WHAT SHE SAID
The way it works, she said, is a matter of science. She had been trained as a microbiologist but felt too removed from microbial interactions to actually care about their result. It was simply a matter of scale. Which is how she began to see humans as macrobes, which, like microbes, were constantly embroiled in complex interactions but that produced more significant by-products, things like music and art and babies and war.
She said, “Culture is an infection spread through macrobial interaction.”
By adulthood, macrobes are infected with multiple cultures which have a varied and unpredictable affect on one other. Let’s take an individual macrobe, she said, to illustrate this point. A boy, brought up, say, in the Catholic church, embodies that culture, as well as the culture of his parents and siblings; as he grows up he is infected with the culture of his peers, of his coaches, and teachers; let’s imagine he goes to architecture school, where he is exposed to a variety of cultures, some of which he immune to, but some which infect him nonetheless, a pair of teachers, say, stricken with deconstructivism, pass that onto him, which is made stronger by later work experiences, so that by the time he is out on his own, the architect is product of a succession of cultures and carries remnants of all of them in a complex egosystem in which one or more of these cultures is dominant.
This is important for cities, she said, because building of a structure is a sort of fermentation or metabolism, an interaction between several macrobe cultures that must be present for the process to take place. The first culture that must be there is the will of the larger community, represented in the planning and/or building department, the entity that lays the ground rules for what is acceptable within a particular jurisdiction. The second culture that must be present is the developer, who seeks to build the structure in order to gain more nutrients (money) for himself; but it is also he who provides nutrients for the fermentations. The third culture that is required is the contractor, who takes the nutrients provided by the developer and works within the conditions imposed by the city to construct the building. The culture that is not absolutely required, but which often adds complexity – if that’s what the developer wants for his building – is the architect.
She likens the making of a building to the making of wine: is a succession of biological onslaughts, macrobial instead of microbial, starting with the fermentation of the developer culture with the architect culture, the primary fermentation producing a design, which can then be processed by the city through the metabolism of permitting. The secondary fermentation – the interaction between several cultures, primarily the developer and the contractor – occurs once the building permit has been granted and the construction begins. Sometimes these fermentations occur simultaneously, but usually they are serial in nature, each one providing nutrients specific to the subsequent fermentations. If deeper complexity is the goal then the presence of other macrobes is encouraged; however, due to the often-negative effects of unsolicited macrobial opinions, most projects attempt to proceed without such input. She said that the influence of unwanted macrobes leads to unpredictable results, often inviting unsavory characters to the project.
The by-product of an architectural fermentation is a building, the species of which is a result of that specific fermentation. A new building species is formed when the fermentation changes, usually occurring when one or more of the fermenting agents is altered. For instance, if the planning department changes the zoning, or a developer who sees a new opportunity brought about by a changing economy, or an architect who wants to test a new design concept, the fermentation takes a different course, which could result in a new building species.
Thus succession of interactions, she said, is the mechanism that produces the succession of building species through which a city evolves, one building at a time. She said the process can be controlled, if you know what you’re doing. Which is why she became an expediter.
