Architectural Envelope as a Reflection on Nature-culture Dualism

The cases of this lecture converge beautifully as a bunch of experiments on the interface between human and non-human nature.

Bruno Latour, in his We Have Never Been Modern, defines modernity as the consciousness to a careful distinction between nature and society. Through technological fabrication and scientific progression, we distinguish the exterior from the interior, preserve living spheres for ourselves, and protect ourselves by a man-made nature. Technological mediation creates the envelope that separates society from nature. Alejandro Zaera-Polo claims that architectural techniques are political because it is an agency that manipulates the intersection between the internal and external world. 

However, we find that we are never able to completely purify ourselves from nature. The hybridity between nature and culture proliferates through technology and science. Techniques are in the state of permanent innovation, yet they are still working, revising, mediating, modifying, and modulating the interface between man-made nature and first-order nature. Technical innovations articulate human and non-human relations over and again throughout history. 

A group of great architectural examples is shown in today's lecture to illustrate the above ideas. Architects' fascination with membrane, facade, interface, and shell testifies to the conviction that perhaps modernity has never purified ourselves from nature.