Architecture in the Production of Ecological Time

Abstract

This paper revisits Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, UK to interrogate architecture’s relation to neoliberalism. It looks to this project as a means to open a speculative approach for architectural scholarship to engage neoliberal society. Eden, I argue, coordinates its spaces, technologies and objects to project a temporality that seems to lack both past and future in favor of presenting time as continuous, homogeneous, bound to the perpetual management of the present – what I call “ecological time”. This project shows that in the theater of neoliberal governmentality, the present is the object of design, and “design” becomes indistinguishable from the technological management of the world.

Keywords:

• climate change
• neoliberalism
• architecture
• ecological time
• preservation
• Eden Project

Notes

1 Anon., “£100 Million China Eden Centre Deal Signed in Beijing Today” (2015), http://www.edenproject.com/media/2015/09/100-million-china-eden-centre-deal-signed-in-beijing-today (accessed November 24, 2016).

2 For example, Cornell West, “Goodbye, American Neoliberalism: A New Era Is Here,” The Guardian, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/17/american-neoliberalism-cornel-west-2016-election (accessed November 24, 2016); and Aditya Chakrabortty, “You’re Witnessing the Death of Neoliberalism – From Within,” The Guardian, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/31/witnessing-death-neoliberalism-imf-economists (accessed February 17, 2016).

3 Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani and Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?,” Finance and Development 53, no. 2 (2016), http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm (accessed November 24, 2016).

4 Among many other examples, see Peggy Deamer, “Architectural Work: Immaterial Labor,” in Industries of Architecture, ed. Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech (London: Routledge, 2015), 137–147; Jack Self, ed., Real Estates: Life Without Debt (London: Bedford, 2014); Reinhold Martin, “Financial Imaginaries: Toward a Philosophy of the City,” Grey Room 42, Winter (2011): 60–79; Ted Cruz, “The Architecture of Neoliberalism,” in The Politics of Parametricism: Digital Technologies in Architecture, ed. Matthew Poole and Manuel Shvartzberg (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 189–199; and Jonathan Massey, “Risk Design,” Aggregate (transparent peer reviewed), http://we-aggregate.org/piece/risk-design (accessed November 17, 2016).

5 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008). Prior to the translation of Foucault’s work into English (and its subsequent surge in popularity around the world), David Harvey’s Marxian account of neoliberalism was a common reference for much of the critical literature on neoliberal capitalism: David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

6 Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 219.

7 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neo-Liberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2013).

8 To this end, two works stand out in their approach to neoliberalism from the knowledge and practice of architecture, each with a different aim: Felicity Scott’s history of architecture’s entanglements in the establishment of global neoliberal governance structures: Felicity Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone, 2016) – and Douglas Spencer’s valuable contribution to architecture and the production of subjectivity: Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became a Device of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

9 I borrow this notion from a recent talk, also by Spencer: Douglas Spencer, “Requiem for a Dreamworld” (paper presented at “The (Dis)enchanted Subject of Architecture: Between Neoliberalism and Neobaroque” conference, Architectural Association, London, UK, November 25, 2016).

10 Dardot and Laval, New Way of the World, 255–299. For more on the production of subjectivity (subjectivation), see Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014).

11 By “ecological time,” I am not referring to the scientific term denoting a time scale relevant for assessing changing climates and environments. In this sense, it is a more speculative term that attempts to relate a dominant cultural narrative about climate change with the political and governmental techniques of neoliberalism.

12 Dardot and Laval, New Way of the World.

13 Hugh Pearman and Andrew Whalley, The Architecture of Eden (London: Transworld, 2003), 8.

14 Richard Buckminster Fuller, “The Case for a Domed City,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, September 26, 1965, 39–41.

15 Richard Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).

16 Ibid., 37.

17 In particular, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), ch. 1: “Modernity and the Planes of Historicity.”

18 Scott, Outlaw Territories, chs. 2–3.

19 Reinhart Koselleck, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67, no. 2 (2006): 357–400.

20 Ross Exo Adams, “Notes from the Resilient City,” Log no. 32 (2014): 126–139; idem, “An Ecology of Bodies,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, ed. James D. Graham (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), 181–190.

21 For example, Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

22 For example, Parregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000).

23 Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015).

24 Note that The Eden Project has and continues to pursue many commendable projects, e.g., its People and Gardens program http://www.edenproject.com/eden-story/our-ethos/people-and-gardens/.

25 Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (London: Continuum, 2003). For Negri, the notion of kairòs identifies the “power to observe the fullness of temporality at the moment it opens itself onto the void of being” (158). Kairòs is an immeasurable time that invents a “to-come” – a radically non-futurist time of praxis that breaks altogether with the inevitability of continuous time. “It is indeed in the struggle for the free appropriation of the present that life opens itself to the to-come; and desire perceives – against the empty and homogenous time in which all is equal (including, and in particular, the future) – the creative power of praxis. If life is not based on this active experience of the to-come, it cannot be called life” (163).