Frankenstein Periphery

Description

As there is no surface, the inside and the outside, the container and the contained, no longer have a precise limit; they plunge into a universal depth or turn in the circle of a present which gets to be more contracted as it is filled. — Gilles Deleuze (1990)

CIAM’s 1951 idea of the “heart of the city,” contributed to the influence of body metaphors in architectural urban thinking. While the heart highlighted the significance of public space and resonated with debates on centrality, identity and public space, the city of today spills into the wilderness. It sprawls unruly along infrastructures, expands, and consumes ever more nature. The heart of the city was a way of thinking the coherent hierarchy of figure and ground, monuments and fabric. Today the metaphor is different: the city is hybrid, diffuse, relational. The city extends into a continuous periphery – suburbs, exurbs, fringes, edges, sprawl, infrastructures, fields, the terrain vague. It is this shift to a Frankenstein body of the periphery that interests us, spatially and formally. We argue that the periphery is now the place and ecology where most of the global population lives, loves, and often loathes. In this paper we investigate the entanglements of these conditions, their crises, typologies, enclaves, and islands. We ask how such peripheral bodies are reconfigured against collective life – of peripheral subjects and quasi-subjects, of culture and nature-culture, of imagination and infrastructure, of otherness and an ugly beauty. We consider how the schizophrenics of the periphery can be thought bodily, i.e. architecturally, as the central aim of our theoretical and design research. We argue for ways of further transgressing not only the dichotomies of figure/ground and some of the pairings we reflect on above, but also the networked relativities of field conditions towards an involuted, ecologically informed amalgam of architecture and infrastructure.

Period	23 Nov 2024
Event title	Body Matters - Architectural Humanities Research Association 21st International Conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Norwich, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International