Papers by Seth Denizen
Journal of Architectural Education, 2023
There is a Western European environmental imaginary that assumes arid environments are incapable ... more There is a Western European environmental imaginary that assumes arid environments are incapable of supporting human life, or that the quality of that life, if it exists, is hardly worth living. From this perspective, it is easy to see agriculture and arid environments as antithetical. Irrigation becomes necessary in arid environments like the Mezquital Valley when the plants you want to eat did not evolve to survive aridity, but there are plants that have evolved in this way, and many of them form the basis of rich culinary traditions in central Mexico. We began researching the arid foodways of one such culinary community in central Mexico, known as the Otomí or ñähñu, in the Mezquital Valley of Hidalgo, Mexico. Exploring Otomí Indigenous foodways in the Mezquital Valley became a way of questioning the culinary imagination of irrigated agriculture, but it also led us to reflect on deeper biases as well, as we struggled to visually represent the alternative forms of environmental knowledge we encountered in Otomí dryland agriculture. Today, we find ourselves working in the twilight of natural history, where the normal visual conventions for communicating objects and processes at the blurry boundary between biology and geology tend to fail to convey the kinds of continuity our research suggests is fundamental to these agricultural systems. The traditional disciplinary distinction between plant knowledge and soil knowledge in our academic institutions is something that the entire history of Mesoamerican agriculture suggests is a waste of time. For this reason, our drawings of the soil-plant-animal world of dryland agriculture in the Mezquital Valley embraces a precarious balance between objects and processes that we hope has pragmatic value as a faithful reflection of its key material relationships.
Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change, 2023
Scapegoat Issue 11 | LIFE, 2018
Architecture has become a battleground in the regulatory war on women's reproductive rights. In t... more Architecture has become a battleground in the regulatory war on women's reproductive rights. In this interview, we speak to architects and activists on the front lines of this struggle in order to understand how architecture has been mobilized against the "undue burden" standard in the United States. In order to visualize the spatial and implications of the regulatory war on women's reproductive health, this interview includes original architectural drawings of the buildings and atmospheres mandated by the Texas legislature in 2016.
Field to palette: dialogues on soil and art in the Anthropocene, 2019
And interview between Seth Denizen, a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape arc... more And interview between Seth Denizen, a researcher and design practitioner trained in landscape architecture and evolutionary biology, and Qui Rongliang, distinguished scholar and dean of the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, at Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University in Guangzhou.
Cell Reports, 2018
Intraday time is the primary determinant of metro microbiome and resistome composition
Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, 2013
Derived from the Latin forensis, the word "forensics" refers at root to "forum." Forensics is thu... more Derived from the Latin forensis, the word "forensics" refers at root to "forum." Forensics is thus the art of the forum-the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political, or legal gathering. Forensics is in this sense part of rhetoric, which concerns speech. However, it includes not only human speech but also that of things.
Volume Magazine: #35 Everything Under Control, 2013
As our contemporary design practices become increasingly biosynthetic in nature we turn to a set ... more As our contemporary design practices become increasingly biosynthetic in nature we turn to a set of terms which help to clarify the nature of all biosynthetic proposals: paradise, zoopolis, eco-management, and entanglements. Adam Bobbette and Seth Denizen take interest in how these terms propose their own biosynthetic form of life; and it is according to these terms that they investigate here a bio-synthetic paradise planned for the edge of Tehran called Pardisan.
Scapegoat 05: Excess, Sep 3, 2013
The relationship between architecture and subjectivity is evaluated through the lens of two psych... more The relationship between architecture and subjectivity is evaluated through the lens of two psychiatric centers in Maryland which incorporated shopping malls into their design.
Books by Seth Denizen
Scapegoat Journal, 2019
Architectural modernity is an emphatically secular modernity that imagines itself to have been re... more Architectural modernity is an emphatically secular modernity that imagines itself to have been recently liberated from an age in which architecture was a metaphysical discipline, and whose architectural forms were constrained by the metaphysical requirements of the king or the church.
Today, architects do not see themselves as metaphysicians, and yet there is unfinished metaphysical business at the core of the modern project that continually undermines this narrative of liberation. Hidden within the new rationalist core of architectural modernity is the old western metaphysical distinction between life and non-life — the living and the non-living — which in the 21st century has increasingly become a site of political struggle in the built environment, linking struggles over reproductive rights, environmental justice, climate change, archaeology, and urban design.
In the LIFE issue we find evidence of architecture’s ongoing metaphysical work in the use of architectural building codes as a tool to limit women’s reproductive choices in Texas, the US military’s conversion of the Aleutian archipelago into its own private radiation sensor, the management of racialized ghosts in Indonesian squatter settlements, the rise of neo-vitalist urbansim in Europe, and the introduction of the logic of automation into burial practices in Tokyo.
Book Reviews by Seth Denizen
The Journal of Architecture, 2018
Uploads
Papers by Seth Denizen
Books by Seth Denizen
Today, architects do not see themselves as metaphysicians, and yet there is unfinished metaphysical business at the core of the modern project that continually undermines this narrative of liberation. Hidden within the new rationalist core of architectural modernity is the old western metaphysical distinction between life and non-life — the living and the non-living — which in the 21st century has increasingly become a site of political struggle in the built environment, linking struggles over reproductive rights, environmental justice, climate change, archaeology, and urban design.
In the LIFE issue we find evidence of architecture’s ongoing metaphysical work in the use of architectural building codes as a tool to limit women’s reproductive choices in Texas, the US military’s conversion of the Aleutian archipelago into its own private radiation sensor, the management of racialized ghosts in Indonesian squatter settlements, the rise of neo-vitalist urbansim in Europe, and the introduction of the logic of automation into burial practices in Tokyo.
Book Reviews by Seth Denizen
Today, architects do not see themselves as metaphysicians, and yet there is unfinished metaphysical business at the core of the modern project that continually undermines this narrative of liberation. Hidden within the new rationalist core of architectural modernity is the old western metaphysical distinction between life and non-life — the living and the non-living — which in the 21st century has increasingly become a site of political struggle in the built environment, linking struggles over reproductive rights, environmental justice, climate change, archaeology, and urban design.
In the LIFE issue we find evidence of architecture’s ongoing metaphysical work in the use of architectural building codes as a tool to limit women’s reproductive choices in Texas, the US military’s conversion of the Aleutian archipelago into its own private radiation sensor, the management of racialized ghosts in Indonesian squatter settlements, the rise of neo-vitalist urbansim in Europe, and the introduction of the logic of automation into burial practices in Tokyo.