Creatures Are Stirring: A Guide to Architectural Companionship

(Paperback)

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Creatures Are Stirring is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future.

The book reconceptualises buildings as our friends by amplifying architectures creaturely qualities formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organisational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms.

Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigour and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

Reviews

It's fun to trip the light fantastic of animal metaphors but for learning, I turn to the true owner of our house, our spaniel, Aalto. His chosen lookout--our stair landing--views all routes to and through the house, it carries a heating pipe for his pleasure, and it lets him jump down quickly to bark at the mailman. Similarly, donkeys traversing steep landscapes trace out paths whose contours are well suited to their own carrying capacities and those of humans. Learning from creatures and critters, Altshuler and Sedlock produce an entertaining book that relates, plays, and interacts with urbanism, and reminds us to make buildings as habitable as a dog's house. --Denise Scott Brown, co-author of Learning from Las Vegas and Having Words
Creatures Are Stirring is a poetic collection that will help with the transition to this fuzzy and sometimes slippery post-anthropocentric way of being. --Thomas Thwates, author of GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human
Stop making selfies out of nonhuman beings! No, please, for the love of God, stop it. This book will inspire you to do something much better instead. --Timothy Morton, Rice University, author of Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People
This brilliant and engaging book uncovers the rich ecological potential of anthropomorphic architecture, of, that is, buildings whose shapes or movement styles are reminiscent of those of more obviously animate creatures. Appealing to a wide range of readers, Altshuler and Sedlock explore how structures with creature-like forms can induce less anthropocentric modes of human subjectivity--modes at odds with the fantasy of mastering the diverse and lively group of entities, materials, forces, and efforts that is the world. Creatures are Stirring explores what architecture can do, and, more specifically, how it can work to elicit a sensibility and a future that is more joyful, less violent, and more intelligently entangled. Fascinating and inspiring. --Jane Bennett, Johns Hopkins University, author of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Author Bio

Joseph Altshuler is cofounder of Could Be Architecture, a Chicago-based design practice, an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the founding editor of SOILED, an architectural literary magazine.

Julia Sedlock is co-founder of Cosmo Design Factory, a Hudson Valley practice that combines residential client work with a commitment to local community development and activism. As a founding member of Philmont Land and Opportunity Trust (P.L.O.T.), Julia collaborates with neighbours and local government to improve housing equity and inclusivity in the village of Philmont, NY.