A Creative Ecology of Practice for Thinking Architecture

Abstract

This contribution offers an examination of the positions that have promoted a return to the ontology of objects and “realism” in philosophical thought (Meillasoux, Shaviro, Morton, Harman, Gannon), and their consequences for theories of architecture. Frichot criticizes some collateral effects of such a theoretical shift in the field of architectural theory: in the first place, the risk of wanting to go back to objects, buildings, material effects with excessive ease. As an alternative, and even an antidote, she proposes to reconsider the notion of “ecology of practice” offered by Isabelle Stengers, meant as a continuous “process of learning” and an “act of creative resistance”. This alternative would be fundamentally critical (of the context of action, particularly for architects) and opposed to the “flat ontology” of “speculative realists”. Ecology, for Stengers, is quite simply a question of habitat, the context in which you undertake your labour, and the habits that circumscribe your methodologies. In operating within your “habitat” your practice must feel out its borders, recognises its limits, and also push against them, in order to re-establish them again and again.