After the Raw and the Cooked

Abstract

The obsolete dichotomy between the natural and artificial finds its most exacerbated expression in the routine and tired ways in which we conceptualize the ground and intervene in it. In this essay, Colman and Lerup jointly propose to destabilize and redefine our relationship to nature through the ground by applying the prism of Post-Structuralism to the ideas and categories laid out by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked. The work of Belgian architect Xaveer de Geyter, with his unconventional interventions in the saturated ground of his Flemish context, serve as demonstration of the many ways in which architecture and nature can and should exchange positions according to this new logic.