"NATURE VERSUS DENTURE" IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY REVIEW / by AN.ONYMOUS

Iman Ansari's essay, Nature Versus Denture: An Ontology of Dental Prostheses, is in this month's special issue of Architectural Theory Review on Architecture and Anthropology (published by Taylor & Francis). The essay examines the fascinating history of non-anatomic dental prostheses in the twentieth century and investigates why their development came to a halt. In doing so, it analyses a range of cultural and anthropological factors concerned with dental morphology, and concludes that the concept of who we are and what makes us human—our identity, personality, language, culture, or technology—no longer rests within the bounds of our material body, but in the non-material world we have created. And that the social, cultural, and technological systems we have built outside of our bodies have as much influence over our physical and anatomical attributes as we did in shaping them.