Hybrids

Definition

Hybrids, in Latour's account of modernity, are the mixtures of nature and culture — of humans and nonhumans, facts and values, technologies and societies — that the modern constitution has always produced but systematically denied. Modernity works through "purification": the creation of two distinct ontological zones, nature and culture, and the assignment of everything to one or the other. But "the more purification happens, the more it creates conditions for the growth of hybrids" — the ozone hole, the genetically modified organism, the climate-altered city, all irreducible to either pure nature or pure culture. For architecture, the hybrid is the truth of every building: a building is never purely "technical" or purely "cultural" but a knot of materials, regulations, meanings, and humans. Acknowledging hybrids means "we stop being modern."

Key Thinkers

• Bruno Latour — hybrids as the denied product of the modern constitution; "we have never been modern."
• Albena Yaneva — hybrids and the socio-technical nature of architectural objects.

Related Concepts

• Nonhumans — the nonhuman side of hybrids.
• Actor-Network Theory (ANT) — the method for tracing hybrids.
• Modernity — the constitution whose purification work produces hybrids.
• Gaia — the planetary hybrid par excellence.
• Metropolitan Hybrids — the typological-programmatic register: hybrid architecture as the combining of typologies by transplanting or program appropriation (Luna).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Latour for Architects — purification, hybridization, and "we have never been modern."
• Thing-Shapes (Dubbeldam 2002/2006) — a second, spatial-cultural sense of the hybrid: the network condition in which "a new hybrid condition proliferates in which the relationship between local and global is constantly adjusting" (p. 96) — the globalized city as hybrid ("physical expressions of global economies in which only the traces of local cultures remain") — and the built object as "a set of smart layers, hybrid structures" (pp. 99–100). Where Latour's hybrids are nature/culture mixtures that modernity denies, Dubbeldam's are local/global mixtures that globalisation produces and design concedes — the hybrid not as suppressed truth but as the given condition architecture must address.
• Productions: spatial practices, processes, and effects (Odom 2018) — a third, practice-genre sense of the hybrid: "hybrid art/interior architecture" as a named genre of production-oriented practice — practices "ranging from interior design, architecture, and installation art to hybrid art/interior architecture" that "challenge preconceived notions of the interior by their very fixation on the production of space and ephemera." Where Latour's hybrid is a nature/culture mixture modernity denies and Dubbeldam's a local/global condition design concedes, Odom's is a practice genre willingly inhabited: the disciplinary mixture (art + interior architecture) as the POP's medium, chosen rather than suppressed. See production-oriented-practices, interdisciplinarity.
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — a fourth, typological-programmatic sense of the hybrid: "Hybrid architecture combines different typologies in order to create a new one. This can occur by a process of transplanting" (Figure 43.2) or by program appropriation — "an existing building shell and inject a new program unrelated to the shell to create a new typology; an example would be an abandoned jail building injected with hotel programming to make a jail-hotel" — theorized through Tschumi's "distanciation between the architecture and the program" (cross-programming, trans-programming, dis-programming). Where Latour's hybrid is suppressed, Dubbeldam's conceded, and Odom's chosen, Luna's is designed: the typological mixture as the generative operation of metropolitan hybrids — the merger of metropolitan architecture and hybrid architecture inscribed into existing structures. See metropolitan-hybrids, programming, typology.