This book specifically situates the concept of ‘care’ within those practices and discourses which are the entangled relationships of architecture and the humanities.
The book presents responses to such questions as: How can care inhere in the ecologies of modes of representation that we use to design and communicate architecture? Who is caring for whom/what in activist practices of urban development? How can we understand the very situated potential of professional practice and its political nature to engender caring forms of ‘doing’ architecture? What are the expanded ecologies of buildings for care (such as educational and healthcare facilities) and how do they acknowledge the particularities of users’ situations? It is the inter- and transdisciplinary nature of the crisscrossing of architecture and the humanities which permeate the works presented in the book, bringing together an international collection of thinkers and makers to respond response-ably, with care, through the specificities of architectural thought.
This book brings together developed works from a geographically diverse set of contributors, which as a collection offers insights into the possibilities of care’s insinuation into the breadth of what we might label ‘architecture’ in very different international cultural settings. It provides essential reading for students, researchers and academics in this burgeoning area of research.
Introduction
Oren Lieberman and Alessandro Zambelli
Yarning
1. Fragments of a Conversation: exploring the educational potential of collage in dialogue with spatial design students
Rachael Brown, Nicola Crowson, Phevos Kallitsis, Leago Madumo
2. Caremaking: Embodied sculpting, storying through figurations, and collective crafting in the architectural design studio
Aslıhan Şenel
3. Casting care: An embodied practice of care within the walls of Walmer Yard
Laura Mark
4. Mapping Design Ethics: Towards Agency, Accountability, and a Feminist Ethics of Care for Architectural Practice in Aotearoa New Zealand
Jessamine Fraser, Andrew Burgess, Megan Burfoot, Rachel Shearer, and Charles Walker
Interlude
5. Situating Care in Architecture: Violence, Sovereignty, Solidarity
Elke Krasny
Outcast
6. Sensory architecture of waste: a humane pedagogical approach to the analysis of the common immaterial heritage of Cairo's Garbage City
Paola Ardizzola and Mayar Amr Youssef Elsemary
7. Dirty Pedagogies: A Conversation
Simone Ferracina and Sepideh Karami
8. What About the Undeveloped Camera? The situated image of care
Toby Blackman
9. Making and doing research with others: A transdisciplinary conversation on thinking with the more-than-human
Hester Buck, Maria Alexandrescu, David McKeown, Rachel Schwartz-Narbonne, Julia Udall
10. A Manor House for the Destitute: Homelessness, Social Control and Repression of the Outcast in Mid-century Portugal
Ricardo Costa Agarez and Tânia Rodrigues
Living to Learn
11. Housing Students with Care and/or Discipline: A study of a Swedish female-only student housing complex
Fredrik Torisson
12. Autonomic Messiness: Reimagining Autonomy in the Assemblages of Yoshida Dormitory (Yoshida ryō 吉田寮)
Sarah Mills
13. On the leaky labour of laundry: Drying yards in Somers Town and Vanbrugh Park Estate.
Marianna Janowicz
Interlude
14. Repair Stories: World Mending and World Destroying
Hélène Frichot
Moving Care
15. Choreographic things: rhythm-affordances of situated care
Oren Lieberman
16. Embodied Architectures: Moving and Drawing with sensory and digital data
Virginia Farman, Victoria Hunter, and Belinda Mitchell
17. Recognising an Unequal City: From Drawing Space to Taking Space
Sarah Ackland
18. Sticking with the dance, diffractive readings of care over time
Jonathan Orlek, Claire McAndrew, Cristina Cerulli, Mara Ferreri, Victoria Hunter; with Elena Balzarini, Andrew Belfield, Helen Stratford, Rain Wegmann
Biography
Oren Lieberman is Professor of Architecture at University of Portsmouth with degrees in philosophy/psychology and architecture. His practice spans teaching, researching, writing, and curating. His research explores performative practices entangling architecture, performance, philosophy, geography, anthropology, and sociology, focusing on posthuman aesthetics and more-than-human assemblages in architectural production, examining political practices, critical pedagogies, and ethical world-making through post-qualitative methodologies.
Alessandro Zambelli is an academic at the University of Melbourne. His research explores colonial commons, alongside architectural–archaeological interdisciplinarities pursued through situated, performative, and creative practice. He regularly publishes and exhibits across these themes, and is Managing Editor of Architecture and Culture Journal, promoting interdisciplinary approaches to the architectural humanities.
"Lieberman and Zambelli curate an essential and concertedly entangled conversation between architecture, ethics, and planetary responsibility. Unlike conventional texts that default to assuming architects have more agency than they do in the face of seismic ecological collapse, their book refuses the abstraction of “care” as sentiment and instead situates it as praxis - an embodied, relational, and political act through which architecture must now learn to live otherwise.
This collection stands as both a theoretical and a practical manifesto for architects, educators, and theorists seeking to move beyond extractive modes of design toward a pedagogy of grief, reciprocity, and response-ability. It will resonate profoundly with those working at the intersections of solastalgia, multispecies justice, and decolonial design research. It offers a reminder that to build - at this moment in time - must be an act of repair and care: an architectural proposition for survival grounded in both humility and humanity, qualities our species has yet to achieve."
Dr. Harriet Harriss, Pratt Institute School of Architecture
