Architecturing-with All Creatures: Speculating with Children and Other Creatures for an Ethico-political Environment
Creators: name: Penaloza Caicedo, Andreia
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 390113
subject: Science, technology and engineering curriculum and pedagogy
classificationCode: 330102
subject: Architectural design

description: In today’s planetary crisis, human activity has significantly altered the planet’s system and ecosystem. Non-anthropocentric or posthuman theories argue that such human-centric approaches cannot lead to ethico-political environments, in which the abilities to act and mutual relations between humans and other-than-humans are acknowledged. Conventionally, the practice of children’s architecture education has an anthropocentric understanding of architecture and education. It commonly understands architecture as spaces defined for humans’ needs, senses, measures, and activities. It is usually grounded in human-child-centred pedagogies.

This speculative research-creation project aims to create a speculative pedagogical tool that decentres the human in the practice of children’s architecture education. In doing so, the project intertwined a reflection on the researcher’s architectural-educational practices; posthuman and process theories; speculative thinking and methodology; and a speculative research-creation event. 

From the reflection on those practices, non-anthropocentric concepts emerged and framed this project: across-species, across-spatial scales, and across-shores. These concepts relate to posthuman theories and how the inclusion of both humans and other-than-humans in today’s architectural education practices is conducive to ethico-political environments. 

Second, the project adopted a speculative thinking and methodology in one overarching concept: architecturing-with all creatures. Architecturing-with all creatures defined the speculative research-creation event, fieldwork, and the speculative pedagogical tool that is the research-creation outcome of this project. Architecturing-with all creatures was the speculative research-creation event in which children built cross-species-scales-shores spaces-architectures with creatural exploratory tools and creatural building materials, and helped the children to consider themselves and other-than-humans as part of the environment, rather than consider themselves in a privileged position over other species. 

 The speculative pedagogical tool translates three interferences into a kit for prompting architecturing with all creatures. The interferences were: i) Speculative exploratory moments, in which children living in Colombia and Australia explored the world around them and collected organic and recyclable materials, ii) Speculative building moments with living experiments as inquiries, in which children questioned and were aware of the needs, claims, and capacities of the creatural building materials through processes of germination, crystallisation, moulding and fermentation, and iii) Speculative building moments with the building of spatial scales, in which children built spaces-architectures for different species to live together in the same body, house, landscape, planet, or universe. Together, the children and the creatural building materials built floors, roofs, doors, flames, lakes, or mountains, for all creatures to live together in the same spaces-architectures. Children dissolved boundaries between species, scales, and shores through the performance of those speculative creative experiments. These interferences produced differences in the children’s architecture education practice. Children decentred the human and understood the actions, needs, claims, capacities, and possibilities of other-than-humans within the environment.

The speculative pedagogical tool is designed for children, pedagogues, parents, and other creatures to build spaces-architectures according to the needs, senses, measures, and activities of humans and other-than-humans. A set of interlocking-folding cards invites Earthly creatures living in different territories to perform speculative exploratory moments, and speculative building moments. The cards, divided into four packs, expose participants to the possibilities of speculation, exploration, collection, and building with and for all creatures. The cards are full of drawings, pictures, videos, questions, and QR codes that pass on provocations of creatural exploratory tools to explore, including torches or magnifying glasses; creatural building materials to collect, such as organic and recyclable materials, including seeds, cardboard rolls or eggshells; creatural living experiments to understand the capacities of creatural building materials; and creatural spatial scales to build, like bodies, houses, landscapes, or universes. 

The study shifts current perceptions of the environment as a resource for human use, into an environment perceived as the intermixed worlds of all Earthly creatures. Architecturing-with all creatures cultivates social and ecological justice on Earth, nurtures an ethico-political environment, and moves from human-child-centric pedagogies to speculative creaturely-centred pedagogies.