Anthropotechnology: Sloterdijk on Environmental Design and the FoamWorlds of Co-Isolation

Abstract

The paper has two primary goals. The first is to re-examine the dynamics of cultural change by applying the innovative interpretations of German theorist and cultural historian Peter Sloterdijk, who contends that the ways we traditionally have made and understood our built environment are grossly inadequate in our contemporary media-saturated, war-weary, biotechnological world. The second is to show how such a reinterpretation of space, architecture, and culture could help us to learn to design better and act by way of an “anthropotechnology” (Sloterdijk’s word) that is simultaneously developmental and threatening – that might enable us to find an orientation in a world of complexity, and thus more positively shape our lives and future world. Sloterdijk’s intriguing concepts – spheres of immunization (bubbles, globes, foams), co-isolation, dyads, tensegrity – hold great promise for the next pulse of architectural, planning, and construction theory.