Monstrous Desires and Disinterested Appreciation: Architecture, Technique and Nature

Abstract

It seems that in the last decades architecture has finally become aware of the impact the demands of its construction and of its maintenance and operation have on the environment. The demands for architecture of being green or becoming ecological have been answered mostly through an enhanced use of technology, through a technical deployment of a multiplicity of systems and gadgets that try to achieve a better performance, or in other words, a better efficiency, but not by addressing the roots of the question. Henceforth, this increase in the use of technology is covering the fact that what architecture needs to do for being green is not to promote the use of technology, but to rethink its original relation with technique and nature. This paper will propose in the first place a brief survey of this original and tainted relation between architecture, technique and nature, to show how and why this relation was condemned since the beginning. Then, I will propose in the first place two strategies to fight this original misunderstanding: an architecture of visibility, which should be a critical one, and an architecture of gratuity, that should necessarily be a disinterested one. It will follow a review of some of the questions already mentioned with more detail, addressing the question of a necessary negotiation with nature, the issues posed by the rhetorical use of green technology, the demands of transparency and gratuity in architecture, the relations between physis and techne, and the important question of disinterest through the lens of Kantian aesthetics. In a final and short conclusion I will propose, instead of a technical substratum for the relations between architecture and nature, an aesthetical one, that can anticipate a relation between man and nature based in disinterest instead of extraction and domination.