"Nonviolence or Revolution. Towards a Hybrid and Anti-Speciesist Architecture"

Abstract:

In 1923 Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture was published for the first time, maybe the most influential essay for the discipline in recent centuries. Imprinted on the title page of that first edition was the photo of the deck of the steamer Aquitaine, at the time the most up-to-date result of the industry: from there, the "machine" became the model for a radical renewal of architecture. Nowadays, in 2023, who would ever dream of presenting the latest cruise ship or a super-jet as a paradigm of a renewed architecture? In the meantime, in fact, a century has passed and a turnaround has taken place. The current environmental crisis, with ever more violent and frequent extreme events on the one hand and an increasingly widespread rampant eco-anxiety on the other, is changing our sensibility. The paradigm for the architecture-to-come that is starting to glimpse in this first part of the XXI century is hybrid, "monstrous", made of vegetal and animal matter: it is more similar to a tree than to an airplane, more similar to an animal than to a ship; finally, more similar to Buddha than to Christ: in fact, Buddhist nonviolence can be assumed – in an ecological key – as a revolutionary posture to try to access in a new world.

Link al sito della Libreria del Convegno (SGEM Vienna):