Formless, Faceless, Directionless: Earthworms Defy Architectural Logic

Credit: MIT Press Reader/Source image: Adobe Stock. Architects do not draw earthworms; they are a disturbing affront to the very notion of form. Modular and iterative, their repeating rings could have been the envy of modernist and organicist experimental architects. But no, there is no reference to worms of any sort in, say, Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Algiers , which proposed running a motorway atop a long ribbon of social housing. Nor was there any mention of worms in relation to Luigi Carlo Daneri’s INA-Casa Forte Quezzi complex in Genoa. Instead, Daneri’s project - known for its long, linear undulations along the slope of the Quezzi valley - was nicknamed “Biscione,” or the big grass snake. Of course, the earthworm does possess a kind of rudimentary form - a head and a tail. But it is exceedingly difficult to tell its mouth and anus apart at first glance. Architecture likes consistency: fronts and backs, beginnings and ends. The earthworm questions that binary. It is oblivious to the vertical and the horizontal, the surface and the ground, boundaries which it disturbs as it stirs, digests, and mixes soils. For architecture, all of this raises a profound ontological problem - and thus, a threat. Philosopher Georges Bataille claimed that the earthworm (along with the spider and spit) is the epitome of the formless ( informe ), something that “has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere.” The formless, Yve-Alain Bois likewise argued , must be crushed “because it does not make any sense, and because that in itself is unbearable to reason,” adding it is “the unassimilable waste that Bataille would shortly designate as the object of heterology.” Georges Didi-­Huberman, on the other hand, gave the earthworm a bit more credit: Examining it through the lens of “formless resemblance” ( ressemblance informe ), he suggested that the worm contains an embedded figure, morphology, and metaphor. Yet Bois contended that the informe is simply “not referring to a resemblance but to an operation.” The informe , then, is not a figure but an operation that “crushes metaphor, figure, theme, morphology, meaning ­ everything that resembles something.” The unsettling operation of worms is something science realized a long time ago. Drawing on observations by Charles Darwin and Otto August Mangold, Jakob von Uexküll explains that the earthworm identifies different parts of a leaf or a pine needle - not by shape but by taste. There is “nothing to the notion of shape perception in earthworms,” Uexküll concluded. “The worm is in no condition, by its constitution, to develop shape schemata,” and it is the change in taste that becomes the “form symbol for the earthworm.” Indeed, no shapes for the earthworm, which smells and tastes and operates by moving matter around and through its own body. If anything, it is this that the architect can grasp and represent. The traces left behind/around by the earthworm are not only the marks of its movements and the spaces of its making, but...

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