Creatures Are Stirring: A Guide to Architectural Companionship

Creatures Are Stirring is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future.

The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture's creaturely qualities--formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms.

Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors' essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings' points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

Author: Joseph Altshuler, Julia Sedlock
Publisher: Applied Research & Design
Published: 01/18/2022
Pages: 180
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.55lbs
Size: 9.90h x 7.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781951541613

About the Author
Altshuler, Joseph: - Joseph Altshuler is co-founder of Could Be Architecture, a Chicago-based design practice, and the founding editor of SOILED, an architectural literary magazine. Joseph teaches and coordinates the undergraduate curriculum for the Architecture and Interior Architecture programs at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Sedlock, Julia: - Julia Sedlock is co-founder of Cosmo Design Factory, a Hudson Valley practice that combines residential client work with a commitment to local community development and activism. As a founding member of Philmont Land and Opportunity Trust (P.L.O.T.), Julia collaborates with neighbors and local government to improve housing equity and inclusivity in the village of Philmont, NY.