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PREFACE:

The era of climate change involves the mutation of systems beyond 20th century anthropomorphic models and has stood, until recently, outside representation or address.

 Understood in a broad and critical sense, climate change concerns material agencies that impact on biomass and energy, erased borders and microbial invention, geological and nanographic time, and extinction events.

 The possibility of extinction has always been a latent figure in the textual production and archives; but the current sense of depletion, decay, mutation and exhaustion calls for new modes of address, new styles of publishing and authoring, and new formats and speeds of distribution. 

As the pressures and realignments of this re-arrangement occur, so must the critical languages and conceptual templates, political premises and definitions of ‘life.’ There is a particular need to publish in timely fashion experimental monographs that redefine the boundaries of disciplinary fields, rhetorical  invasions,  the  interface  of  conceptual  and  scientific  languages, and geomorphic and geopolitical interventions.

While the Anthropocene thesis has recently received significant attention in both the news media and academic scholarship certainly drifting well beyond its original loci of consideration within the meetings of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences—there remains a fundamental ambivalence about the value of the concept from the point of view of both cultural theory and design practice.

 Is the Anthropocene not just another assertion, typical of European society, of the ascendancy of man over nature? Is the Anthropocene, when read through the lens of cultural criticism, not just another appropriation of a properly scientific nomenclature for the purposes of provoking aesthetic or moral shock? Is the Anthropocene not an apolitical, even fatalistic idea, given that it implicates all humanity equally in the production of a geophysical stratigraphy that is, and has been since the “beginning” of the era, which is also a matter of debate—asymmetrically produced according to divisions of class, race, gender and ability?

Although architecture has a sense of its place within broader socio-political and cultural systems, it has not, until very recently, acknowledged itself as part of the earth’s geology, despite the fact that it is a forceful geological agent, digging up, mobilizing, transforming and transporting earth materials, water, air and energy in unparalleled ways.

 With the Anthropocene thesis, architecture is called to think itself as a geological actor capable of radically transforming the earth’s atmosphere, surface morphology, and future stratigraphy. This extraordinary and provocative collection of essays, design projects, and conversations plots out what the planetary condition of the Anthropocene might mean for architecture, architectural theory, and design practice.

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