New materialism’ is the umbrella term for a series of movements that distance themselves from anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity and ethics in terms of ‘inhuman’ forces within the human, emphasise heteropoiesis as the organising power of transversal processes, and explore the political ramifications of these processes for cultural practices such as architecture. According to this view, archite
cture does not represent culture but is a mechanism of culture. The focus of Architecture Thinking is on two primary areas, namely Architecture and Libidinal Economy, and Architecture and Political Economy. The former addresses the embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective approach to production, recording and consumption of the built environment. The latter critically analyses the manifold situatedness of a given design project, both in terms of physical attributes of site at multiple scales and the complex conditions and factors operating through social, economic and political forces. Architecture and Libidinal Economy
Key Concepts: Ethico-Aesthetics, New Materialism, Radical Empiricism, Biopower, Noopower, Technology/Media, Affect Theory, Affordance Theory, Plasticity, Anthropocene, Ecology Without Nature. Key Thinkers: Gregory Bateson, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, James J. Gibson, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Brian Massumi, Robin Evans, Katherine Hayles, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sanford Kwinter, Bernard Cache, Jane Bennett, Claire Colebrook, Timothy Morton, Slavoj Žižek, etc. Architecture and Political Economy
Key Concepts: Neoliberalism, Late/High Capitalism, Geo-Politics, Human/Urban Geography, Community, Spatial-Economy, Globalisation, Network-Society, Liquid Modernity and theproblématique urbaine. Key Thinkers: David Harvey, Neil Smith, Peter Marcuse, Neil Brenner, Erik Swyngendouw, Fredric Jameson, Saskia Sassen, Edward Soja, Manuel Castells, Richard Sennett, Zygmunt Bauman, Bruno Latour, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Walter Benjamin, etc.
