1

CONTAGIOUS NATURE

We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991)[1]

01_ Favelas in Manila. Demonic, rebel, parasitic forces inhabiting cities

Nature as “representation”

When the Hampstead Heath Act was signed in 1871, thus marking the birth of the northern park in

the City of London, the debate focused on the extent of its "naturalness." According to the prevailing

idea of the time [2], all efforts were aimed at "maintaining” its allegedly ideal status. “[The Greater London Council] shall at all times preserve as far as may be the natural aspect and state of the Heath and to that end shall protect the turf, gorse, heather timber and other trees shrubs and brushwood thereon. […] Subject to the provisions of this Act the [Greater London Council] shall for ever keep the Heath open uninclosed and unbuilt on except regards such parts thereof as are at the passing of this inclosed or built on and shall by all lawful means prevent resist abate all encroachments and attempted encroachments on the Heath and protect the Heath and preserve it as an open space and resist all proceedings tending to the inclosure or appropriation for any purpose of any part thereof.”

Hence, the intention was to protect the natural status quo, that is to say nature’s “representation”

more than its “becoming”. Nature was asked to remain still and unscarred, thus limiting its

adaptation process, its insolent logic of spontaneous colonization, expansion and invasion.

So what was exactly to be preserved?

Transforming nature into artifice, namely "fabricating a landscape", means depriving nature from

its chaotic aspect and sublimating its aesthetic value, its specific anthropological interpretation.

2

As noted by Simon Shama commenting on the underlying reasons for that Act, “[...] the great city needed a wilderness for its own civic health. […] It was precisely the unkempt and uncultivated nature of the heath that was said to be its special gift to the people[3].” That "prevent resist abate all encroachments" seems to refer to the nature’s demonic forces rather

than to human gestures. After all, nature “representing” the wild, indeed “resembling” the wild,

seems a device to contain the human beings’ inner wild. However, for the wild to be sustainable and

instrumental to civic purposes, it must be controlled and manipulated.

The aesthetics of the sublime and nature as “noble remedy”

With the Hampstead Heath Act, nature ceases to be a mere object of contemplation and an

inspiration for arts[4]. It becomes a noble remedy for human animals living in cities. What was

needed to transform the 320-acre land into a "park" for leisure consumption – free from

exploitation and speculation – is what today is (more thoroughly) done by ecology, i.e. the nature

"museification", the fabrication of a landscape as an aesthetic metaphor and an "educational

device."

In both physical and figurative terms, Hampstead Heath is a "reserve" characterized by its

“openness". Compared to the bordering city, it is an open public space shaped as the domain of the

irrepressible and the immeasurable (literally, too large to be perceived by the human eye). Hence,

a metaphor of the aesthetics of the sublime, which is miles away from chaos, though we might get

close to the original idea of chaos, considering the multiple and unseizable space-time scales of

ecological functions, where any boundary is made unstable, for instance by the passage of migrant

birds.

The very idea that nature - albeit altered - is first and foremost an educational device or a cultural

agent is however deeply rooted. Indeed, contemporary park-reserves, such as Fresh Kills or

Emscher Park[5], are products of a persistent symbolic and archetypal nature representation.

On the top of it, the removal of embarrassing stories – i.e. stories of landfills and of post-industrial

polluted areas re-colonized by nature - and the re-composition of mixed ecologies satisfy a

collective need for "redemption”. The recovery of those "disturbed sites" - as Elizabet Meyer[6] calls

them to capture, like in music, interference echoes - helps reformulating the relationship between

consumption and production, between technology and environment, between private and public.

However, the external outfit remains the 19th-century one: a natural artifice as positive alternative

to something (the city, the exploitation, the impoverishment, the catastrophe or our inner savage?).

Even though an ecological response[7] is now expected, that is a pioneering and vagabond nature

behavior is welcomed, let alone planned, the underlying theoretical assumption has not changed.

The idea of evolutionism continues to consider biodiversity, i.e. the specialization growth (literally

the "fabrication of new species"), as an indisputable value and to combat anarchic, rebel, parasitic

forces, tending to the blending of species, the so-called planetary "brassage" mentioned by Gilles

Clement.[8]. It is that very idea which justifies the war against Agrostemma Githago, a weed growing

on the leftover, or against the colonies of Rattus Norvegicus, mice nesting in cities, or against human

unplanned camps, the favelas growing in the metropolis. But those hybrid genres, hyper-resistant,

with exceptional self-adaptive and self-organizing ability, are fatally remapping urban regions, seas,

and those areas that are not yet untapped or "secondarized[9]" by human activities.

The so-called involutive trend of nature undermines the polar pattern – in a biological, but also

philosophical, political, aesthetic term – with which we continue to "measure" the legitimacy and

sustainability of human ambitions and actions on the territory.

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What if we change our perspective? What if we embrace a completely different idea of evolution

and create an alliance with the becoming of the world?

Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s approaches, which have been deeply influencing architecture

ever since the late '60s, might be the answer to that question.

02_ Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord Park. The aesthetics of the sublime in contemporary parks-reserves

03_"Planetary brassage": Agrostemma Githago, weed growing on the leftover

Hybrid genres of contagion

In the Deleuzian philosophy, the very notion of polarity is lost, not because there are no differences,

but because the differences are so many and so deep that the demarcation line is too thin to be

perceived. Or rather, the perception is in itself a "creation" of a reality that does not exist yet, if not

virtually.

“If there is originality in neo-evolutionism, it is attributable in part to phenomena of this kind in which evolution does not go from something less differentiated to something more differentiated, in which it ceases to be a hereditary filiative evolution, becoming communicative or contagious. Accordingly, the term we would prefer for this form of evolution between heterogeneous terms is "involution," on the condition that involution is in no way confused with regression. Becoming is involutionary, involution

is creative[10].”

4

For that creation to be possible, a symbiotic relationship with the world is necessary, eventually

ending up in a process of "becoming with the other". To explain symbiosis, i.e. the mutual contagion

as a natural and evolutionary phenomenon, Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome shape[11], which

replaces the tree form prevailing in the Western approach. "Forming a rhizome" means getting rid

of any binary logic or linear progression, and starting "deterritorialization", literally abandoning a

territory through the alliance with the other, similarly to plants which “even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else - with the wind, an animal, human beings[12]”

As in the orchid-wasp becoming, “the orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. […] not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. […] the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further[13].” The territory is indeed the "frame" of a progressive and generative movement.

According to Deleuze & Guattari, the territory is an experience of subjugation. Thus, the only form

of creative living, of poetic dwelling, may occur when moments of territory appropriation - in the

home-protected space – are alternated to moments of wandering - in the open-space. That

movement recalls that of the "demonic" animals - pack animals - which, unlike domestic animals -

object of narcissistic contemplation - and unlike mythological animals - object of representation

and domination -, live "on the edge", that is oscillate between sovereignty over a territory and

expulsion from it. In this sense, “becoming-other” is far beyond a mere physical movement. In the

mental process of becoming-animal, human beings let themselves be infected by the world and

experience the limit. States of contemplation and wonder, of exchange and property, of restlessness

and fury overlap. In this way the human being becomes the world.

Living on the edge implies the notion of frame, that is of space and fence. As known, the fence is an

ancestral invention. It marks the foundation of the protected-space – that is the geometric space -

inhabited by man. In its most general meaning, the fence circumscribes both the space for

encounter and contamination, and vice-versa the one for sacredness and interdiction. The

difference between the Roman Basilica and the Greek Temple is to be found in this double meaning.

The same ambiguity also exists in the word “reserve” or “enclave” - literally locked - which can be

understood as the residue of chaos, as well as the garden subtracted to chaos. This confinement -

which we are not always aware of - might become the territory of potentialities, the refuge for

diversities. This might hold true for the Chinese community transforming a workshop overlooking

the street into an evangelical Church, as well as for the wolf pack living in a protected park.

After all, similarly to all creative processes – e.g in painting – the fence-frame operates as a device

capable of triggering mechanisms of human deterritorialization and reterritorialization in its space.

Such fence-frame may indeed be considered as the ground zero of a reterritorialization movement

of the becoming-other - as the becoming-animal of a city - in which the three conditions of animality

(domestic, mythological and demonic) coexist and overlap.

Perhaps, a history of urban theories might be drawn from that triad, while here the attempt is made

to explain and interpret in that light Rem Koolhaas's generic city, populated by self-sufficient

machines, and Andrea Branzi’s fuzzy city, made of interconnected mobile devices.

5

Rem Koolhaas’ reserves of city-artifice

Over the past 50 years, many pages have been written on the city as the most real example of

complex and stratified ecologies. The city: significant cohabitation model; container of enormous

differences, of extreme combinations and overlaps; collage of hybrid genres; territory of the drift,

disorientation, unpredictable, excesses, technological and programmatic exuberance; metaphor of

the becoming, where the idea of an ancillary, secular, reassuring nature contrasts with a hideous,

transgressive, confrontational world; theater of war.

Paradoxically, the city embodies animality more than the cultivated nature pervading western

landscapes. The process of “becoming-the other”, during which new forms of inhabitation are

generated through the creative contagion, may indeed begin in the city.

Rem Koolhaas’ becoming-other is the approach to the theory of Bigness[15], a cynical reaction to

the undifferentiated and generic growth of contemporary Metropolis.

Bigness are gigantic autonomous artificial universes, multifunctional buildings, where all

programmatic overlaps are eligible and possible, even the most far-fetched as the combination of a

church and a garage. “[Bigness] is the one architecture that engineers the unpredictable […]; its accumulation generates a new kind of city [where] there’s no collective “it” left. […] Bigness no longer needs the city: it competes with the city; it represents the city; it preempts the city; or better still, it is the city[16].”

Bigness is the paradigmatic renunciation to composition and the idealization of performance, the

ability to bear the continuous change of the Metropolis. At the same time, architectures become

impersonal, eternally open envelopes. Acting as time-recording machines, capable of adapting to all

programmatic mutation, such architectures behave like complex and compact animal shells,

unfolding metamorphoses, hosting being in becoming, or even new inhabitants.

In Koolhaas everything is artifice. There is no residual nature. "Extirpated from the Metropolis, nature is resurrected in the Skyscraper, though only as one of its many levels, a technical infrastructure that makes it more bearable and revives the wearing metropolitan existence[17]”.

04_OMA Rem Koolhaas, Two Libraries for Jussieu University

6

There is the idea of morphogenesis as a complex – mental and physical - "stratification" process in

which the architectural object or the landscape writing takes on consistency through the

manipulation and creative interaction of inert matter. The strata of such formation process are, for

instance, the transforming functions of a library – as in the case of the Seattle Library - or the force

lines of a landscape - as in the project of Melun Senart. Koolhaas’ thinking and architectures can be

explained as a superposition of imaginary levels that fabricate new relationships while generating

original forms which, at least on a conscious level, do not derive from model imitations. At a pre-

conscious level, not only does that derivation exist, but it is indeed what makes fundamental

references to history viable.

In Deleuze’ & Guattari’s description, one might say that, by separating nature as "substance" -

unstable, fluid – from nature as "form" - stable, compact –, Koolhaas disclaims not only mimesis, the

imitation of nature, but also the potential symbiosis with its residual components. In other words,

Koolhaas seems to stave off any form of contagion whatsoever.

Its artificial machines, dreamed in "Delirious New York" (1978 ) and then, since the '80s, designed

in projects of competition, such as the Très Grande Bibliothèque in Paris - perhaps his most

spectacular and most disruptive project - "form a rhizome" of man with man, that is, the artificial

human with artificial human.

They are "reserves" for humans only. Gilles Clément would say: "what happens to the rabbit? And the bird, and the wind? And the farmer? ...What happens to the stragglers... [and herbs, shrubs and flowers that spontaneously take root in open areas]?[18]"

Andrea Branzi’s city-nature without architecture

Indeed, Andrea Branzi’s positivist view seems to answer these questions.

In his "partial utopias" - partial as "part" of the existing, next to and not in substitution of it[19]" –

Branzi, like Koolhaas, metabolizes the indefinite nature of the present society: solid and liquid,

material and immaterial, expansive yet involutive. With "fuzzy" – a word well describing the

intermediate stage of galaxies between mass and energy - Branzi captures the metaphor of a new

era of science, a sort of scientific and technological naturalism that "no longer considers nature as a primitive stage to edit but as an advanced model to be imitated in the construction process of the new.[20]" Branzi’s contamination with the other is "genetic", explicitly literal.

Turning his gaze to those "enzymatic" territories where cultivated land and city are wildly

alternating, rather than to the exasperated spectacle of the Metropolis, Branzi formulates a model

of "weak urbanization". Similarly to Indian cities, in that model "information technology, nature, mass-production, animals, myths and religions are no longer contrasting realities, but must live as integrated parts of a highly- performative complex system[21]."

Close to the operational matrix of an agricultural productive system, linked to seasonal cycles and

meteorology, Branzi’s cities are potentially reversible, infinitely traversable, fully expandable,

expressionless, psychologically and perceptually horizontal. They are incubators of potentials,

exportable prototypes of a becoming-other, setting no geometry, no hierarchy, no limit, abdicating

to any attempt of "composing" a territory-frame - albeit temporary - in the Deleuzian sense.

Since his early radical experiments, shared with Archizoom in the 60’s[22], Branzi represents the

city as a manifesto to bare a society liberated by figurative and linguistic constraints, yet vacuous,

alienated and fateless. The No-Stop City, "a city without qualities for a man (finally) without quality, that is without compromise[23]", is a "vibrating surface" with no external form but endless internal

forms: informal - not yet chaotic – assemblages of nature and artifice, information and products

where vital, hardly-specialized energies flourish.

7

According to Deleuze and Guattari, the Branzian city can be understood as a two-dimension

diagram, a virtual reality intentionally embodying no solid form. In this sense, it is a city without

(yet) architecture, since architecture is the inescapable solid state of the creative process of

reterritorialization.

05_Andrea Branzi, the weak urbanization of the No-Stop City

The animal city

Koolhaas’ and Branzi’s cities are informal - literally formless - and without history. The notion of

"masterplan" does not exist if not as an actualized prototype, an unfolding of hybrid genre.

Should we try to define the hybrid genre – reflecting the very idea of creative neo-evolutionism in

architectural terms - we would say that it hints to living forms embodying simultaneous and

multiple states of determination and indeterminacy at the same time.

Around a rule - what Deleuze & Guattari call "the rule of planning, diagramatization[24]" - the

architect’s becoming-animal begins with a fence-frame. Within the process of symbiosis with the

animal-city, in the motion of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the architect shifts in

layers between art and science. As a scientist he “brings back from the chaos variables that have become independent by slowing down, that is to say, by the elimination of whatever other variabilities are liable to interfere, so that the variables that are retained enter into determinable relations […]” while as an artist he “brings back from the chaos varieties that no longer constitute a reproduction of the sensory in the organ but set up a being of the sensory, a being of sensation, on an anorganic plane of composition that is able to restore the infinite[25].” In Koolhaas and Branzi this gradient tends to quality indeterminacy - "varieties" - and to quantity

determination - "variables" - to deliberately undermine the "plan of composition". The

methodological and conceptual enigma remains on what is the plan of composition.

Extracted from chaos and indeed intertwined with chaos, the animal-city - space of contamination

and enclave – looks at us dumb and full of questions. She fixes us as Jacques Derrida’s[26] cat and

reminds us of the difference between her and us. She reminds us that our (albeit difficult) task is

dressing her up and making her solid.

8

Notes:

[1] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1991) “What Is Phylosophy?”. New York: Columbia University Press, p.169 [2] It is the period of the Second Industrial Revolution marked by a profound and irreversible transformation of the economic productive system, and the entire social system. In art begins Impressionism which also marks the rediscovery of landscape painting [3] Shama, S. (1995) “Landscape & Memory”. London: Harper Collins Publishers, p.524 [4] In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists are the first to mobilize to defend European forests against the wild building activity. The first "natural reserves" to which an identity, a coherence, a unity is assigned through a boundary line, are created. The first natural reserve of this kind was born in 1861, the 1097 acres of the Forest of Fontainebleau in France, near Paris [5] Fresh Kills Landfill and Emscher Landschaftspark - respectively landfill on Staten Island near New York City and the industrial district of the Ruhr in Germany - are among the most famous and important landscape regeneration projects of vast polluted areas. To explore the theme we suggest the following texts: Corner, J. (ed.) (1999) “Recovering Landscape”. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Waldheim, C. (ed.) (2006) “The Landscape Urbanism Reader”. New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Praxis n. 4 (2002) Landscapes. Cambridge; Czerniak, J.& Hargreaves, G. (ed.) (2007) “Large Parks”. New York: Princeton Architectural Press [6] Meyer, E. (2007) “Uncertain Parks:Disturbed Sites, Citizens, and Risk Society”, in Czerniak, J.& Hargreaves, G. (ed.) (2007) “Large Parks”, Cit., p.59 [7] The notion of landscape ecology has abandoned the scientific determinism that characterized the early design manuals "with" nature, such as the book "Design with Nature" by Ian McHarg, published in 1969 which pioneered the concept of ecological planning. Today, the methodological relativism allows us to interpret the morphology of hybrid and complex landscapes [8] The concept of "planetary brassage" is expressed first by Gilles Clément in 1996 in the book "Thomas et le voyageur". To explore the theme we recommend: Clément, G. & Éveno, C. (1997) “Le Jardin planétaire”. La Tour d’Aigue: L'Aube/ChâteauVallon; Clément, G. (2004) “Manifeste pour le Tiers-paysage”. Paris: Sujet/Objet [9] Clement, Ibid [10] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism, and Schizophrenia”. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p.260 [11] The characteristic of the rhizome, to independently develop new plants even under unfavorable conditions, has led some thinkers to use it metaphorically. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century Carl Gustav Jung adopted it to symbolize the invisible nature of life, which grows mostly underground, while what appears only lasts one season [12] Deleuze & Guattari, Ibid, p.11 [13] Deleuze & Guattari, Ibid, p.31 [14] Interesting reading of French botanist and anthropologist André-Georges Haudricourt, who speaks of the opposition between sowing of seeds - on Western agriculture of grain - and replanting of offshoots plants – in Eastern horticulture of tubers. Such opposition would indeed reveal a different philosophical view of the world. To explore the theme we recommend: Haudricourt , A.G. (1962) “Domestication des animaux, culture des plantes et traitement d'autrui”. In: L'Homme vol.2, n.1, pp.40-50 [15] In Koolhaas, R. & Mau B. (1995) “S, M, L, XL”. Rotterdam: 010 Publ. [16] Koolhaas & Mau, Ibid, pp.511-515 [17] Koolhaas, R. (2001) “Delirious New York”. Milano: Electa, p.146 [18] Clément, G. (2002) “Éloge des vagabondes”. Paris: Nil éditions [19] Branzi, A. (2006) Modernità debole e diffusa. Il mondo del progetto all’inizio del XXI secolo”. Milano: Skira editore, p.134 [20] Branzi, Ibid, p.19 [21] Branzi, Ibid, p.134 [22] In 1969 Archizom Associates, composed by Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Corretti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario and Lucia Bartolini, open a reflection on the contemporary city, starting from the theoretical projects of Ludwig Hilberseimer and landing to the idea of the "city without architecture": the No-Stop City (1969-1972). To explore the theme we recommend: “Gli Archizoom” in Domus, 455 (1967); “Città catena di montaggio del sociale. Ideologia e teoria della metropoli” in Casabella n. 350-351(1970) [23] Branzi, Ibid, p.78 [24] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) “A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism, and Schizophrenia”. Cit., p.91 [25] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1991) “What Is Phylosophy?”. Cit., pp.212-213 [26] Derrida, J. (2008) “The Animal That Therefore I Am”. New York: Fordham University Press