Principles of "Cosmoarchitecture"

In African societies, it's customary to say that the house also belongs to those we haven't yet met. This is really the best definition of sustainability.

An ancient sense of sustainability

Let's fix this approach to sustainability, which sees it as a kind of intergenerational contract instituting that the actions we take today must not compromise the existence of those who will live after us. With this in mind, let's try to isolate from traditional architecture and sum up the related ferments for a new ethic of sustainability, whose potential would perhaps be to regenerate from Africa the contemporary debate around the challenges of living together and the habitability of our planet.

The idea of an exclusive right to enjoy things, the very notion of property and any exaggerated sense of ownership are, as we know, remarkably blurred in African cognitive apparatus. In traditional worlds, things are considered to belong vaguely to everyone... the house in particular, whose construction will often have mobilized the entire village with the help of millet beer.

If a stay in an initiation enclosure is designed to create a sense of belonging to the same body for the entire age group, then the construction site for a new house - like the many rites that punctuate the earthly stay - is responsible for reactivating and reinforcing this bond. The communal dimension of architecture is thus its first guarantee of durability.

For while the African house is generally placed under the responsibility of the woman for whom the husband initiated its erection, its doors must remain permanently open to all comers. In this way, the house becomes the main hub of a complex system: an interweaving of collective obligations and the responsibilities of all towards one another, which incidentally shapes its relative permanence.

The home thus extraordinarily crystallizes the very first performative system that humanity has ever developed: man augmented... by man.

Refounding responsible architecture

Man is insofar as he inhabits

M. Heidegger.

From Heidegger's point of view, the traditional African house would appear not to be Le Corbusier's “machine for inhabiting”, but rather a machine for learning to inhabit! It conceptualizes more than it models: “responsible dwelling”.

The principles presented above can be mapped onto contemporary issues: gestation = Sustainability / anthropomorphism = Responsibility / differentiation = Equality / gyration = Balance / fractal = Democracy / panopticon = Solidarity / totality = Inclusion / Unity = Cohesion.

Following the intricate ideal, sustainability could participate as in the African spirit, together with : “responsibility”, ‘equality’, ‘balance’, ‘democracy’, ‘solidarity’, ‘inclusion’, ‘cohesion’, of a single movement of which living could be the modality.

Back in 2005, we proposed a system of tools for this purpose: the 8-Grid, enabling us to envisage the horizon of a modern “cosmo-architecture”.

Cosmoarchitecture is an architecture with a claim to the “World”, i.e. the ethics and politics of taking charge of the communality of living things, different scales, the unity of the spectrum and balance, through the same gesture of building and the inhabitation it prescribes. Cosmoarchitecture sees itself as a new contract of kinship, based on an undivided anthropocentrism of totality. So it weaves with its environment. All living things find shelter here. The idea of solidarity across generations runs right through it, and actions taken today must leave room for manoeuvre in the future... It introduces no break in the habitation of the world... not even that, in modernity, of existing (in the sense of an earthly sojourn) with the maternal womb and the grave. In a sense, it invites a more general, fundamental consideration of dwelling: a way of being in the world that goes far beyond the realm of housing, even though the conditions of installation and functional logic prefigure it. From the outset, therefore, the builder is caught up in a complex web of relationships and responsibilities, which often involve ritual in order to make do or tie themselves together. Prefigured by traditional society, cosmoarchitecture is a modality of the “World System” that stands in opposition to the “modern” civilizational approach to human installations.

Ideally, cosmoarchitecture's means would engage “living together” in its most contemporary acuity. It would necessarily have a relationship of its ethics to the material.