Albert Pope

& Brittany Utting The Sixth Sphere

An Emerging Sphere
As the Earth has undergone radical climatological and envi-
ronmental shifts over its 4.5-billion-year existence, its five
natural spheres have coexisted in dynamic equilibrium,
producing the stability required for the development of life
as we know it. The lithosphere is the geological material of
the planet. Resource rich and energy latent, it includes the
raw materials, soils, minerals, petrochemical deposits, and
carbon fuels that undergird human civilization. The hydro-
sphere consists of the planet’s water in liquid form, encom-
passing the oceans, rivers, lakes, rain cycles, watersheds, and
groundwater reserves. The biosphere is the Earth’s living
organisms – flora and fauna (including humans) – their eco-
logical interrelations and the energy they metabolize from
the sun. The cryosphere comprises the polar regions, gla-
ciers, permafrost, and high mountains – frozen water. And
the atmosphere, which envelops the planet, is sustained by
the biogeochemical interactions between living organisms
and inorganic material. The five spheres continuously engage
in reciprocal cycles of material and energy exchange. In this
sense, the conceptual model of the sphere functions not as an
idealized and enclosed entity but as an entangled and rela-
tional phenomenon.
Now approaching the five spheres’ scale and degree of
planetary integration is a sixth sphere, the technosphere. A
term introduced in the late 1960s to identify human tech-
1. John H. Milsum, “The technosphere, nology as a “primary agent” transforming the planet,1
the biosphere, the sociosphere: Their
systems modeling and optimization,” IEEE
technosphere was expanded in 2014 by the late geologist Peter
Spectrum 5 (June 1, 1968): 76. K. Haff to describe the “set of large-scale networked
2. Peter K. Haff, “Technology as a geological
phenomenon: implications for human
technologies that underlie and make possible rapid extrac-
well-being,” in A Stratigraphical Basis for the tion [of resources] from the Earth.”2 According to Haff, the
Anthropocene, ed. C.N. Waters et al. (London:
The Geological Society, 2014), 395. technosphere, sourced from the natural spheres, deploys its
own metabolism: converting energy, resources, and infor-
mation into the accumulated mass of human industry. The
technosphere is like a collective prosthesis that extends our
Opposite page: The cargo ship Ever
capacities in the world, and, as such, it is integral to our
Given stuck in the Suez Canal, near
Manshiyet Rugola, Egypt, March 28, material forms of life. The architecture we inhabit, the
2021. Photo: Planet Labs Inc. urban systems we rely on, and the landscapes we transform

9
 are all part of the technosphere. Yet, despite their importance
to many aspects of our survival, the material and energy
expenditures of the technosphere are threatening the collec-
tive lifeworlds of both humans and nonhumans. The techno-
sphere’s energy-intensive processes are actively destabilizing
the five spheres upon which it depends. The infrastructures
that support our material needs – and desires – create
technospatial dependencies, metabolic rifts, and cascading
externalities, which, in turn, produce the unintended,
undesigned, and increasingly uncontrollable behavior of the
technosphere, exceeding the planet’s ability to self-regulate.
The technosphere emerged with the rise of industrial-
ization and global capitalism and was marked early on by
the increasing interconnection between human activity,
resource extraction, and environmental modification.
Through the centuries-long expansion of networks of
technology, empire, and industry – including the develop-
ment of such spatial types as the mine, the plantation, the
factory, the port, and the transportation and telecommuni-
cation infrastructures that connect them – the technosphere
became legible as both a planetary and historical actor. The
fully integrated transformation of isolated infrastructures
into the technosphere reached a new form of maturity in the
decades following World War II. The wartime economy
produced not only technical and material innovations but
also led to an exponential increase in productive capacities in
the postwar consumer economy. Often referred to as the
“Great Acceleration,” this period of breakneck industrial
expansion and globalization is characterized by the profound
3. See Will Steffen et al., “The trajec- impact of human development on the natural spheres.3 Today,
tory of the Anthropocene: The Great
Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1
the technosphere has emerged as the physical transformation
(2015): 81–98. of the Earth into a planetary enmeshment of bodies, environ-
4. See Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Scale and
Diversity of the Physical Technosphere: ments, and technologies.
A Geological Perspective,” Anthropocene A 2017 study, led by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, estimated
Review 4, no. 1 (2017): 19.
the weight of the technosphere at 30 trillion tons, which is
“five orders of magnitude greater than the standing biomass
of humans.”4 Taken as a whole, the technosphere includes our
feedlots and sewer systems, factories and housing, tarmacs
and croplands, and every modification we have made to the
ground, the glaciers, the sea, the air, and the biosphere. It is a
vast and often banal landscape. And while both the comforts
and consequences of the technosphere are unevenly distrib-
uted, almost everything we do – prepare a meal, buy a shirt,
message a colleague, fill a prescription, take a bath – we do
through the technosphere.

10 Log 60
 The technosphere is not simply another word for infra-
structure. While the components of the technosphere include
what we have historically called “infrastructure,” it is infra-
structure of an entirely new scalar dimension, not only in
its planetary extent, but also its intimate interconnected-
ness with our everyday lives. It is a technical assemblage
that encompasses the physical spaces of extraction, industry,
and transportation and the immaterial systems that under-
gird them: the digital networks, logistical nodes, and flows
of capital that sustain human production and consumption.
The technosphere is a comprehensive material network into
which we are born and in which we remain embedded. It is
precisely this biological, logistical, and environmental entan-
glement that allows the technosphere to be understood as a
planetary phenomenon.
The technosphere is also not another word for the
Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, as proposed by atmo-
spheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen, represents a new epoch in
geological time in which the human impact on the Earth’s
geology, ecosystems, and climate is changing the equilibrium
5. See Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of of the Holocene.5 While conceptually linked to the Anthro-
Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 23 (2002).
6. In March 2024, the International Union
pocene, the technosphere is, by contrast, a geophysical
of Geological Sciences rejected the proposal phenomenon in that it represents a material world rather than
to designate the period starting in the mid-
twentieth century as the Anthropocene an epochal shift. As a point of comparison, we cannot weigh
epoch, stating that the Anthropocene “will the Anthropocene. Furthermore, not only is the moment of
not be recognised as a formal geological
term but will more usefully be employed transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene contested,6
informally in future discussions of the the anthropos in the term Anthropocene assumes a universal and
anthropogenic impacts on Earth’s climatic
and environmental systems.” International undifferentiated human subject.7 We argue that the term
Union of Geological Sciences, “The technosphere more precisely acknowledges the technological
Anthropocene,” March 20, 2024.
7. For example, see Bernadette Bensaude- apparatus at work – as well as those who have historically
Vincent, “Rethinking time in response
to the Anthropocene: From timescales to
wielded it through empire, capital, and industry.
timescapes,” Anthropocene Review 9, no.
2 (2022): 206–219; Donna J. Haraway,
“Making Kin: Anthropocene, Capitalocene,
A Nascent Autonomy
Plantationocene, Chthulucene,” in Continuous intra-spherical exchanges maintain the Earth’s
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the
Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University climates, geologies, and ecologies. While we are integrated
Press, 2016), 99–103; Kathryn Yusoff, into these cycles, the spheres function autonomously, inde-
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota pendent of human intervention. In the carbon cycle, for
Press, 2019). example, the carbon molecule moves through a series of
states: atmospheric carbon dioxide combines with water to
form carbonic acid, which falls to the Earth’s surface in rain,
dissolving rocks and releasing calcium ions. Rivers carry
these calcium ions into the ocean, where they combine with
carbonate ions to form calcium carbonate, which organisms
such as crustaceans incorporate into their shells. When these
creatures die, their shells become cemented with layers of

11 Log 60
 sediment and form limestone, which effectively sequesters
carbon in the lithosphere. Moving from the atmosphere into
the hydrosphere (or the frozen cryosphere), absorbed within
the biosphere, and then deposited in the lithosphere, carbon is
continuously recycled, sequestered, and released. This cycle is
the product of the entangled autonomy of the Earth’s spheres.
Haff suggests that the technosphere’s increasing com-
plexity, integration, and scope are producing a form of entan-
gled autonomy similar to that of the five natural spheres.
Like the natural spheres, the technosphere is integrated with
multiple environmental scales that both produce and are
produced by planetary processes. He emphasizes that this
networking of infrastructure leads to the incorporation of
human activity into the logic of the Earth’s systems. Humans
are no longer simply seen as end-users of any technical ser-
vice but as integral components of the technosphere. While
humans created the physical manifestations and operational
protocols of the technosphere, it increasingly functions inde-
pendently of human agency. In this sense, the technosphere is
moving toward a type of autonomy, operating under a logic
that is not always understandable, actionable, or desirable to
its constituent parts.
This systemic logic runs against our perceived sense of
agency, if not our entire anthropocentric worldview.
Inasmuch as humans have agency, we imagine and often act
as though we can control the technosphere by redesigning its
parameters. However, just as we cannot control the hydro-
sphere’s flows or the atmosphere’s cycles, we can only
obliquely affect the technosphere’s behavior. As an “infra-
structural species,” the technosphere is as crucial to human
existence as breathable air (atmosphere), potable water
8. Jedediah Britton-Purdy, “The World (hydrosphere), and arable soil (lithosphere).8 And like each
We’ve Built,” Dissent, July 3, 2018.
of the natural spheres, it establishes many of the terms of our
survival. The vast scale of material resources and energy
processed by the technosphere supports the material existence
of the billions of people who live on the planet today.
The more the technosphere’s subsystems are integrated
into our means of survival, the more guarded they are against
failure. The hacking of a pipeline, the disruption of a supply
chain, and the pollution of a municipal water system are all
breaches in our globally networked habits and forms of life.
And while these examples may seem like human failures, they
can also be described as temporary outages across a large,
comprehensive network. The fail-safe components of this
network are armored by backup systems, redundancies,

12 Log 60
 reserve capacities, digital and physical firewalls, multistage
alarms, and legal and financial systems that are all meant to
assure the continuity of their functions. More than just a
simple piece of infrastructure – like a sprinkler system or a
seawall or a kitchen appliance – such elaborate fail-safe
mechanisms bind us to the technosphere. Haff argues that this
systematic integration is characteristic of technology:
Technology is not passive but has evolved mechanisms for its own
defence. . . . Technology defends its mode of operation primarily by
offering incentives such as abundant food, medicines, instant
communication channels and other desiderata that bind, or even
addict, humans to the system that produces them, as well as by less
subtle mechanisms expressed via legal, juridical, political, military
9. Haff, “Technology as a geological and other elements of the technological armory.9
phenomenon,” 6.
10. Ibid. Life-preserving systems, such as utility grids, are autonomous
in the sense that they cannot simply be shut off without
causing immense human suffering.10 Our reliance on the
technosphere makes radical alterations to its systems, logics,
and defenses increasingly difficult.
Irrespective of our claims to agency or control, the tech-
nosphere has developed its own properties, which are based
on, but not identical to, our own. Not only are we addicted to
its benefits, like climatological comfort or freedom of move-
ment and exchange, but also our material world is designed
and built in such a way that forms of life outside of the techno-
sphere are challenging. This seemingly coordinated behavior
of the technosphere creates a type of nascent autonomy: a form
of agency separate from human design and intention. Here,
we use the term nascent to point not only toward the emergent
effects of the technosphere but also toward the uncanny meth-
ods through which it defends and propagates itself.

An Emergent System
If the technosphere does not function according to the logic
of its human components, by what logic does this encompass-
ing planetary system operate? In an interview included in this
issue (pages 19–25), Haff argues that the technosphere is a
primitive emergent system that is evolving toward an autono-
mous state, which it may or may not achieve. Emergent sys-
tems are defined as systems in which larger entities, patterns,
or behaviors develop through interactions among smaller
components that do not themselves exhibit these larger pat-
terns or behaviors. We simply assume that the logic that gov-
erns specific parts of a system is the same logic as that which
governs the overall system.

13 Log 60
 One of the key distinctions between the parts and the
whole of the technosphere lies within the nature of primitive
emergent systems themselves, which are composed of com-
plex subsystems. While it seems counterintuitive, a primitive
system can contain complex components. For example, a for-
est fire is an example of a primitive emergent system. A simple
rule of growth governs the behavior of a fire: It consumes fuel
until that fuel is used up. However, because numerous factors
affect the initial conditions of a forest fire – such as long-term
forest management practices, changing drought and weather
conditions, and ignition sources – the manner in which a fire
grows unfolds in complex ways, often leading to unpredictable
behavior. Similarly, viral outbreaks can be seen as emergent
systems. While viruses are composed of complex elements like
proteins and genetic material, they are governed by a simple
rule: reproduce. However, their interaction with host organ-
isms and broader environmental conditions leads to unpre-
dictable behaviors in how viruses spread, mutate, or die out.
Like a fire or a virus, the technosphere displays the
characteristics of a primitive system in that it lacks the self-
regulating mechanisms of the more complex components that
it contains. For example, the technosphere cannot recycle its
11. As Haff argues, unless or until the own waste products.11 Unlike the natural spheres and their
technosphere is able to recycle carbon,
its status as a functional planetary sphere
cycles of restoration, the technosphere’s processes result in
remains provisional. atmospheric pollution, hydrospheric acidification, biospheric
12. See Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How
Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the extinctions, lithospheric contamination, and the outright
World (Princeton: Princeton University destruction of the cryosphere. The extended time frames of
Press, 2018), 157.
the natural spheres cannot repair the damage of the techno-
sphere quickly enough.12 In the absence of the homeostatic
(self-regulating) functions of complex systems, the voracious
growth of the technosphere only seeks more energy; it cannot
regulate its waste products or stabilize its processes into a
dynamic equilibrium. In this sense, it solves its own limita-
tions by inputting more fossil fuels, material resources,
capital, and technology, creating runaway planetary effects.
While the technosphere contains high-level organisms like
trees and humans that have the ability to search for and store
energy and recycle waste products, there is no evidence that it
possesses any such behavior itself. Like a fire or a virus, it will
continue to consume energy and grow until all available
resources are depleted. And because it can neither recycle nor
repair, it ultimately exhausts those resources.
When one examines the behavior of the technosphere, its
crudeness as an emerging system becomes apparent. Not only
is it unable to resolve its own metabolic wastes, but its logic

14 Log 60
 produces significant systemic vulnerabilities. For example, in
March 2021, the flow of traffic through the Suez Canal was
blocked for six days when a 400-meter container ship ran
aground. The ship rotated in the canal until it was wedged,
bow to stern, between the canal’s banks, blocking hundreds of
ships and stranding an estimated $10 billion worth of trade per
13. See Vivian Yee and James Glanz, “How day.13 While the accident was blamed on a combination of
One of the World’s Biggest Ships Jammed
the Suez Canal,” New York Times, July 17,
strong winds, human error, and the inadequate provision of
2021. tugboats by the canal authority,14 the Suez Canal blockage
14. Ibid.
demonstrated the ability of an emergent system to paralyze a
far more sophisticated subsystem – the global trade network.
The runaway effects of small errors reveal the technosphere’s
fragile logic and brute power: It cannot adapt without wreak-
ing havoc on its more intelligent components.
The seemingly relentless trajectory of carbon accumula-
tion, ocean acidification, and species extinction demonstrates
the difficulty of wielding traditional forms of agency in the
technosphere, especially when the power structures of petro-
capitalism safeguard its systems and spatial forms. Yet efforts
to stem the technosphere’s destructive effects are also difficult
due to our fundamental dependencies on its systems. This is
not to say that the solution to climate loss rests on individ-
ual rather than political action. Instead, it points to how the
technosphere has insinuated itself into the spatial practices of
everyday life. Our entrenchment in the technosphere limits
our ability to intervene in its destructive systems individually.
To collectively reconstruct the technosphere, we must first
begin to unravel the ways in which the built environment is
bound to its logics and inertia.

The Planetary Turn

There is another way in which the species has already legislated for
itself, not with laws, but with another kind of infrastructure, with
concrete, steel, and wire. The world we make tells us how to live in
it, makes us know our place. We live within a global, though also
intensely differentiated and unequal, order that dictates to us what
we shall do. If you want to stay cool in the summer and warm in the
winter, communicate with others, work, feel yourself a part of the
cultures in which you share, here is what you must do: enter onto
these roads and rails and flights routes, tap into these power grids
and data networks, use these tools.
– Jedediah Britton-Purdy, “The World We’ve Built”

Legal scholar Jedediah Purdy’s words suggest a radical depar-

ture from our present-day narratives of mastery and control,

15 Log 60
which are part of a closely held anthropocentric world-
view vis-á-vis technology. If “the world that we make tells
us how to live in it,” then between technological retreat and
Promethean positivism, we must ask if there are alternative
ways to engage the technosphere.
By anticipating the technosphere’s nascent autonomy,
we can begin to understand the changing forms of human
agency, including that of design. Haff suggests that as the
technosphere evolves into a more complex integrated sys-
tem, our relationship to it will match our relationship to the
atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, and litho-
sphere. Instead of controlling the technosphere, our lives will
unfold in the interstices of multiple autonomous cycles. As
the technosphere increasingly integrates with the five natural
spheres, we will find ourselves operating within the larger
context of six interrelated spheres. Yet, perhaps it is within
the interstices – the space between spheres – that new forms
of planetary agency can emerge. Indeed, by reconceptual-
izing the technosphere not as a totalizing and autonomous
whole but as a series of interrelations between human and
nonhuman worlds, we begin to find new spaces for interven-
tion and design.
The autonomy of the technosphere will only ever be a
crude proxy for planetary cycles. As a geological phenom-
enon, it merely approximates the processes of exchange and
renewal that entangle natural spheres with our own social
and material worlds. Fertilized soil cannot restore the nitro-
gen cycle; carbon capture technologies cannot repair the
carbon cycle; water treatment plants cannot replenish the
aquifers; and greenhouses cannot recover the biome. For
now, the technosphere lacks the homeostatic mechanisms
necessary to sustain its own metabolic processes. It can only
consume and grow.
However, when we glimpse the coordinated logic of the
technosphere, it is possible to tacitly imagine that its complex-
ity imbues it with the ability to correct itself: that the system
will ultimately evolve and behave more like the natural
spheres. Yet without a radical change in energy-intensive
forms of life, the technosphere’s destructive logics of extrac-
tion and expansion will play out once again in its relationship
to land, resources, and labor. Even as the technosphere begins
to transition to renewable sources of energy, the space
required for wind and solar farms is accelerating new land
grabs;15 the pipelines needed for carbon capture are expanding
the infrastructures of the petrochemical industry;16 and the

16 Log 60
 demand for minerals used in “clean” technologies is not only
continuing brutal mining practices but also driving the next
15. “Norway protests target wind farm space race for off-planet mining.17 And herein lies the funda-
on land used by herders,” Associated Press,
October 11, 2023.
mental contradiction of the technosphere. The intractability
16. Anna Matson, “Pipelines Touted of climate action through techno-fixes is increasingly clear:
as Carbon Capture Solution Spark
Uncertainty and Opposition,” Scientific The technosphere is not likely to resolve its own metabolic
American, October 1, 2023. excesses. Design must instead operate outside of the techno-
17. Terry Gross, “How ‘modern-day
slavery’ in the Congo powers the recharge- sphere’s logic, working toward projects of repair, justice, and
able battery economy,” National Public mutual dependence rather than technological substitution.
Radio, February 1, 2023; and Ramin Skibba,
“Things are Looking Up for Asteroid We would like to suggest that it is precisely within the
Mining,” WIRED, October 20, 2023.
18. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in
technosphere’s contradictions, rifts, and insufficiencies that we
the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine can enact alternative planetary relations. In its specific combi-
Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 40.
19. Arturo Escobar, “Reframing nation of planetary crudeness and nascent autonomy, we can
Civilization(s): From Critique to regard the technosphere not only with caution but also with the
Transitions,” ARQ 111: Degrowth, ed.
Marcelo López-Dinardi (August 2022): 35. potential to resist the fatalism of its logic. We cannot control,
20. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the manage, or geoengineer our way out of the technosphere’s
Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence,
Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds destructive behavior. Instead, we argue for a design politics that
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), relinquishes the increasingly elaborate countermeasures of
xvi. Italics in the original.
performance and technosolutionism. When the narrative shifts
away from mastery, our relationship with technology becomes
less about control and more about extending our capacities to
form human and nonhuman alliances. Thinking with Bruno
Latour, when we understand the Terrestrial not as a passive
geological phenomenon but “as a new political actor” in action,
the entangled – and potentially subversive – autonomy of the
spheres becomes increasingly legible.18 By shifting vantage
points in this way, we can begin to imagine a possible reconcili-
ation between human and planetary systems.
This issue of Log argues that the technosphere is a useful
framework for reimagining the relationship between the
built environment and the natural spheres. Moving beyond
the traditional spatial and temporal scales of architecture,
designers are increasingly exploring new systems of plan-
etary interdependence and reciprocity. This planetary turn
reclaims autonomy, not as an architectural object, but as a
capacity to sustain multiple lifeworlds, suggesting a more
integrated relationship with the Earth and its systems. As
anthropologist Arturo Escobar writes, “At its best, auton-
omy is a theory and practice of inter-existence and of
designing for and with the pluriverse,”19 meaning that the
entangled autonomy of the spheres produces “a world where
many worlds fit in.”20 In this sense, if the sixth sphere is a
critical infrastructure for our species’ survival, then we
must reconstruct its systems to enable more inclusive forms
of coexistence.

17 Log 60
 This issue is made up of five sections – Atmosphere,
Biosphere, Hydrosphere, Cryosphere, and Lithosphere – in an
effort to position design in a transcalar dialog with the plan-
etary. This organization argues not that the spheres should be
conceptualized separately but that we must examine each of
them to understand their particular behaviors, communities,
and the lifeworlds they sustain. Rather than producing a fixed
and complete model of the Earth, the focus on each sphere
allows for the heterogeneity of planetary systems to unfold
at different spatial scales and time cycles. Furthermore,
this schema brings into focus the increasing entanglement
between the technosphere and its broader environmental
conditions, suggesting that a planetary architecture must
become a space of coalition and reciprocity. Through design
and research, Log 60 positions the technosphere not only as a
geophysical condition to understand and critique, but also as
a collective site in which to construct alternative social, tech-
nical, and environmental futures.

Albert Pope is the Gus Session

Wortham Professor of Architecture
at Rice University. He is the author
of Ladders (Princeton Architectural
Press, 1997, 2015) and the forthcom-
ing book Inverse Utopia (Birkhäuser
Press, 2024). Brittany Utting is an
assistant professor of architecture
at Rice University and cofounder of
the research and design collabora-
tive HOME-OFFICE. She is the editor of
Architectures of Care: From the Intimate
to the Common (Routledge, 2023).

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