Nature And Nature Essay

Nature
The following discussion on the perception of nature will discuss three main topics: a contemporary perception of a culture separated from nature, a sociological analysis of the perception, and a blurred perception understanding key concepts of being sympathetic and affixed to nature. More precisely, the discussion will run sequentially from unpacking the recent Archilab 2013 discussions and its perception of nature, to the sociological view on the contemporary relationship between nature and society through Bruno Latour, to conclude with the mediatory role played by Lars Spuybroek, referring digital design culture to the guilds producing Gothic architecture, and urging for design to feel sympathy of all things which design it.

[Archilab discussion]

The sociologist Bruno Latour questions the underpinning which scientific discourse has set as the basis of modern society. He defines the social structure of the modernist Western culture through the distinction made between nature and society, whereby society exists outside of nature, and thus nature outside of society. The discussion is elaborated by introducing the role of mediators between the two distinct entities where socio-natural negotiators “will try to naturalize Society by integrating it into Nature (Hull, 1988), or to socialize Nature by getting it digested by Society (Bloor, [1976] 1991)”

“[…]Nature as it is, or at least as it is known to the sciences - which remain in the background, unstudied, unstudiable, miraculously con­ flared with Nature itself. Thus at the heart of the question of relativism we find the question of science.”

Scientific discourse and scientists are described by Latour as the primary authorial figures whereby mediators latch themselves o...

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...ympathetic to the entire ecology which allowed its conception.
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In a generalisation, the main perception of nature which Archilab 2013 holds is nature to be distinctly separate to culture, and calls upon science to act as a mediator. Bruno Latour maintains such practice to be the ideal of a modernist society which places importance on the unquestionable truth of nature, but then questions whether we have ever been modern, linking “primitive” culture to the so-called modern man. Lars Spuybroek calls upon Ruskin’s Victorian writing on the topic of Gothic architecture and its sympathy of the ecology which creates it. The subject of Darwinism provides a topic attempting to define nature through science, yet Spuybroek takes a similar stance to Ruskin in that it does not describe the sympathy which a “primitive” culture may have shown in the production of architecture.