Gardens of Compost

Abstract: An interrogation of architecture's prevailing myths, and a practice for how to live and die well as an architect in the Anthropocene epoch.  It is an effort to combine joyful representation and speculation (because architecture is both too serious and not nearly serious enough), with philosophy, for still possible pasts, presents and futures. For this it leans mainly on the ideas of Donna Haraway, Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, to present a methodology called Nomad Storytelling. A methodology that aims to move between a multiplicity of adjacent sites as to care for them in appropriate ways, with the intention of contributing to the idea of relationally unmaking the environmental urgencies of the 21th century. It consists of 8 chapters dealing with juridical care, letting be as care, humour and shaming, fabulous speculation, non-quantifiable architecture as dissent and graphic design as a crucial part of remembering what the cost of architecture is beyond the monetary, in the end suggesting the idea of architect-as-worm and compost architecture. It’s about not telling another killer story, because they always end with apocalypse or dystopia, and instead tell stories of gathering and fabulous futures, as Ursula K. Le Guin called it. Because it matters which architectures architect architecture and which lines line lines.