Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman Creativity

Maria Voyatzaki’s chapter examines how contemporary speculations on matter shift materiality into the epicentre of architectural contemplation and affect its ethos and praxis. By encountering the emergence of a new paradigm for which the establishment of an overall orthodoxy is impossible, the chapter, following the contemporary quest for a better understanding of this model of reality, offers a profound insight into contemporary thinking and creating architecture in this new framework defined as posthuman. As architecture throughout its history has always been defined on the basis of a certain worldview and in reference to a certain conception of the human, what will architecture become in the posthuman turn or even more in the nonhuman? How are its broad spectrum of established ideas, values and practices problematised by this new philosophical debate on architectural thinking and practicing in our globalised and technologically mediated world? The chapter examines these questions in terms of three main issues: the new conceptions of architecture that could emerge from the contemporary materialisms, the new understandings of the material outcome of architectural creative work and the influences of the above conceptions and understandings on the development of the creative process.