A Manifesto for Post-COVID Living by Cutwork
In the fifth and final installment of a five-part series, we introduce “Confronting Nature” – the fourth theme in a manifesto by the Paris based architecture and design studio, Cutwork. The manifesto presents a wide-reaching collection of perspectives about post-confinement architecture, design and living.
To keep our readers up-to-date on this series, the following description by Cutwork has been reprinted here:
“Following the Covid-19 pandemic, we explore and acknowledge how physical distancing may transform how we live in the future and change our lifestyles for far longer than we might at first imagine.”
“Divided into five core subjects and accompanied by studio co-founder, Antonin Yuji Maeno’s illustrations, Together Has Changed examines the more typical topics of office and home working but also how this may even affect our intimate relationships such as attitudes towards monogamy and how we might prepare for life within a future pandemic.”
“Our collective trajectory is different…Not only is global confinement accelerating pre-existing trends (digital transformation, remote working, localized supply chains, self-sufficient production, urban exodus, mass-surveillance), but it is magnifying fundamental systemic flaws.”
“We live in a narrative that prioritizes productivity over self. The global over local. Private property over shared spaces. Economics over ecology. Personal interest over collective perspectives. Now that the world has come to a pause, not only can we see the inherent limits of our former ways to live and work, but also new unexpected opportunities for systemic change.”
“As an architecture and design studio, we are sensitive to societal changes and the drivers behind them. Post-confinement, how will our relationship to cities be affected? What new collective narratives are emerging? How will this impact our relationship to work? How can we design new habitats to accompany and bring out the best of our new ways of life?”
Below, find the last of the five core themes explored – “Where we are ready to live as a part of nature instead of believing we are apart from it. Where our environments are also built for the other (non-human) beings with which we share our habitats.”
CONFRONTING NATURE / Living with Other Beings
In 2014, an American study showed that children, aged between 4 and 10, can recognize and distinguish thousands of different brands at first glance – yet are not able to identify the leaves of ten plants from their immediate surrounding.
Nature has become a decor – a background to our lives for which we have lost touch. We have adopted a false understanding and transactional relationship to nature. This mentality is mirrored in how exclusivity has permeated our social structures and urban habitats.
How can our cities act as conduits for the natural blossoming and proliferation of life? How to conceive buildings like trees that could activate biodiversity in our cities? How can we design our shared habitats to cultivate greater attention to non-human living beings?
For us, architecture is about opening the senses to the immediate environment and the greater territories shared between beings. In the city, even without the urban hum and rumble of activity, the environment is not quiet. Urban birds warble, trill, babble, chatter, cry, croak, whistle, hoot and sing. Architecture could act as a conduit to draw our attention to the multitude of motions that surrounds us. The city must become an environment conducive to blossoming and the natural proliferation of life. Buildings could be planted like trees to activate biodiversity in our cities.
Though today, our senses are dimmed and our attention is relentlessly being pulled in countless directions. In the early 2000s, the average time a human could concentrate was 12 seconds. Today, in the flood of the information age, this has dropped to 8 seconds. (Just for perspective, the average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds.) Not only is our attention span shrinking, but its direction is also shifting. Almost anyone will instinctively recognize the shape of a logo, even from far away, or in small print at the bottom of a poster. An American study, in 2014, showed that North-American children, from 4 to 10 years old, can recognize and distinguish thousands of different brands at first glance – yet are not able to identify the leaves of ten plants from their local surroundings.
With our lifestyles becoming increasingly urban, there is a crisis of attention toward non-human living beings: The very mechanism of our perceptions has changed. Baptiste Morizot is a French philosopher and animal tracker. For him, the cultural heritage of Western society has fueled a deficit of attention towards non-human living beings. He invites us to “reinvent and adjust our perspective in order to find new ways to be beings/new ways to be livings” and “to learn to cohabitate with the alterity.”
Our fundamental sensitivity to recognize patterns in our environment has shifted toward manufactured goods. This replacement is only accelerating as our attention becomes monetized and the economy of attention accelerates. We are building an environment around us where everything wants our attention all the time, and where the experience of nature is increasingly excluded.
More and more we are losing touch with the diversity of species we share and inhabit our spaces with. Globally, 55% of people now live in urban areas. In most western countries, this is even higher (France for ex: 61%). By the turn of the century, Americans already spent 87% of their time indoors. Today, kids only spend an average of 4–7 minutes outdoors per day while spending an average of 7½ hours a day on electronics. And that figure was before confinement. We can only imagine how much this has increased today as education and spending time with family and friends has shifted onto our screens. In Australia, the National Broadband Network saw daytime screen use increase over 70%, compared to figures in February.
Our collective imagination and experience of wild nature is entirely framed. We are forgetting nature – let alone its wildness. It relies on the same filtered and beautified narratives of nature documentaries and children’s books. Nature has merged into the background, a decor, the grey noise beneath our activities. We have reduced it almost exclusively to serving as a resource, which also happens to be pleasant to look at on a stroll.
Historic fictions drove the first artificial wedge between us and nature in western culture. We are still confronting this strong conceptual heritage today – that nature is present to serve as our tools and resources for human civilization. Nature is “the great other” – a scary mysterious force to be overcome. This perspective is fueled by two conceptual mistakes: We compare “natural” to “artificial” and misdefine what is “natural” with what was once “original.” In truth, today, relatively few hectares of virgin Amazonian forest remain in their “original” or “untouched” states. And with mankind’s relentless impact on the global composition of our atmosphere, even this conception of “untouched” can be
easily challenged. Does this mean that our world is no longer natural anymore?
We have forgotten a simpler, more elegant truth: As humans, we arose and evolved from the same molecular processes and physics governing anything else in the universe. We are “natural” by default, and thus, so are all of our activities. Yes, technology, AI, and video games are all extending branches of nature in this respect. And yes, even human-made climate change could be considered a “force of nature.” But in this lies the key issue: Our entire conception of “nature” is now tinted by human activities – distorted by our own degrees of involvement and accountability.
We need to quickly dismantle the transactional relationship we have to nature. Even when well intended, the idea that we need “to take care of Nature” comes from the same bias. It preserves a flawed understanding that we are separated from nature. Perhaps our conception of “nature” could thus be replaced by a new conception of “living beings,” in order to reframe our perspectives and renew a sensitive and practical relationship with the multiplicity of other life forms and their needs. We need to embrace the fact that we are a part of a bigger system of lives – a vast ensemble of ‘milieus’ in which we coexist. In what ways can our designed territories help shift our perspectives of nature? For us, architecture and urban projects are means to overcome this fictional gap the western world was built upon.
What if we recognize that such boundaries of differences are artificial – fictions of our own making? It’s always easier to find differences: “We are not part of Nature, I am not an animal, I am not a woman (or a man), I am not in your religion, I am not of your nationality, etc.” Where does one draw the line on what acceptable differences may be? “I do not have the same color eyes, I do not have the same body shape, I do not have the same number of freckles, I am not born on the same day, hour, or minute. I am not the same as anyone, hence, I am exceptional.” If we follow this tendency toward exclusivity, we are bound to be alone. Beyond concerns of morality, fabricating a line to define what is or is not an ‘acceptable tolerance’ is completely arbitrary – a self-imposed boundary only limiting ourselves.
Fully integrated and inclusive perspectives of nature could even lead to more inclusive understandings of each other. Reinventing our relationship to nature means reinventing our relationships in a much wider sense: between humans and humans, women and men, adults and children, working and retired. If we recognize that we are a part of nature: We are animals, we are humans, we are conscious, we are alive. If we choose it to be inclusive to nature, suddenly we are together. And today, this extends even as far as between humans and machines, between people and engineered forms of life. Within nature, new kinds of differences are emerging: We are not yet robots, we are not yet genetically enhanced, we are not yet engineered in labs. How inclusive are we going to be on these fronts?
We shape and are shaped back by fictions. This is a dynamic dialog. Personal fictions – our identities, perspectives, attentions – are surprisingly flexible and open to reinvention. The contours of our personal identities are negotiated with the larger intersubjective reality, our collective narratives. The whole history of western society has been pushing against nature’s limits, rooting for mankind to win against this existential foe. The fiction of nature is one of the big contemporary narratives subdividing our togetherness and constricting our collaborative potential. Let’s confront it now.
Cutwork is an award-winning architecture and design studio based in Paris, specialising in co-working and co-living spaces. It designs innovative spaces and furniture for pioneering companies who are re-imagining the way space is shared. A team of architects, designers, engineers, and researchers, Cutwork designs smart, multi-use architectural and interior concepts that make it easy to continually transform a space, build better communities, and encourage collaboration. In 2020 Cutwork won the FRAME Award for Societal Innovation for their work on Flatmates, becoming the youngest studio to ever win a FRAME Award, and in 2018, Cutwork was named in the EIT Climate-KIC list of Europe’s Top 30 Cleantech Startups.
Recent projects include Station F, the largest startup campus in the world home to 1000 startups and the European hubs of Facebook, Microsoft, Ubisoft; Flatmates, the first large-scale co-living space in Paris for 600 entrepreneurs; and the Cortex Shelter by Cutwork, a pioneering self-built, low-cost, long-term,‘just add water’ housing solution to help address the critical humanitarian crisis in refugee housing that received global acclaim.