Seeking Com-posthuman Structures : A critical exploration of potential posthuman architectures

This project is critical speculation on architectural ‘composting’ or gleaning from processes forming the city’s landscape. It is a search for opportunities around and outside their material and spatial human-centered processes. By ‘composting’ matter and spaces and considering forces beyond those of human domination I seek possible local niches or whole ecosystems of creativity that can emerge. The hypothesis is that these kinds of spaces could act as pockets of posthuman landscapes able to re-situate the human in the complex context she is part of. I seek the vibrancy and potential agency of a web of nonhuman actants in inviting these creative forces to co-steer the project. The aim is to explore how an acknowledgment towards the assemblages I work within might more earnestly approach a more-than-human architecture by not making for but instead with. The theoretical and academic footing I think from and think-with are feminist and new materialist theorists. After establishing this theoretical ground the discourse is narrowed toward architecture. Through theorists and researchers, I look at examples of how posthuman and new materialist theories are presented in architectural research and discussion. The last section of the report describes my process of finding matters to compost with, departing from the physical context of soils, and gathering information and matter as the process unfolds. In conclusion, I find that the method of ‘composting’ generates a critical project, but is also challenging because of the many directions and influences that equally enrich and complicate the concept of the project. By seeing this project as one attempt to synthesize a feminist posthuman approach, one voice aligning with many others, it can liberate itself from trying to solve complex questions and instead be part of a collective imagining of what creating-with and staying with the trouble can entail, closing in on what posthuman architecture can be