This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "Why Architects Need to Get Dirty to Save the World."

Courtesy of the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

This article was originally published on Metropolis Magazine as "Why Architects Need to Get Dirty to Save the World." Of all the terrarium-like experiments included in Lydia Kallipoliti?s The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What Is the Power of Shit" (Lars Müller/Storefront for Art and Architecture), Biosphere 2 is the most infamous. A steel-and-glass structure baking in the Arizona desert, it represents the hope and hubris of re-creating Earth on Earth. The project was launched by an alternative living group with a taste for theater, and tanked by disastrous management by Steve Bannon (yes, him). As such, it illustrates the risky arc that courses through Kallipoliti?s 300-page volume?visions of utopia bending toward ultimate failure.Early in the 2009 book Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities, author Rebecca Reider quotes one of Biosphere 2?s creators as saying, ?When you create a new world, you end up with all the problems in the world.? Kallipoliti?s anthology follows a similar doubling via 37 engineered environments, or ?Living Prototypes,? each carefully calibrated to isolate itself from the dynamics of spaceship Earth. First documented and analyzed by Kallipoliti and her student research teams at Syracuse University and Rensselaer Polytechnic ...