein Letters: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955 (New York: Walker, 1971), 158.
3 Niels Bohr, “Discussions with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1951), 240.
4 Erwin Schrödinger, “Discussion of Probability Relations between Separated Systems,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 31 (1936): 555.