Geoempathy: Architecture, Time, and the Anthropocene
Geoempathy: Architecture, Time, and the Anthropocene is an ongoing manuscript that rethinks the roles and scope of architecture amidst climate crisis and environmental degradation. Using geological knowledge, posthumanist philosophy, anthropology, and speculative fiction, the book proposes a turn toward design as a temporal process—design through (and with) geoempathy.
This mode of designing shares many of the concerns of ecological work in architecture for which the well-being of other organisms is equated against an object. A fundamental difference is the embedding of planned obsolescence into architecture, which foresees changes in the form, function, performance, and users of the very objects that arise from this process.
Arguing for empathy with human and non-human constituencies, along with a shift toward the geo(nto)logical, the book will arrive at a new model for architecture that can generate political affect and slow the passage of time. To do this, I look into different processes of ‘accidental making,’ such as surrealist art practices that prioritized process over product, to consider architecture’s possibilities for participatory design methods that welcome other agents into the design of the world. Similarly, by conducting a brief historiography on different ecological movements within architecture, the book proposes an alternative vision for our discipline: one for which material decay, transformation, and the shifting forces of nature and environment are embraced.
Through this work, I also consider different modes of storytelling and world-making as generative strategies for architecture. While most of the writing for this book is in the form of critical essays, a concurrent a creative project for this book involves a series of short speculative fiction stories. These stories are a means for interpreting the world, nurturing new habits of seeing, and speculating on survival and adaptation strategies for an uncertain future. The texts question whether literary language can be connected to spatial features, and whether words can take on spatial form. Importantly, these short stories follow the form of the New Weird genre, a subgenre of speculative fiction that makes it possible to dissolve the borders between humans and ecosystems, allowing the natural world—rather than technology—to be the primary site of speculation.
This work paves the way for a generation of designers and thinkers committed to tackling the social, cultural, and environmental challenges of our time, introducing different architectural, visual, and textual case studies to reconceive architecture’s practices, codes, regulations, and outputs.
