Abstract
Burj Khalifa sweats so you don’t have to. To achieve this feat requires extreme technical measures. Understood as a life-support system or a collection of socio-technical prostheses, the intersecting systems that coalesce to form and circulate Burj Khalifa render themselves as well as those bodies that move through and around them as networked cyborg entities. Extending through Burj Khalifa’s thermal enclosure and the skins of its inhabitants, this assemblage of systems and elements fleshes out a world as it draws spatially and temporally distant entities and events into contingent, mobile, and potentially unmappable relations with one another. Despite mounting evidence of such spatial and temporal contingency, the figures of the coherently, singular, bounded building and the human subject persist in the mainstream discourse of contemporary architecture and history. Such material-discursive horizons and limitations, compounded by their intersections with the nebulous term “anthropocene,” call for multiple, different, and expanded vocabularies to describe fundamentally irreducible and unequal conditions. For architects and historians, this means that the figures of the building and human subject are no longer sufficient conceptual tools. Attempting to glimpse beyond this terminological horizon, this paper asks, what happens when we take the provocation of Burj Khalifa sweating seriously.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Cyborg, Media, Aesthetics, HVAC, Burj Khalifa
