LIGA 24: UNWELT (Chile). The House of Machines
Photography: Luis Gallardo
Perhaps Corb was misunderstood or poorly translated from the French and never thought about architecture as a machine for living. Perhaps he meant to say the very opposite, that architecture should provide a house for machines, as UMWELT does in its transmission stations on the San Cristóbal hill in Santiago. If this were the case, the “exterminating angel” (as Léon Krier called him) would have predated by several decades contemporary discussions about the end of any distinction between the human and the non-human—in social sciences, philosophy, anthropology and in architecture.
Above all, he would have anticipated the final extermination of the old distinction between nature and culture. But we know, unfortunately, that this is not what he was referring to. The translation appears to be correct. His own ideas only multiply ad nauseam the persistent dualist opposition that insists upon seeing the supposed original conditions of the planet as something wholly distinct to the technological and cultural progress of humankind. In this way he could set up the purity and abstraction of his work on top of an uncontestable and glorious nature that his own culture had produced.
This modern and modernizing tradition, arising from the notion of a “blissful state of nature,” was formulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, instigating the Romantic ideal of a sublime nature. Marshall Berman reminds us that Rousseau was the first to employ the word modernity in the way it would be used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also visible in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s definition of anthropology as a discipline that investigates the relationship between nature and culture, or transferred to David Harvey or Erik Swyngedouw in their effort to understand society and nature as a continuous element. Yet it is evident that it would not be necessary to relate or connect these notions if they were not formulated as distinct and opposed from the start. Dismantling this dichotomy of exclusion is a more radical operation: the elimination of this opposition through the dissolution of the very concept of nature, the one that defines a separate space for the objects that it supposedly brings together.[1] We know, however, that this idea of nature is not going to dissipate by itself. There is a need of projects to destroy it. This task—the destruction of the concept and its images—must be undertaken by architecture.
Therein lies the interest (and also the risk) of UMWELT’s work, because they require both the objects and their conceptual territory to be designed. Their projects, in this sense, appear to decisively take on the perhaps shocking idea that “nature does not exist,”[2] and they understand that the idea of nature inherited from heroic modernity is an obstacle for contemporary architectural thought. However, this elimination gives rise to a problem as interesting as it is difficult: How to reorganize and redistribute—in terms of design—all those things previously categorized as natural? What does it mean, in the end, to reclassify objects that have lost the concept that united them? In different ways, UMWELT’s strategies seek to address these kinds of questions.
Examining this redistribution from the perspective of the project may be seen as the final goal of their explorations: the mass transfer of objects from a concept in crisis to another one yet to be defined and, above all, to be designed within a process of internalization, from the segregation of an outside, towards the interior of architecture. This is what is involved in the project of introducing their work into the cracks in concepts that no longer stand up by themselves, not only in the nature/culture duality, but also in other kinds of dichotomies that are too schematic to be confronted in the contemporary world, such as the public and the private, the urban and the rural, or the intellectual and the popular. Hence too the insistence of UMWELT on the notion of infrastructure as a programmatic tool for avoiding forced explanations of the different scales of the work and for being able to discuss all the objects without exception, beyond futile deliberations on what is small or what is big. Through infrastructure—by definition without scale—architecture could finally invert the paradigm and transform the whole planet into the house of machines.
[1] See: Pedro Ignacio Alonso, “Atacama Deserta,” in Deserta: ecología e industria en el desierto de Atacama (Santiago: ARQ, 2012), pp. 14-27.
[2] See: Francesco Manacorda, “There is no such thing as nature,” in Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009 (London: Barbican Art Gallery/Köening Books, 2009), pp. 9-15.
