Essay and Roundtable held online on 17.12.2021 and curated by Santiago Miret
Janus, Janus or Ianus, the Roman god of doors and passages, of beginnings and endings, of simultaneity and duality. It is not without reason that Janus is depicted with a two-faced head, one face looking toward what is to come and the other toward what has already been. Architecture manifests its Janus-like vocation by simultaneously performing two seemingly opposite actions: the interruption of planetary flows in which it is inscribed and the integration of these flows with the corporealities that inhabit it. Interruption and integration. At the same time. Interruption: the disarticulation of a whole. Integration: the articulation of a whole. Architecture plays hide and seek.
Let us examine this in more detail. On the one hand, we say that by inserting into the planet the arbitrariness of an alien, supernumerary space-time, architecture promotes a biological, climatic, and perhaps even spiritual discontinuation of the telluric forces that shape the landscape. The domestic pierces the planet; it not only installs other temperatures, luminosities, and atmospheres within it but also stimulates and accommodates the habits, rhythms, speeds, temperaments, and sensibilities that unfold when the exposure to the elements ends. On the other hand, we also say that treating architecture as a sealed spaceship isolated from the exterior ignores something fundamental: architecture welcomes and is composed of materialities continuous with those that constitute the planet, and therefore, it necessarily acts, interacts, and even “intra-acts” with it. Consider any domestic space—does it not present itself as a site where bodies come closer, entangle, and even merge with tectonics that, ultimately, emerge from the same planetary flows from which architecture claims to separate us? Think of the relaxation, at times even loosening, of the organism in a place of rest, or, less metaphorically, the exchanges of heat and humidity in a hot bath. Or even better, think of the kitchen, the alchemical laboratory where the planet is cut, prepared, and cooked for its subsequent incorporation. Architecture is a hybrid, centauric being: a volcano from which emanates a space-time regime that seeks independence from its surroundings, and a port that welcomes and facilitates multiple modes of biospheric connectivity and planetary mestizaje.
This ambivalence is constitutive of the architectural practice. Let us approach the question of architectural form from this premise. But let us do so through another ambivalence: that of the limit. If Maurice Blanchot famously wrote that the question is “the desire of philosophical thought,” it could well be said that the limit is the desire of architectural thought. For if the limit is self-referential difference and differentiating sameness, if it is a gesture that simultaneously unites and separates—that unites by separating and separates by uniting—perhaps we could speak of architectural form as liminal form, a form whose architectural valence would lie in enabling what we commonly understand as architectural practice: the insertion of space into space, or more precisely, the insertion of worlds into worlds.
This insertion advances and takes shape through that swarm of inversions, transpositions, recursions, and displacements with which architecture simultaneously unites and separates us from the planet. Taking this double gesture as the premise and starting point of the architectural practice, I propose thinking about the concept of the limit beyond its understanding as a red light for action and speech. The self-referential difference and differentiating sameness of the limit unfold in multiple registers or codifications, in multiple modalities. I will focus on three of them: (1) the limit as a frontier or limit-interface—how does the permeability of something vary?; (2) the limit as action or limit-potency—how does something influence something else?; and (3) the limit as environment or limit-biome—what realms of coexistence open within the limit itself? This is not about demarcating and hypostatizing three distinct limits but about articulating and mobilizing together three modes of being of the limit: the limit as the determination of something based on its possibilities of interaction—as, for example, the skin of a snake defines the snake based on the exchanges it allows between the interior and exterior of its body; the limit as the unfolding of something through its action or influence on something else—as, for example, the trees of a forest unsettle the walker by darkening his or her path; and the limit as the opening of a realm of mediation and cultivation between alterities—as occurs in the overlapping of ecosystems in an ecotone. Let us see this in some projects.
The Leonhardt Lagoon project (1982, Dallas), by Patricia Johansson, stands out for the intricate network of terracotta bridges that both soar above and submerge into the waters of the lagoon. However, beyond its calligraphic virtuosity, the wandering of the bridges above and below the water level facilitates modes of trans-corporeality that cannot be explained by the geometry of their contours. Its baroque sinuosity is in service not so much of a contemplative pleasure as of a functional ecosystem that nourishes the expansion of the living. Due to the shadows, variations in humidity, or nutritional richness that the ensemble activates, it is extremely difficult—if not impossible—to claim that the form of the architectural ensemble ends where the volume of the terracotta bands ends. The project expands and contracts intermittently, gradually, and irregularly through all the beings and events with which it interacts, as occurs, for example, with the plants and animals it attracts. This reveals the liminal condition proper to the limit understood as action or limit-potency, something that in this case occurs in a particularly literal way, given the meaning of nourishment alluded to by the Greek term ‘trophos.’
The underwater domes that make up the Nemo Garden (2018), by Ocean Reef Group, are particularly suitable for understanding the games of porosity proper to the interface-limit. In their crystalline materiality, the domes not only separate the hydroponic agriculture taking place in the air inside from the marine medium surrounding it, but their separation from the surrounding seawater favors modes of crossing whose operational selectivity is fundamental for the cultivation of terrestrial plants at the bottom of the sea: in their transparent solidity, the domes keep the air of the interior space safe from the surrounding saltwater, while simultaneously allowing, on one hand, the entry of light for the photosynthesis of the plants and, on the other, the stabilization of temperatures promoted by the marine mass. They also stimulate the evaporation of seawater (the bottom of the dome remains open for human access) and its condensation into freshwater for the automatic irrigation of the plants.
Finally, the interwoven platforms and paths of the ‘living bridges’ in the Shillong Plateau (India) emerge from the synchronization between the rhythms, speeds, and times mobilized by different living beings: on one hand, the inhabitants of Jaintia and their mobility needs in the jungles of northeastern India, and on the other, the Ficus tree species and its unique aerial roots. There is no colonization, occupation, or totalization in the multispecies consonances established between these two living beings. The transmutation of the forest intended by the inhabitants of Jaintia consists precisely in favoring the growth of aerial roots by bending, rotating, and knotting them to form bridge-like structures capable of expanding the forest paths they aim to connect. The living bridges thus constitute spaces of liminality in which the limit presents itself as a limit-biome: by superimposing radically different habitation patterns, these bridges engender passages that not only facilitate transit but are themselves in transit, in perpetual construction and reconstruction.
As we see, the three modulations of the limit proposed as architectural form acquire directionality when mobilized from the Janus-like vocation of architecture: while the limit-interface promotes the more or less porous interruption of the planetary flows that constitute the exposure to the elements—that which is in time or in-tempere—the limit-action promotes the influence—the flux—of these flows in everything that occurs in and around the home—the fireplace as the punctum saliens of the home. The subtle and complex interplay of tensions, reverberations, leaps, displacements, and affinities between the limitation of the limit-interface and the limitrophy of the limit-potency animate the liminality of the limit-biome, that is, all those space-time domains (dominium) that constitute the domestic (domus). The word “domain” should be understood here in the mathematical sense of the term, that is, as the domain of a function—all those values that allow the function to function. Since the domain of a function is part of the definition of the function rather than a property of it, the domestic as a domain of liminality—as a limit-biome—is never constituted a priori. It is, on the contrary, constituted only from the overlapping of all those beings and events capable of functional coexistence, that is, capable of constituting articulations of space-time whose liminality lies in their capacity to host vectors of otherness (xenos), and therefore, to articulate episodes of hospitality (xenia)
