The opposition is neither simple nor limited to the single criterion of work: it involves contemporary identity and gender politics, the search for authenticity that drives nostalgic practices of all kinds, and the elimination of waste central to modern environmentalism. But it is precisely because of that contentious cultural domain—equally active across the stylistic spectrum—that important lessons can be learned from a direct reading of these practices, their artifacts, and the goals and dreams with which they are pursued. This paper examines the use of candles and fireplaces as they have endured through numerous cultural and technological shifts. They each participates in an activity—dining and living—from which the rooms in the house receive their names and in which leisure time is spent.

In theories of work, productive activities that have a determined end are opposed to activities which do not. The opposite condition is called leisure, but it is not to be confused with the rest or inaction that merely serves as a preparation for more work. Leisure has its own ends, and it demands expenditures that can even exceed those of productive work: the energy and competitiveness displayed in recreational sports may only be rivaled by the endless construction, decoration, refinement, and maintenance of the home. It is the waste and labor of household leisure that forms the real object of this investigation. Directly examining the results of those luxurious expenditures provides a view beyond the explanations of taste and aesthetics, into the competing claims of nostalgia, comfort, health, and other shifting goals of modern living. Attention to such quotidian acts of resistance does not suggest that the dictates of work and commodification, of life lived according to the progressive and linear time of the clock, can be arrested merely by engaging in practices like the lighting of a open flames. It does suggest that the possibility of architecture, of building and living well in modern society, can only occur in situations that disrupt those dictates, where aesthetics and ethics are not so carefully separated.

Architectural biotechniques are those methods and conceptual models with which buildings are examined as participants in dynamic, “living” systems, whether of the biosphere or of “machines, social systems, and the economic world.” Parallel work in ecology, cybernetics, general systems theory, and operations research in the decades after the Second World War has developed into much broader and more nuanced understandings of the non-linear, non-equilibrium dynamics that characterize both biological life and complex artificial systems. Such techniques have propelled environmental design--from the Limits to Growth simulation of global resources to CFD studies of air flow--though they are in no way limited to the environmental or even technical aspects of architecture.

This paper compares three radically different forms of biotechnique in contemporary architecture: the interdisciplinary-team practices of sustainable design; the management of “information flow” developed by Sweets Catalog; and the dynamically responsive animations developed by members of the neo-avant-garde (Van Berkel Bos). Each of these practices begins with the premise that conditions are ever-changing and that complex animate systems are rarely efficient and their results inherently provisional. The conclusions of the paper are both practical and ethical. Practitioners of sustainable design have much to learn from the sophisticated techniques of animate design and information flow used in these other practices, beginning with the acknowledgment of the similarities between the dynamics of natural and artificial systems. Viewing sustainable design only as the practice of resource efficiency or the preservation of health reduces it to a technical expertise, loosing many of the more powerful lessons of ecological phenomena—self-organization, symbiosis, co-evolution, and adaptive resilience. Biotechniques succeed precisely where they achieve the vitality of living systems, vigorously spending excess energy and materials to produce newly meaningful forms (and information).