In their recently opened exhibitions at the Milano Triennale and the Venice Biennale, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley argue for an alternative architectural philosophy. They treat bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment. They explore the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture.
The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence. The main goal of Colomina and Wigley´s manifesto is to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than exclusion.
This lecture is preceded by Mark Wigley's lecture “The Drawing that Ate Architecture” on 17.06 at 19:00.
