The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms.

Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors’ essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings’ points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

DETAILS:
By Joseph Altshuler and Julia Sedlock
Applied Research & Design, 2022
Paperback, 180 pages
6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches