NOWNESS PAPER Vol.10 
Second Nature

2022

If you Google this issue's topic "Second Nature", you will find an air purifier company, a weight loss product company, an ecological conservation company, and an IELTS reading entitled “Second Nature”, which is about a kind of habit becoming nature. Haim Ofek, an economist, interpreted “Second Nature” as human beings who stand out in biological evolution because of a nature that distinguishes them from animals - so that exchange is the Second Nature of human beings.

Nathaniel Rich, on the other hand, believes that Second Nature is a "man-made world landscape". In his view, natural nature has been completely transformed by human beings, and the boundaries between nature and artificiality, utopia and anti-utopia, science fiction and science are beginning to blur, so that the whole world today is a Second Nature. In this issue of NOWNESS Paper, we explored “Second Nature” in terms of literature and poetry, and uncovered stories of the new generation of authors, directors, poets, artists and photographers.



68 Pages TOTAL

NOWNESS PAPER Vol.11 
A Kind of Architecture

2022

What is a community? A case in point is Chanel's le19M building in the northern suburbs of Paris, which brings together 11 haute couture workshops and nearly 600 artisans. The concept was first developed by the sociologist Tönnies to refer to social units that share common values (inheriting and innovating traditional craftsmanship), live in the same area and interact with each other, thus coming together. In 1993, author Rheingold coined the term "virtual communities" to expand the concept from real communities to imaginary ones, including and not limited to neighborhood shopping groups and celebrity fan clubs. Today, the most enthusiastic researchers of communities are economists, who claim that whoever controls them will become the new business power.

Interestingly, the division of space is often the division of community, see the enclosed, controlled, precautionary, and square pods; architecture can destroy a community, see the poorly planned and crime-ridden community of Pruitt-Eagle (which was eventually bombed by the government); architecture can also activate a community, see the Granby Quadrangle, which the British art collective Assemble Studio invited local residents to build together. For example, the British art group Assemble Studio invited local residents to build Granby Street. As for Carlyle, who won the Pritzker Prize this year, author Yu Ting argues that his hometown is merely a label for his identity in Europe, writing, "People in developed regions treat people in backward regions, and the wealthy, including the middle class, treat the low-income class, and the former always more or less zoologize the latter." This is a slightly mean-spirited statement, but occasionally it is not too much to ask for a comparison.

In this issue of NOWNESS Paper, we talk about community from the perspective of architecture. Our curiosity is how architecture can reshape human behavior, create new communities, and even change the face of society today.


24 Pages TOTAL