The Public Commons, Synthetic Nature, Worldbuilding

This semester, architecture is charged with the city as a Worldbuilding exercise. Worldbuilding is not a recent term, but has found its way into our work with the use of active imaginaries, Foucauldian heterotopias, Afrofuturism and other strategies whereby the vessel of architecture is an agent within a much larger narrative of ground, human and nonhuman cultures, weathers, and ecosystems. It is more necessary than ever to consider how we are to survive our current late capitalist state, that Worldbuilding may enter as a measure.

There needs to be a paradigmatic shift in how we sort and measure the environment that Worldbuilding portends. Our humancentric tools and our umwelt, or capacity in how we understand everything, are no longer capable of dealing with the critical manner in how other agents and systems apply their own sovereignties. Essentially, architecture can no longer be seen as an elitist human ark for which our capitalist and supremacist signs and signifiers apply only to our endeavors. This is how we have come to be an unsustainable industry. Architecture, like a body turned inside out, must also afford occupancy for more than just humans.