This paper describes architecture as a form of cosmotechnics (Hui) which currently manifests a Western-Christian worldview globally. This worldview is entangled with the assumption of a God-given right to control and subordinate nonhuman nature (anthropocentrism). The text looks at the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi - which itself is a cosmotechnical architectural-aesthetic concept embedded in a Zen Buddhist cosmology - and elaborates on its understanding of human-nonhuman control as an alternative example. Afterwards it zooms in on the notion of control and speculates where it is located on the spectrum between microcosm and macrocosm and to what degree it can be active or passive. The conceptual spectrumof microcosm-macrocosm is used to locate control. The qualitative spectrum of chaos-cosmos is used to define its magnitude and directionality. The paper argues for an architectural cosmotechnological understanding of control which is located partially in the physical and partially in the metaphysical world and which is partially active and partially passive - between chaos and cosmos. This conceptual intersection of both spectrums is defined as a point of continuous active negotiation between the human and the nonhuman world. Awareness of this intersectional control point affords a thinking of post-Christian, postcolonial and posthuman architectural cosmotechnics.

When is a building finished? Is a building ever finished or is it just a product of constant transformation? Transformed by its users, by time, by society and nature? When is a building a building? The moment the foundation is created? The moment the first wall is created? When it is airtight? When the workers leave the construction site? Currently I am constructing a building which functions as an artist studio, a greenhouse, an energy accumulator and an architectural test site. The building is part of my PhD in artistic research at Konstfack University in Stockholm. My PhD and the building’s current state is “half finished”. What does that mean? Is there something to be learned from Romanticism and its obsession with ruins? Is there such a thing as an “active ruin” – a planned ruin? A ruin exposed to the weathering agents of nature but also not forgotten and still in the control grip of its creator. Can a half-finished building feedback and inform theory, which feeds back and informs the rest of a building? Architectural production is different from working with clay on a sculpture.

Architecture has traditionally focused on human-centred practices, emphasising control over construction processes and creating internal environments that separate humans from their external surroundings. The growing interest in posthuman theories introduces the concept of nonhuman agency into this predominantly human-centric field. This research seeks to explore the potential tensions between traditional design practices, such as architecture, and the impacts of nonhuman agency on associated design and construction processes. Building on experimental design research at the intersection of art, design and architecture, this research seeks to contribute to posthuman design discourse by critically examining the implications of occultural and degrowth themes through the design of a specific building located in the woods of Småland. The building is a method to explore the emerging design program of the research: human-nonhuman control relationships.[Bokinfo]

All the works in the exhibition thematizes, in one way or another, spiritual confusion. The West – hungry for spiritual growth / tired of an over-rational scientism which borders on the irrational itself – looks to the East and to its own pre-Christian past in order to find new modes of being.

Somehow trapped in between new (old) ontologies and its current own capitalist-centric mind frame, the spiritual path of the contemporary truth seeker is filled with almost comical tripping stones.

One good example of this is Christmas: part Christian, part pagan, part Coca Cola, part spiritual, part commercial. The here proposed works are tongue-in-cheek references to a multifaceted spiritual memory, which is part ours and part someone else’s. They engage the architectural, the ready-made and found, the commercial and the technological in order to emphasize our entangled and complex status quo.

The “xeno” – “the other” – is a prefix found in such hyphenated bridge words such as xeno-poetics, xeno-politics, xeno-feminism, or xeno-architecture. Xeno is the other, the not-self. But who or wha tis this not-self and where is it? In contemporary architectural discourse we find an increasing interest in more-than-human justice, speculation, or realization: ontological or critical posthumanisms and new materialisms explore nonhuman agency and transhumanist or cybernetic posthumanists celebrate the (always coming) fusion of the technological other with the self in order to overcome nature’s imposed (mortal) limits. There seems to be two types of nonhumans, related to the different – and often opposing – understandings of posthumanism: the man-made nonhuman and the non-man-made nonhuman. The xeno seems to mingle with ideologies of the former. A monad – as found in different monadologies, such as Leibnitz’s or the theosophical – is the smallest part of a metaphysical entity. It is the invisible sibling of the, almost outdated and refuted, physical atom. The monad seems to be exclusively found in life, in the non-man-made. In my presentation I would like to speculate on the xeno_monad, a conceptual overlap of the man-made and non-man-made entity and where it is physically and metaphysically situated in architecture. Physically, we might find such speculative entity in either the weathering processes of ruination and decay (non-man-made) or in the digital infrastructures which make up an increasing part of our architectural matters (man-made). Metaphysically, we find it in human perception (does the nonhuman even exist without human perception?): it is found in the fear of losing control over(architectural) matters and (information) flows; it is found in the desire to project human shortcomings onto the other, the outside rather than the inside; and it is found in the spiritual, sometimes perversely mixed with the transhuman, desire to overcome human limitations.

What is an architectural object, taken from one place to another for the purpose of reuse, from a point of memory? Can it be seen as an object which connects humans through nonhuman memory, ‘sympathetic magic’ or matter’s own agency? This text explores some fragments of ideas, follows intuitive hunches and illustrates the concept of ‘architectural organs’ by using the architectural typology/archetype of the window— here specifically from a church — and its human use for contemplation.

Architecture is a collective technological human practice to control local environments in order to protect the human body. Depending on the worldview and cosmology of the society which produces the architecture – increasingly the global worldview is rational, mono-technological and Western – this practice gives more or less space for nonhuman agency. This paper looks at ways to loosen the contemporary Western obsession with controlling the environment architecturally by exploring different forms of architectural memento mori (remember you must die). The act of willing (poiesis) protective-controlling architecture (technology) into the world, inside a certain worldview (cosmology), is explored through the conceptual entanglement of those three notions: cosmo-techno-poiesis. The paper concludes with an architectural example and a short summary.

In response to global challenges of resource scarcity, increasing attention is being paid to bio-based materials - a domain that covers familiar materials such as timber and emerging materials such as bio-plastics and mycelium composites. The ability to observe, analyse, simulate, and design with their interior heterogeneity and behaviour over time is a necessity for a bio-based and cyclical material practice and opens a deep reservoir of creative and technical innovation potentials within architecture and aligned design practices.This paper describes a research inquiry which seeks to integrate volumetric material data acquired through non-intrusive methods into materially-led digital design workflows. The inquiry is developed as a set of computational tools and approaches to architectural modelling, and demonstrated through three main material tracks: structural glue-laminated timber assemblies, mycelium composites, and bio-luminescent bacteria substrates. Each addresses the acquisition, analysis, and simulation of deep volumetric material data at different scales and in different deployment contexts. In doing so, we demonstrate a novel shift in the digital modelling of bio-based architectural materials and set out its implications for new design practices that deeply embed the individuality and temporality of materials.We contribute a perspective on the possibilities afforded by a volumetric modelling approach to bio-architecture and a computational framework for operating with volume data of heterogeneous materials.

The essay elaborates on the fluidity of realities and different forms of shaping them. Realities can be created and thus must be imagined first and implemented second. Reality production happens on different scales: from the small design studio – where products and desires are created – to the big world stage, where political narratives shape global happenings. At the moment we are experiencing a global dispute about how and to what extend humanity should technologically interact with nature. Should humanity intensify the control of climatic issues through the use of technology or slow down and develop new modes of being in the world? Existing movements provide space for exploring new ways of being in the world such as posthumanism, ahumanism, degrowth practice and marginalized forms of knowledge production such as occulture. Those fields come from fundamentally different (research) traditions but overlap in their quest for new non-anthropocentric ontologies. The overlapping space of these movements is conceptualized as a form of New Romanticism which opposes mainstream reality production and includes the nonhuman in its worldview. Methods for shaping realities range from speculative design to (capitalist) magic. I intend to advocate for non-hegemonic ontological explorations in academic research through experimental speculative design methods. I have written in an explorative style in order to implement speculation as a method. I first begin by looking at a tradition of Romanticism as an “irrational” opposing force to scientism and note how tendencies towards the Romantic have crept into the impetus behind other movements. Afterwards I explore different forms of shaping realities and narratives. Then I will propose new narratives for care for the age of the Anthropocene, followed by some initial ideas of how to implement New Romanticism through methods of Speculative Design. I will conclude with a short summary.