Architectures: reimagining praxis in a post-humanist world [Reference item]

This chapter contends that the Anthropocene is a self-inflicted geological wound—an inscription of extractivism, colonialism, and human exceptionalism onto the Earth’s lithosphere. Architecture, long enthralled by narratives of permanence, progress, and mastery, has been deeply complicit in this planetary violence. From the imposition of the colonial grid to the proliferation of neoliberal glass skyscrapers, architectural practice has repeatedly reproduced systems of exclusion, fortified borders, erased Indigenous lifeworlds, and privileged capital over kinship with more-than-human worlds.

Framing the Anthropocene as both prognosis and prescription, the chapter argues that architecture must relinquish its anthropocentric foundations and re-emerge as an interspecies, reparative, and insurgent form of praxis. It advances a mandate for a post-architectural practice that prioritizes ecologies over economics, embraces posthuman politics, and adopts speculative modes of futurity in which scarcity becomes a framework for sufficiency and survival rather than a marker of failure. Aligning with pluriversal perspectives (Escobar, 2018; de la Cadena & Blaser, 2018), the chapter calls for the cultivation of multiple epistemologies and ontologies capable of resisting the destructive dominance of Western thought. Ultimately, it proposes reconstituting architecture not as a professional enclave of human authorship but as a collaborative practice of care, adaptation, and planetary justice in a world on the verge of rupture.

Living reference work entry