Caremaking: Embodied sculpting, storying through figurations, and collective crafting in architectural design studio

This chapter explores, through a specific architectural design studio case, how feminist materialist posthuman pedagogy can offer alternative imaginaries of architecture and its education to dichotomous thinking that perpetually produces power imbalances within the profession and educational environment. In these troubled times, architecture needs to form attentive social and creative relationships by claiming political, ethical, corporeal, and material agencies. Drawing on feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway’s suggestion for following stories and figures for ‘making kin’ in troubled times, the chapter searches for ways in which architecture may be performed as a collective caring act of ‘making with’ and a process of ‘becoming with’. This offers for future architectures and architectural education an awareness of more-than-human agencies and collaboration in multi-species ecologies. In this chapter, the combined acts of caring while making and becoming a caring collective are defined as caremaking. The figuration of caremaking, through certain practices of sculpting, storying, and crafting, offers situated and embodied imaginaries both for teaching and learning and also for architecture.