2,737 research outputs found
Architecture and environmentalism beyond the pandemic
No full textAn interview between Dr Jon Goodbun and Thomas Lemon. EDITORIAL NOTE: When we first read this insightful interview, we were struck by the clarity with which Goodbun and Lemon were able to draw threads of connection between COVID-19 and the greater ecological crises of modern capitalism in which architecture is caught. Goodbun identifies in no uncertain terms the absolute necessity of action on environmental destruction even as the world convulses in the grips of pandemic. In this interview there is no disconnect between the reaction of global “disaster capitalism” to COVID-19, and to the environmental crises that come careening towards us. In both cases, capital exploits crisis towards its own ends, enrichment and misdirection from its own complicity. For us, is a chilling reminder of capitalism’s ability to, snakelike, distort its form to internalise and reclaim world-shaking crises as instruments of it’s own perpetuation. This interview is a powerful reminder of the intricate web of connections between capital’s destructive impulses and the environment-worlds that it ravages
The Labyrinth of the Immaterials
No full textSuperhumanity conversations: Jon Goodbun responds to Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “Spatial Thought” A review of Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1985 Pompidou exhibition Les Immatériaux. Who or what are the Immaterials? What is their nature? What is their culture? And how and why did they come to inhabit a labyrinth on the fifth floor of the Pompidou Centre for a number of months during 1985? What did they do in there? And what did they say? What was the meaning of their occupation of that building, in that city
Architecture and relational resources: towards a new materialist practice
No full textThe most immediate impact of scarcity on architecture is the insufficient suppiy of building materials. As Jon Goodbun and Karin Jaschke explain, this requires an engagement with more than the direct influences on the exhaustion of natural resources. Looking beyond the conventional capitalist model of flows driven by 'the market', they look at how new ideas on materialism are demanding a radical revision of the relationship between matter and social, economic and political forces
Themes of scarcity
No full textGoodbun is the lead guest editor of this issue of the international journal Architectural Design, and the primary author of the substantial introduction to this edition. In addition, he is the sole author of an article in it entitled 'Flexibility and Ecological Planning: Gregory Bateson on Urbanism', and is co-author of an article (with Karin Jaschke) on 'Architecture and Relational Resources: Towards a New Materialist Practice'. The publication is related to a £1 million EU HERA funded research project 'Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment' (SCIBE) (see www.scibe.eu), led by the University of Westminster (Goodbun a co-investigator), and including the Technical University Vienna and Oslo School of Architecture. Scarcity, whether conceived of as an actual limit on resources, or as a socially constructed condition of uneven social or global distribution of resources, has been largely absent as a critical concept in mainstream architectural discourse. This issue of Architectural Design examines ways in which architects and designers may respond to scarcity by means of a change in their design practices and their design thinking. The publication includes work by leading thinkers and designers, including the design theorist Ezio Manzini; architectural theorists and practitioners Winy Maas, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Michael Sorkin, and MUF; ecological philosophers Tim Morton and Kate Soper, and geographers Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika
Gregory Bateson and the Political
No full textFred Turner and Phillip Guddemi join Jon Goodbun—whose recent work cross-reading Bateson and Deleuze and Guattari presented in an RSD11 paper session—to discuss the question of Gregory Bateson’s relationship to the political
On the possibility of an ecological dialogue
No full textThe call for environmental justice, and the recognition that the effects of environmental change will be played out through class, gender, race and neo-colonial structures, articulates an essential socialisation and politicisation of what is at stake in thinking through our responses to ecological crisis
Take back the land
No full textGodofredo Enes Pereira, Christina Leigh Geros and Jon Goodbun have been analysing governmental Green New Deal policy globally, viewing it through the microcosmic eye of their own research and that of their students on the MA Environmental Architecture course at the Royal College of Art in London. This includes their Lithium Triangle project that concentrates on the environmental damage caused by the extraction of lithium from the Chilean landscape, and the Orang-orang and the Hutan project in Indonesia that contests Western dominance and the effects of centuries of colonisation
The Dialogical, The Ecological and Beyond
No full textIn this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged within complex systems of all kinds. Prompted by the opening question referring to cybernetics as a general study of information processes, focusing on the production, exchange, and consumption of meaning, not limited to a focus on digital logic, Goodbun and Sweeting revisit a plethora of positions on dialogue including those of Gordon Pask, Gregory Bateson, Ranulph Glanville, David Bohm among others. In so doing, they make clear certain semantic confusions related to terms such as communication vs. conversation, dialogue vs. discussion, and analogue vs. digital, and provide a richer understanding of why these semantic revisions are necessary for the context of everyday design practice. Using examples from their own research and teaching work, they point towards models where an alternative approach to communication that critically acknowledges the complications related to “asignifying signs” can help designers grapple with the ecological crisis in the contexts of politics, research, and education
Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics - an addendum to Urban Political Ecology
No full textFollowing a paper given at the 2008 Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) 'Agency' conference, Goodbun was invited to submit a paper to the peer-reviewed international AHRA online architectural journal 'Field'. The paper was accepted for publication in the fourth issue of the journal, which was on 'ecology'. The published paper is a synopsis of key aspects of his PhD research, which informed his contribution to the SCIBE research project and the AD ‘Scarcity’ publication. This paper was the first publication of much of his thinking with regard to this material, and is referenced in recent PhDs (eg Jody Boehnert and Doug Spencer), and university reading lists (including the Bartlett School of Architecture, and the seminars of Peter Harries-Jones, a leading Bateson scholar). The paper considers how ecology – a term that emerged into popular consciousness in the 1960’s as a byword for holistic/ systemic thinking – has returned to prominence in recent years across disciplines beyond its original terms of use, including design theory and practice. Within the natural sciences, ecology is above all characterised by a holistic approach that focuses on organisation and the internal/external relational dynamics of ‘wholes’ or ‘assemblages’ such as ecosystems. Goodbun reviews how the concept of ecology has developed historically, and defines ecology by drawing together the ecological aesthetics in the work of Gregory Bateson, and the urban political ecology of contemporary neo-Marxist geographers such as Erik Swyngedouw, David Harvey and Matthew Gandy. He adds to a growing body of research relating political conceptions of ecology at an urban and planning scale to the possibility of an aesthetics of ecology more directly related to architectural and design-based thinking
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