PRAXIS 13 Lydia Kallipoliti: Eco-Redux 5 : Charles Harker, founder of the TAO Design Group in Austin, Texas, juxtaposes Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” with a new concept for habitation that he coins the “soft machine.”  1 The TAO Design Group—a group of architects, sculptors and artists— experiments with building without drawings, spraying urethane on a chicken wire armature based on sketches and written rules for enclosure. Every step is a fuctuating process of incremental adjustments that necessitates constant reinvention of the origi- nal plan. In his manifesto, Harker outlines an alternative defnition of matter as patterns of energy that solidify in time. He writes, “We are in the midst of a Socio-Psychological, Cybernetic, Mass- media, Space Age revolution,”  2 and speaks of “softness” as an expansion of environmental perception; both literally, through curvature and the use of plastic materials, and conceptually, envisioning an elastic understanding of tectonic conventions. : François Roche, principal of R&Sie(n) in Paris, France exhibits a “hypnosis chamber” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) in Paris. 3 Designed with computational scripts—protocols that allow for growth of the original “seed” design—and fabricated with a fve-axis milling machine, the hypnosis chamber renders an immersive space of disalientation from the social sphere in a state between sleep and wake. A complex intrauterine vascular space, the hypnosis chamber is intended to introduce uncer- tainty in the individual’s environmental cognition, as a means of creative speculation and experimentation which may open up the possibility of transforming one’s environmental sphere. 4 Are these two practices exploring the same issues with similar designs or not ? Are we destined to remediate unsettled memo- ries of our recent past? Is regression a defensive reaction against future disenchantment? Or have we already imagined in the past something beyond the present of that time? The kinship between present-day experimental design and that of the 1960s-1970s is so striking that we can speak of uncanny resemblances, eerie images of projects already seen and experi- enced as déjà-vu. In psychoanalysis, déjà vu is a “disturbance of reality perception, which serves to reassure the patient against this insecurity, by divesting, through an estrangement affect, the recurrent circumstances of the impact of a new reality.”  5 Déjà vu is an unconscious effort of the ego to bridge a gap between the past and the present; it is a peculiar defensive reaction against the fear of the unknown, 6 manifest by projecting the future not as an entirely new course of events but as mixture of past and pres- ent stretched in time. In our feld, a number of critics have described concepts, forms, and approaches retrieved from the recent past as a perva- sive phenomenon of “media archeology.”  7 Is this type of regres- sion, however, merely expressive of historical interest? Looking to the postwar period may be more than a quest to identify his- torical antecedents. It could be quite the opposite: that the pres- ent helps us understand this recent past and, of course, vice versa. History only survives as a relevant discourse through revivalism of the oblivious past. Leftover histories—environmen- tal experiments with organic matter, synthetic growth, and other alternative technologies that were once esteemed as marginal and deviant—are now of core signifcance to architectural dis- course. Displaced from the periphery to the center of delibera- tions, these counter-histories may account for the multiplicity and diversity of current ecological anxieties in architecture. As such, déjà-vu might be used procreatively to rebuild future disciplinary courses. Reconstructing projects and ideas of the past through a new organizational and classifcatory lens might enable us to generate a critical discourse that migrates to differ- ent terrains of thought throughout time. The way we classify things bears a profound impact on disci- plinary structures; the means by which we organize information emerges from and profoundly affects our social, political, intel- lectual, and cultural constructs. The legacy of ecological ideas in architecture evidences this effect. Post-enlightenment, environ- mental debates focused on assiduous observation and documen- tation of objects and organisms, analytically classifying the living stock of the world. In the postwar period, environment was addressed through diagrams of feedback cycles, and global resources were examined as interconnected systems that could be redistributed. Today, while the environmental discourse is much more diverse than in the past, it shares an investment in local data classifcation of living systems, similar to information clouds of data constellations online. Beyond the pretext of healing the planet and the strategic relo- cation of fnite natural resources, the present ubiquity of ecologi- cal concerns illustrates a persistent taxonomical thinking in ECO-REDUX: LYDIA KALLIPOLITI ENVIRONMENTAL ARCHITECTURE FROM “OBJECT” TO “SYSTEM” TO “CLOUD” 6_17Ecoredux_ac.indd 5 2/16/12 8:33 PM