A Vital, Architectural Materialism: A House-person’s Escape from the Anthropocentric

Abstract

In this chapter Pia Ednie Brown takes a vitally materialist approach to discussing the nonhuman creativity that comes from the house which, like any creative project, is like a living creature whose personality changes in time and whose vitality of matter is wild. Architecture as assemblages of forces, humans as a force that becomes part of a tangled ecology and the house, acting like any personality, perpetually evolving and being discovered, while in relation to us humans, it is yet another responsibility for which we are never utterly in control of. The chapter attempts to approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. As the author suggests, new forms of value can be generated if things can be thought of as persons. That way we may manage to usher their activity to attention.