This essay is a prompt towards climate-related action strategies for an architecture based on planetary thinking. It proposes a conceptual framework of entanglement, rethinking design practices through sympathy, care, and relationality beyond anthropocentrism. The essay offers a conceptual trajectory between two neologisms: xenomateriality and xeniomaterialism.
First, the essay re-examines the notion of xenomateriality, coined as the currently contested relationship between traditional systems of creating architectures and what is seen as alien matter. It then uses xenomateriality as the basis to develop, conceptualise and contextualise a xeniomaterialism. It is a new symbiotic materialism in-between nature, technology and culture to be invented and re-composed through products of human and nonhuman activity towards a resilient planetary ecology.
In xeniomaterialism, the revised construct of living matter is entangled with omnipresent human intentionality and nonhuman creativity and engaged in a non-hierarchical symbiosis and sympathy – an inclusive hospitability. In xeniomaterialism the “geo” is linked with the “Gaian” and framed by posthuman and decolonial ecologies of matter and care.
The essay presents an architecture and action strategy where nature, technology and culture are composing matter-to-come, affirming the importance of pluriversality: a coalition of non-hierarchical agency on a global scale. This radical proposition of achieving a xeniomaterialism creates a meta-philosophical blueprint towards a sustainable Gaian Anthropocene.
