Part 2 : Ground Control to Major Tom.
An appreciation of ‘what can be’ must necessitate a prior and thorough understanding of ‘what is’. This entails a purging of definition and jargon, of evaluating existing knowledge through a context-determinate lens, instead of as self-evident and absolute. No system or construct exists in isolation, and it's properties are governed by a plethora of contextual parameters which may in themselves be ephemeral in their existence / influence. Our understanding of why societies exist as they do today, in environments fashioned as they are, cannot be directly transposed to foreign colonies, because of a decided disparity in contextual construct. Neither must this understanding be the barometer for examining the success of the architecture of future colonisations. While we do attempt the colonization of Mars at the present locus in our evolutionary timeline, it would behoove us to regard our current evolutionary state as fluid - a product of parameters we have been chronologically exposed to. This presupposition will ensure our approach to the colonization is viewed not as a linear extension of our current state, but rather, a minimally invasive, mutualistic attempt with the host planet as an equal stakeholder.
From an evolutionary standpoint, our species has exhibited a marked proclivity for dispensing with physiological excess – from outgrowing vestigial tails and rejecting appendices deemed functionally redundant, to developing shorter arms as we embraced upright walking postures. This phenomenon, however, seems to exist at odds with the parallel growth of our cranial faculties – which have steadily evolved to process more and more quanta of information of increasing complexities. Our cerebral constructs have had to adapt to be the foundation of our survival mechanism, essentially because we have never been as physically dominant as some of our larger antediluvian counterparts. To that end, it is not surprising that we have been able to thrive in organized clusters to leverage a strength in numbers, and find comfort in the cooperative constructs of tribes, communities and societies. The ensuing ability to hunt larger prey in formation, the ability to tell poisonous fruit from palatable, to predict the advent of seasons and other products of our collective cerebral prowess - represented a steadily growing library of useful information that needed to be articulated and stored. The very notion of language, expression and Art stems from this need for articulation - be it the need for cataloging as templates of methodology, or be it for the want to celebrate achievement and epoch.
Over time, organized religion - a pledged subservience to a created divine, birthed the concept of artistic expression as a form of homage; and some of our earliest and finest architectural marvels across civilizations, are places of worship. Serving as centers for congregation and affiliation, of recorded instruction, legend and lore - they became focal points around which indigenous cultures flourished.
It is when Art began to outgrow mere expression and take on the mantle of symbol and affiliation, that it became the semiotic encapsulation of something much larger than aesthetic experience. From flags that fronted the conquests of empires to the incubation of foreign architectural styles that followed their conclusion, the politicization of art would irreversibly alter the constructs of culture, community and identity. Through centuries of wars, the rise and fall of empires, the Renaissance- a pinnacle of our collective aesthetic achievement, the Industrial Revolution and the technological advancement it spawned, electronic and lately social media that made the sharing of visual and aural experiences instantaneous (and for a time, wonderful) – we eventually witnessed the inevitable - the pseudo-democratization / dilution / demise of Art. Context took a backseat in lieu of connotation, and Art completed its transformation from a discipline of primal expression to one of derivative individualism on the part of a few, and imposed consumption on the part of most.
This is the epoch we find ourselves in today – an age of expression saturation and stagnation, which in industry parlance, we have conveniently termed globalization. We celebrate standardization, and fetishize instances of superficial expression that disrupt for the sake of disruption. The diaspora of commercially propelled pulp that we call experience normalizes over-stimulation to the extent where over-stimulation manifests as collective swathes of homogeneity. Sentiment is borrowed and learned instead of evoked, and skylines look to replicate blindly those of superior-world nations. Though we have biologically evolved to dispense with excess, as societies today, we are indisputably consumption-centric and programmed by our own created constructs to embrace excess. We need a reboot.
Architects of the future will be tasked with shaping extra terrestrial communities, and it is imperative that they cannot further their discourse as a linear extension of current developmental paradigms. Architecture, when distilled to its true fundamentals, is essentially a statement of artistic expression that facilitates function, governed intrinsically by the context in which it is envisioned. Our current unsustainable models preclude true mutualism with context, and are instead selfishly anthropocentric. We will need to glean from our vast repertoire of expertise, the zest for exploration and our immense scientific fortitude that has even made the thought of such a colonization possible. A planet that is virgin and unknown awaits. A spirit of empathy will serve us well.