For an account of the ecological and social degradation associated with the mining of sand, see for example Vince Beiser, “Why the World Is Running out of Sand,” BBC Future, November 18, 2019, ®. For a thorough examination of the history and impacts of the primary and secondary production of aluminum, see Carl A. Zimring, Aluminum Upcycled: Sustainable Design in Historical Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017).
Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation), “Architecture as Ultra-clear Rendered Society,” in Vanessa Grossman and Ciro Miguel (eds), Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2022),165.
For insights at the intersection of architecture, design, and disability studies, see for example Aimi Hamraie, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2020); and David Gissen, The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
Daniel A. Barber, “After Comfort,” Log, no. 47 (2019).
For an exemplary articulation of this point see Kiel Moe, Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology (New York: Actar Publishers, 2020).
Simone Ferracina, Ecologies of Inception: Design Potentials on a Warming Planet (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2022).
Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 186.
Yourcenar, The Abyss, 186–7. Italics mine. The passage also reminds me of Jane Hutton’s powerful definition of materials as “fragments of other landscapes.” Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2020), 5.
Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 30.
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 8.
Elisa Iturbe, “Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity.” Log, no. 47 (2019), 12.
Rolando Vázquez, “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence,” Journal of Historical Sociology 24, no. 1 (March 2011), 42.
Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 34.
Ahmed, What’s the Use?, 34–35.
Ibid., 44.
Giovanni Marmont and German E. Primera, “Propositions for Inoperative Life,” Journal of Italian Philosophy, no. 3 (2020), 10.
Walter D. Mignolo, “DELINKING: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of de-Coloniality,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (March 2007): 453. Rolando Vázquez writes that “Decoloniality is about delinking: it is about being otherwise. It is about recovering the possibilities of deep relations that overcome gender, heteronormativity, the human-nature divide, anthropocentrism, and individualism and move towards the communal.” Rolando Vázquez, ‘‘What We Know Is Built on Erasure,’’ The Contemporary Journal, no. 1 (January 25, 2019).
Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth S. Vrba, “Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Form,” Paleobiology 8, no. 1 (1982): 4–15.
Gould and Vrba, Exaptation, 11–12.
For more information on the notion of exaptive design, see Ferracina, Ecologies of Inception. See also Simone Ferracina, “Exaptive Design: Radical Co-Authorship as Method,” in Rachel Armstrong, Experimental Architecture: Designing the Unknown (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019), 121–43.
I discuss the story of the Pianodrome before its arrival at Ocean Terminal in Ferracina, Ecologies of Inception, 111–114.