ABSTRACT
In the face of multifaceted environmental crises of anthropogenic origins, recent developments in architecture and urbanism aim to explore other materials, technologies, resources, and modes of collaboration. Yet, what if what was at stake was not the redesign of architectural forms and urban landscapes, but the very redesign of urban design and architectural practice themselves? This chapter offers a collective speculation of this, where the “more-than-human” is treated as more than the content of a design brief; demanding instead an opening to other-than-human capacities in co-design processes and to the unpredictabilities resulting from terrestrial and multispecies interdependencies. How to care, then, in architectural practice for terrestrial and multispecies entanglements? Rather than providing guidelines or general principles to do so, this chapter describes an experimental approach to relearn architecture practice from animals. Following STS and environmental humanities multispecies concerns, it describes a pedagogic experiment where urban animals were treated as epistemic partners for rethinking architectural practice, thus engaging their capacities in attempts at designing with them.
