Performing Sustainability: Life Support Inside Biosphere 2âs Glass Box Theater, 1991-1993
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, the term Performative Architecture has been increasingly used as a pseudonym for sustainable design.In the case of Biosphere 2 (B2), performative architecture became not only a service oriented container for long-duration life support, it became the stage on which multiple sustainability narratives were played out.Perhaps unconsciously achieved by the project's architects, Phil Haws and Margaret Augustine, the functional form of B2 provided the front-of-house and back-of-house venues that propelled the operation, and the perception of sustainable life-support during Mission 1.This paper defines the troupe of performers: ecology, ecotechnics, Biospherians, scientists, tourists, and popular media, and utilizes their performances upon the B2 stage to unpack the ensuing drama of Mission 1 through the lens of this glass box theater architecture, while speculating on the value of the lessons learned for today's performative architectures.Here, conventionally understood quantitative aspects of performative architecture link the eco-technological design and operation of B2 to qualitative humanities based frameworks of Performativity such as theater, service oriented design, and object studies.Through the case study of B2, it becomes apparent how and why these coupled quantitative/qualitative understandings are critical to the future success of performative architecture in the Anthropocene, at a time when adaptive architectural strategies for sustaining and enhancing global life support, which supplements diminishing ecosystem services during rapid climate change, are becoming more ubiquitous.Ultimately, we can utilize the performative architectural apparatus of B2 to develop a more sophisticated understanding of trans-disciplinary architectural design and its operational implications, which will ultimately facilitate the design and performance of more productive constructed eco-techno-socio environments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".