Connor OGrady
figure 5: Diffuse Responsive Systems, From Within
The way that people collect housewares or decorate in order to make a house into their home is an example of how this relationship can form between people and their spaces. However, illustrating the quality of a diffuse architecture, requires the highly intimate and prolonged act of intertwining fingers. This relationship is rare yet significant between individuals and the built environment. But it can be found more commonly in the interactions of people, exemplified in the brushing past another person on the street, the act of hugging or being immersed in a crowd at the local stadium. It may be a human disservice to build only such finite and robust structures, focused on creating separations between nature and one another, rather than infusing our world with systems composed of softened boundaries and teasing thresholds akin to those of our own bodies. An architecture that could mediate between nature and culture offers the potential to expand current definitions of the relations between beings and things. ( figure 6 ) This world may benefit from a diffuse, responsive, public environment viewed and treated as a companion species. An architecture that contributes to the health of all beings and the environment. An architecture of difference, that participates in the act of knowing, and aims to help each of us to know one another better. Entangled, inefficient, and co-dependent, as modern architecture was once described by Le Corbusier as a machine for living in, a post-human architecture may be considered as the machine for living with. A built environment participating in a collective effort to champion empathy, for our well- being and ecological good. O
Connor OGrady
figure 6: Diffuse Responsive Systems, Speculative Section
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 37
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