Approaching a New Biotope

Is it nowadays possible to talk about Nature? During the last decades Science Studies have tried to redefine the concept of nature according to our present time, its knowledges and technologies. People like Ilya Prigogine, Michel Serres, Manuel De Landa, Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour have attempt to draw up how it could be signed a new alliance between Nature and Sciences. This task has not only meant a reconfiguration of our understanding of scientific disciplines related to nature, like biology or physics, but it has also arisen some attached social, cultural and political consequences. Obviously, Architecture, as socio-cultural and political construction, cannot be alien to this determinant cultural event, and it has to realign its battle fronts in order to confront the collapse of culture and nature proposed by the authors above, which changes around the external referent on which modern and classical architectural discipline were laying on. Deeply immersed in the culture of the image, architectural discipline has to confront this question not only as a general principle of re-organization, but also as a matter of sensitivity. That is, the idea of nature will transcend towards a new definition of materiality that will re-configure our way of looking at our environment. Finally, these implications can be organized around a new figure of action, or in other words, a new symbolic metaphor of the subject. Hence humans are moving toward their integration into the new ecosystem derived from the redefinition of a society-nature, the circle of life of animals will become the first step of interaction, testing and experimentation. Animals and animal life would evoke the pureness of that sensitivity, both sensual and absolutely soaked into its own environment. The worrying humanized animals designed by Patricia Piccinini, the animalized symbolism of artist like Matthew Bartney or the biological hybridisms in films like David Cronenberg's Existenz, begin to configure the new sophisticated bestiary of our days. Could it be that the arisen of an Age of the Culture of Image has inevitably leaded us towards a whole process of human animalization?