"Ruins are now our gardens. Degraded 'blasted' landscapes produce our livelihoods… Yet mushroom picking is a gentle art, and it can tell us about ways to live together in at least some damaged environments." -Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

There is a dramatic rift forming between the rapidly accumulating frequency and distribution of “blasted landscapes” and the discipline of architecture’s relationship with specifics and generalities. “But vague and general ‘hope’ is not always helpful. Instead, what is needed is a critical lens on, and more attention paid to, what it is that we are specifically hoping for and working towards.”

In “Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country,” Donna Haraway advocates for a site of hope to be fostered in the act of caring in resistance to the creation of fixed futuristic utopian or dystopian visions. To, in essence, think in terms of species while learning the gentle art of mushroom picking.

This studio will explore concepts of “embodiment” as a site of symbiosis between acts of caring, hope and regenerative architecture. Our work will be structured as a design research studio and will expand upon contemporary discourse on “embodied carbon” by including a broader, multi-species perspective as well as a critical examination of how we expect architecture to perform from cultural and ecological perspectives.