nontypological architecture

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Architectures of Schismogenesis: Syncretism as a Method
Brendon Carlin & James Kwang Ho Chung

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This year in Diploma 19, we will deepen our anthropological and architectural exploration of emergent syncretic types of practice and architecture. Syncretism can be understood as a method for nesting, blending, juxtaposing, or hybridising radically divergent, often incommensurable architectures of ‘reality.’ We will think with emergent examples of schismogenesis: experiments in radical cultural divergence, and with other ways of seeing, relating, knowing, and building that operate from within and against dominant ‘typologies’ of infrastructure, architecture, law, property, and ecology.

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In Ireland, abstractive water governance serves monopolistic agriculture, big data, and exploding AI, precipitating water contamination and scarcity in one of Europe’s wettest islands. Group water schemes are bypassing dominant infrastructure and property regimes to reclaim wells, dams, and treatment systems as simultaneously sensuous, technical, cosmological, and political spaces. Sites like bogs and peatlands, once typologised as ‘Nature,’ become hybrid terrains irreducible to instrumental categorisation as ecological, cultural, or political.

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Amidst the acceleration of sinkholes caused by the abstraction of water for industrial farming of foreign cash crops, dams, canals, sinkholes, farms, markets, mosques, and homes are becoming platforms for experimental practices which deploy unholy hybridisations of newly old pre-monotheistic sympathetic magic, Islamic knowledge, and technological and scientific practices to assist water’s descent from clouds to rivers and aquifers.

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Indigenous communities in Siberia are co-designing dances with melting permafrost, ancestors, lakes, frozen rivers, and ancient mammoth bones from within and against Soviet and Russian urban parade typologies and their glorified necropolitics: ones that bring poison and death to the land and its human sons.

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Against its historical role in too often alchemically rendering domination desirable, we will ask how the practice of architecture might instead take the side of those who are already experimenting with new architectures of relation. We argue that any form of ‘building’ common realities must ‘democratically’ involve the representation and participation of all those things and beings—more-than-human, living, dead, unborn, and invisible—whose flourishing is impossible to disentangle from our own.