Cohabitation: Subverting Anthropocentrism in Architectural Discourse

EasyChair Preprint 8404, version 1

Abstract

The research situates itself in the wake of the widespread ecological crisis effect caused during the current geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This makes the Anthropos (humans), the superior agency in determining the planet’s current sustainability and at the centre of the current earth’s ecological system. This is the basis of the word anthropocentrism, where everything revolves around the needs of the human. The research attempts to address the sovereignty humans enjoy in this current ecology of various humans and non-human actors and potential implications of climate change and global warming caused by the carbon footprint the Anthropos exerts on this terraform. The built ecology also becomes an important contributor to this increase in the ecological crisis.

Even though much effort and inquiry have been made towards ecologically sensitive and resilient built ecology they remain as bucolic aspirations with material paradigms, organizational issues and resource distribution. Accommodation of other species which are not usually domesticated has not been addressed within the current paradigms of architectural discourse. Can we subvert this anthropocentrism in our built ecology to create a cohabitation environment that is inclusive of various species each in symbiosis bringing their own set of benefits? The research stems from this ideal and banks on the fearless feminist and post-humanist enquiry of Donna J Haraway in “Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene” and the idea of Terrapolis where architecture becomes an n-dimensional space which is inclusive of various human stakeholders, but also non-human species and inorganic agents to create a cyborgian-prosthesis framework. Even though these ideas may seem radical, the research attempts to ground them in reality by taking existing precedents as models of enquiry which also include author's architectural design explorations to address the fragility.

Keyphrases: Anthropocene, Cohabitation, built environment, ecology, queer

@booklet{EasyChair:8404,
  author    = {Aswin Senthil},
  title     = {Cohabitation: Subverting Anthropocentrism in Architectural Discourse},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 8404},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}