Inviting atmospheres to the architecture table

In order to test this shift to the processual as well as architectural practice’s ability to design socialities, in this chapter I propose to think and work with a dynamic and seemingly intangible material: air. Although ignored throughout architectural history (Banham,1969) during the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a proliferation of inflatable structures that used air to explore the lightness, ephemerality, transparency and transportability of new plastics to propose new ways of living closer to the everyday, popular culture and political resistance (Dessauce, 1999; Topham, 2002). The project I discuss here, although sharing certain aesthetic qualities, was conceived differently. On the one hand, the Polivagina was not conceived as addressing air through its structural capacity, but on how its invisibility and dynamism destabilise architectural practice, requiring a transformation of methods, techniques, materials and social organizations. On the other hand, it acknowledges that the social is not the result of the inhabitation of inflatable structures; the air is already social. German philosoper and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk in his work on social foams (2005) proposes that sociality is not only about human exchanges of information (Wakeford, 2011), but is a foam that includes humans, structures, and the air and climate that brings them together. Then, taking the air into account in architecture shifts the attention beyond boundaries, such as walls and roofs, to what is in between them, working with humidity, pressure, smell, toxicity, and breath

Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

This article develops a wider ontology of infrastructure. It argues that infrastructures not only hasten the flow of materials but produce non-human mobilities and immobilities that radically alter the dynamics of life. Infrastructures become a medium of life as natural and infrastructural ecologies meld, reorienting notions of design, architecture, planning and governance. Non-human life itself can be cast as infrastructure, with biopolitical implications for anticipating and managing the future. An infrastructural ontology moving beyond anthropocentric familiars generates new analytics and critical openings for the politics of governing human and non-human life. European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant Urban ecologies: governing nonhuman life in global cities (uEcologies; Grant No. 759239)

Matters of sense: preoccupation in Madrid's popular assemblies

Peer reviewe

On the Usefulness of Modern Animism: Co-Creating Architecture with Soils as Ontopolitical Practice

In opposition to the general understanding of animism as an irrational religious set of beliefs, the—secular—modern animism embodied in this practice of built and grown architecture is operative. It conceives of places—ecosystems—as beings with agency that we garden with to nurture and express their resilience. It is a useful ontology for ecological practice; this architectural animism is ontopolitical; it co-creates a common world. At a recent symposium, a number of projects were presented as architectural soils and to give a voice to these earthly beings, the method was to write a letter from them to me. This first letter with the response in this article forms the beginning of an animistic correspondence. The medium places the reader in a pluriverse, in between the multiple voices of various “actants.” The text is isomorphic to the embodied dialogue of this earthy practice. It is useful both to nurture societal awareness—empathy and care—towards these fragmentary ecosystemic beings, and as research method to conceive them, and our relationship

Learning design with social insects: the ant, the spider, and the wasp

Este artículo analiza el curso de Proyectos Arquitectónicos impartido en los períodos 2014/15 y 2016/17, que giró en torno al tema de la migración de estilo de vida en los paisajes costeros del Mediterráneo. A partir de mi propia experiencia como estudiante influida por conceptos provenientes de los estudios de ciencia y tecnología (STS) y por los debates de la Escuela de Arquitectura de Alicante, España, expongo los límites de las descripciones propuestas por la teoría del actor-red (ANT) en cuanto a la enseñanza y el aprendizaje del diseño y, al mismo tiempo, el rol que pueden tener en expandir los horizontes de la arquitectura una vez que ésta se conecta con problemas contemporáneos. Estos cursos nos han permitido re-imaginar, juntos, los distintos arquitectos en los que nuestros alumnos pueden transformarse. Para hacerlo, enriquecimos la ANT con dos conceptos filosóficos adicionales: SPIDER —acrónimo de Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness (la práctica habilidosa supone el desarrollo de una sensibilidad encarnada)—, propuesto por el antropólogo Tim Ingold y que ubica al alumno de arquitectura, como practicante, en el centro de una red material concreta que, tal como la simpática avispa (WASP) de Spuybroek, puede abstraer el entorno más allá de los encuentros puntuales en los que cosas y personas se dan forma unas a otras.I discuss the Architecture Design Studio Course held in 2014/15 and in 2016/17 around the topic of lifestyle migration in the changing coastal landscapes of the Mediterranean. Starting with my own experience as a student, influenced by STS concepts and the debates in the School of Architecture in Alicante, Spain, I show the limits of ANT’s (actor-network theory) extensive descriptions as a tools for teaching and learning design and, at the same time, the role they can have in stretching what architecture can be once it is connected to contemporary issues. These courses have allowed us to re-imagine, together, the many types of architects students can become. We have done it by enriching ANT with two other anthropological and philosophical concepts: anthropologist Tim Ingold’s SPIDER, whose ’Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness’, and places the architecture student, as a practitioner, in the center of a concrete material web that, as Spuyborek’s sympathetic WASP, is able to abstract the environment beyond the felt encounters between things and people as they shape each other

Concluding dialogue

This is a chapter in a book with the overall description: This is a critical time in design. Concepts and practices of design are changing in response to historical developments in the modes of industrial design production and consumption. Indeed, the imperative of more sustainable development requires profound reconsideration of design today. Theoretical foundations and professional definitions are at stake, with consequences for institutions such as museums and universities as well as for future practitioners. This is ‘critical’ on many levels, from the urgent need to address societal and environmental issues to the reflexivity required to think and do design differently