Safe as Houses: The More-Than-Human Home

By Rachel Armstrong

This book examines the notion of the home in the context of the pandemic and lockdown, as they relate to environmental concerns and how we live with viruses and bacteria. It argues that, in order to decrease our vulnerability to infective agents, we need to acknowledge the link between people, space, daily routines, and microbes and explore how the predominantly benign microbial world might be harnessed to combat and boost out immunity to future pathogens. Suggesting more than environmental home improvements, it explores new innovations and new materials which incorporate microbes for more ecological designs, such as ceramic tiles, concrete bio-receptive surfaces, building skins, fabrics, waste management, and alternative energy supplies. A series of drawings which reveal the evolution of microbial technologies, infrastructures, spaces, dwellings, and architectures sets out a prototype for an ecological home for post pandemic times. Identifying the lessons that COVID-19 has brought us, the book highlights the need for humans to consider and take microbes into account in future built environments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lund Humphries
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781848225152

Book preview

Preface

Our world has always been microbial, but we lacked the ability to see it. First, until the invention of the microscope, we could not perceive the tiny cells all around us that made the soil fertile and air breathable. Next, we could not see the benefits of microbes on account of comparatively few species identified that invaded our bodies, treating them as easily plundered, hot organic ecosystems, causing infectious disease. Then, we could not see the microbial composition of our skin, guts and flesh on account of our anthropocentrism, regarding them as ‘contaminants’. Finally, we could not see the impact of our plundering of wildernesses and animal welfare abuses on stable microbial ecosystems until they shattered our economic systems via the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Our inability to ‘see’ ourselves in a microbial world is not about optics and stimulus, but the receptivity we have to the irreducibly complex, dynamic materiality that makes up our unique life-bearing planet. In contrast to the tactile reflexivity of microbes, we invent many layers of meaning which transform us into beings capable of complex thought and decision-making. Confronting us with the best and worst of ourselves, the coronavirus pandemic presents us with stark choices going forward.

In the 1999 science fiction film The Matrix, the main character, Neo, is offered the option of a blue and red pill. Should he select the red pill, then he will have to learn a potentially devastating truth, but if he takes the blue pill then he can return to comfortable ignorance. The choice that architecture, design and indeed, all humanity face now that the world of microbes has been revealed is whether the ‘matrix’ of anthropocentrism that positions us at the heart of all meaningful action is a reality we should continue, or not.

If we choose the blue pill, we can regard the coronavirus as an inconvenience from which we recover and return to the ecocidal practices that characterise human development. After all, we have filtered out microbes from our worldview up until this point and can successfully do so again. Further pandemic outbreaks will be regarded as mere disruptions to our baseline normality. We can hold this anthropocentric path until the underlying reality of climate emergency breaks through and combined with the disorder in the fabric of the living realm, this version of the world is torn asunder.

If we take the red pill, we will acknowledge our interdependency with the microbial realm and appreciate their capacity to ‘make’ the world through their potent, persistent, life-promoting metabolic reactions. With massive implications for anthropocentrism, notions of human identity and how we must begin to (re)imagine the nature of human development, the appreciation of an always-already microbial realm requires us to undergo incredible change, thinking beyond our immediate needs into a reality that we really don’t yet understand.

For the blue pill takers, consumptive design practices continue as usual with an occasional speech about sustainable innovation. The machines-à-habiter and their industrial kin continue to consume and pollute the world, albeit more politely than before. For you, this book is a work of science fiction, an invented world that offers a cautionary academic tale but is an unlikely reality.

This book is for the red pill takers. Now that Pandora’s Box is open, inside you will find questions, proposals and case studies that should not only provoke thought, concern and even consternation, but, ultimately, invite action.

1

Safe as Houses

Humans have always modified their environment of course, but the term designated only their surroundings, that which precisely, encircled them. They remained central figures, only modifying the décor of their dramas around the edges. Today, the décor, the wings, the background, the whole building have come on stage and are competing with the actors for the principal role. This changes all the scripts, suggests other endings. Humans are no longer the only actors even though they still see themselves entrusted with a role that is much too important for them.

Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, 2017¹

Our relationship with our homes changed on 11 March 2020, when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, was a pandemic.² This resulted in enforced periods of self-isolation in a process called ‘lockdown’; communities shut down like a global cascade of dominoes. Since Western cultures spend 90 per cent of our time in indoor spaces, during this time we got to know our living spaces intimately.

With more than 125,000 cases and nearly 5000 deaths across the world, the scale and severity of the zoonosis soon brought dread. In April 2020, the volume of bodies overwhelmed New York City’s capacity to deal with the dead, so a long-term freezer storage facility at a Brooklyn pier was opened. During India’s second wave in April 2021, crematoriums were open all day and all night as funeral pyres lit up the sky to send off the deceased in its worst-hit cities. Retreating indoors, we adopted new rituals that filled the ensuing days of uncertainty, and our homes became unfamiliar.

The previous informal relationship with our homes that we enjoyed as a retreat away from our main workspaces, turned into a deeper relationship as lockdown unfolded, where the details of our lifestyles and character of our living spaces were juxtaposed, amplified and exposed.

At first, our homes were welcoming spaces. The time saved in commuting was liberating and we were able to organise our schedules freely but without being able to go anywhere.

Outside, anthropogenic impacts took centre stage as clear skies appeared uncrossed by aeroplane trails, crystal waterways remained unstirred by marine traffic, birdsong swelled to deafening levels, and the omnipresent grumble of traffic quelled. Pollution and greenhouse gases (GHGs) dropped significantly, as health concerns and sweeping movement restrictions slashed the demand for mobility around the world. Shipping companies cancelled hundreds of sailings, and some of the world’s largest airports came to a standstill as their runways lay idle. Bewitched by this world without people we watched our own irrelevance from our windows and balconies, stimulating much reflection on how we live.

Those with online access and white-collar employment turned to online working, transforming less-used areas of their homes into makeshift offices. As employees weathered the extra costs of overheads in addition to their labour, the home itself started to become more present.

All the imperfections and household chores within our living spaces could not be ignored by walking through the front door to a more important work location. It was pointless to commission a builder to sort these details out, as all the blue-collar trades were also in productive limbo. Day after day we confronted the places that we had taken out mortgages on, becoming unsure about their fitness for their intended purpose. With the new status quo requiring more time spent away from the workplace, perhaps we needed somewhere larger, with more rooms and a garden.

The last line of defence we have against the city, where important things happen – economics, markets, society, culture, politics, pandemics – that are entangled with other people and the complexities of the Anthropocene, the home is a place where we can safely ignore the big picture problems and escape into our own world. Within this private domain, some of us still bring preferred aspects of the outside in through different types of media, but we think we are in control of this. We can choose not to purchase a newspaper, or turn our devices off.

inline-image 1 This is my kitchen. Day 50

As the pandemic worked its havoc all around us, we had to find new daily routines for living. Our distance from others grew, being unable to visit friends, loved ones and the dying. We learned the greatest risk of infection was indoors through the breath we shared in poorly ventilated spaces, where microbial atmospheres could work their way inside through every door, window and with every visitor. Domestic space took a dark turn as precautionary measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 imposed restrictions on our usual freedoms. Even the arrival of a package could potentially mean that the virus might cross the threshold imperilling our health and lives. Quarantines, social distancing hygiene protocols and fear restricted our access to the haptic realm, distancing us from the comfort of natural touch (washing rituals, gloves), greetings (shaking hands) and physical reassurances (hugs). This ominous psychological dimension permeated everything, questioning what and whom we could trust and locating our living space,s at the mythological border that divides mundane ‘normality’ from invisible ‘other’ microbial realms. Those fortunate enough to be able to work from home discovered that familiar activities (meetings, writing, corresponding, calculating etc.) now provoked mental health issues, while those already trapped in the discomfort of their living spaces such as victims of domestic violence and the lonely, could not escape from torment. At worst, our lockdown living spaces were waking nightmares where we were not safe from a disrupted world, confining us to a space that prevented our much-anticipated return to normality. At best, these gilded cages separated us from society through deadened digital filters, but even the most computer literate individuals had to return, at some point, to a more immediate physical reality. The scars left by these tensions will persist long after the pandemic ends, haunting our living spaces and urban fabric in ways we cannot yet imagine. Having left our imaginations to fill in the detail of the microbial threat potentially anywhere in our homes, formerly innocuous objects have taken on the mantle of possible fomites³ acquiring a wilful agency previously confined to the territory of children’s books⁴ – a distortion of our former reality, and reminiscent of the intensely psychological encounter of confinement within a flawed living space vividly depicted in Charlotte Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper.⁵

It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are open or not, the smell is here. It creeps all over the house.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1981⁶

Moving into the void left by the bustle of human society, noxious microbial atmospheres penetrated familiar landscapes that we once commuted through. Having considered the realm of microbes so little, it was hard to know the right things to do. Shored up by the confidence of a twentieth-century anti-microbial society, where Western antibiotics and public health measures largely kept devastating infectious disease at bay,