nontypological architecture
Liquefying Properties: Unsettling the Dominant Architecture of our Relationship to Water
Throughout Europe, water crises—from droughts to floods, overuse by monocropping and big tech and big data, to coastal erosion caused by sea-level rise—are causing individuals, communities, and governments to reevaluate the architecture, infrastructure, practices, policies, and ideas surrounding our relationship to water. In many cases, for example, communities have moved to establish water cooperatives and collectivize water infrastructure.
What kind of role can the architect play in these kinds of projects? Can the architect’s imagination and knowledge of a range of experiments from other contexts be offered to both open the architecture of our relationship to water to new, free, and common imaginaries and uses? Can architects offer ideas about form, space, and materiality that can trigger exciting new cultures of relating to each other and the web of relationships that nourish clean water?
In many communities in crisis across Europe and the Americas, we have observed that people begin to rebuild knowledge, relationships, and intimacy with the most fundamental forces that sustain life: water, soil, minerals and land, sun and other cosmic bodies, air and wind, and plants and animals. While these are often called “resources,” we propose referring to them instead as “earth beings.” Earth beings are not the inert, passive, or discrete compounds that have been invented by modern science and industry, but rather complex entities and bodies with blurry boundaries that are entangled within a web of other beings, forces, and systems. Their political inclusion, care, and protection inherently require radically different ways of knowing, being, and relating, along with collective duties, taboos, agreements, and shared practices. These forms of care are deeply political and thus require a focus on common forms of governance and stewardship.
As the philosopher Isabelle Stengers has argued, cosmopolitics offers one of the most promising ways of becoming unstuck and exploring radical new avenues of worlding. In fact, in many examples where we see experiments with new forms of “boundary commoning” emerging, new and uncommon architectural, settlement, and infrastructural forms are latent. Massimo De Angelis has described boundary commoning as a dynamic process that involves the negotiation of boundaries to manage the commons in ways that are inclusive and adaptable. Boundaries, in this framework, are not fixed lines that separate people but are relational and porous, allowing for the careful regulation of access, participation, and responsibilities within the commons. Boundary commoning is therefore about creating spaces where rules, values, and relationships are collectively shaped to sustain shared resources while balancing competing needs and interests.
Furthermore, the feminist theorist Silvia Federici has argued that any radically new politics must work at the level of de-atomizing reproduction. Many have proposed the destruction of the single housewife kitchen of one and have thus imagined and experimented with radically different kitchens, houses, and cities. But going even further, can a de-atomization of reproductive architecture that extends to the nonhuman open up even wilder experiments?
Beyond theory, and in response to a crisis of happiness or life, communities and individuals are already experimenting with different practices and architectures of the ways we relate to each other, the land, sea, and multispecies community. These transformations are taking place in the wake of mounting disruptions.
Today, the relationships, cultures, and ecologies shaped by the things we consume and use are often so out of sight and mind that we only recognize their fragility when crises reverberate back to us. These crises—manifesting as the “disasters” of climate, capital, and property, such as droughts, floods, coastal erosion, species extinction, pandemics, inflation, housing and food shortages, or mass migrations—force us to suspend our habitual ways of seeing, thinking, and living. In such moments, we begin to reconsider the deeper, most basic structures of our relationships.
While past cultures are far too shrouded in mystery and complexity to romanticize, historical rituals—particularly those from before the era of rapid, mass communication and transportation—offer a different way of relating to the built world. For example, many Indigenous cultures engaged all members of a community—including the dead, unborn, inanimate, and nonhuman beings—in practices of collective negotiation around their shared reality. These rituals can be understood as a kind of immediate “cosmopolitical” parliament. Cosmopolitics refers to a form of politics that acknowledges the agency, perspectives, and rhythms of a radically interconnected web of beings—beings with vastly different needs and ways of being, but who nonetheless depend on and nourish each other.
These ideas were explored in tandem with a critical reflection on the role architecture has historically played in reinforcing dominant systems. Since at least the Industrial Revolution, architects and other cultural producers have often been commissioned to produce a good image for bad content. In doing so, we have inadvertently lent our skills in designing beautiful spaces to the service of a world built on endless cycles of production, exploitation, and extraction.
Architecture, infrastructure, and technology should never be understood as neutral. Their very material forms are crystallized modes of seeing, thinking, relating, and building reality. They are artifacts that have politics: their configurations actively produce and reproduce specific practices of design, construction, maintenance, and use. In doing so, they sustain and perpetuate separations, divisions, and distance—both between people and in our relationships with other living and inanimate beings, forces, ecologies, and the “resources” we depend on for life and happiness. This distancing can be understood as atomization and alienation, which ultimately become sources of contemporary disorientation and disenchantment, or even meaninglessness.
While these infrastructures and architectures cast new spells and forms of enchantment over us, they also dispossess us of knowledge, care practices, and relationship-making, robbing us of the intimacy required to politically engage with the beings and forces that sustain our life and happiness.
It was in this context that, this spring, we invited students to imagine ways that architecture might become ‘unstuck’ and do something radically different. How can we throw off the straitjacket of producing more of the same kind of built reality—one that increasingly steers us toward ecological and social collapse, or worse, confines us to ways of working and living that are deeply disenchanted, alienating, and powerless?
