Rethinking the Individual–Collective Divide with Biodigital Architecture

Abstract

Abstract This article suggests an expansion to perceptions of the individual and the collective in the context of the biodigital turn in architecture and the embrace of algorithmic, generative methodologies into its corpus of the past 20 years. Such an expansion subverts advanced capitalist hierarchies and promotes alternative (be)comings. For despite two decades of biodigital novelty narratives, which speak of a shift from humanist-formal processes in architecture to complex, generative and posthuman architectural practice, biodigital architecture, it is argued here, fails to account for bios (human and non-human) and therefore fails to promote real novelty/difference. Drawing on current posthumanist and nomadic theories of subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti and on turn of the twentieth century ethological theory of ecology developed by Jacob Von Uexküll, alternative materiality here emerges to transpose two biodigital practices, Achim Menges and François Roche’s, toward ethical paths.