Posthuman Architectures: Beyond the Human-Centred Design Paradigm

What if architecture stopped being about humans?

This is not a nihilistic question. It is a posthumanist one. Rosi Braidotti, in The Posthuman (2013), argues for a radical departure from the assumption that the human subject is the centre of all design, all ethics, all thought. In a world of ecological crisis, algorithmic decision-making, and interspecies entanglement, the autonomous human individual is no longer an adequate starting point for design.

James Bridle's Ways of Being (2022) takes this further into the realm of intelligence itself. What counts as intelligence? What forms of knowing do plants, animals, and machines possess? And what would it mean to design spaces that respect and incorporate these non-human ways of being?

Donna Haraway has been asking related questions for decades. From her Cyborg Manifesto (1991), which dissolved the boundaries between human, animal, and machine – to Staying with the Trouble (2016) and her concept of "critters," Haraway insists on the interconnectedness of life forms. Architecture, in this view, must transcend human-centric models and consider the needs and well-being of the entire ecology it inhabits.

Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT), as extended into architecture by Albena Yaneva in Latour for Architects (2022), provides a practical framework for this shift. ANT treats buildings not as static objects but as networks of human and non-human actors – materials, technologies, regulations, weather, organisms – all exerting agency. This re-evaluation of the role of matter in design practice calls for a redefinition of the social, political, and ethical associations that structure urban life.

Jane Rendell's Art and Architecture: A Place Between (2006) adds another dimension: the space between artistic practice and architectural theory as a site of critical potential. Her argument that architectural practice can be a form of social critique supports the possibility of a new, post-patriarchal discourse about architecture – one valued on diversity rather than hierarchy.

For my project, these perspectives converge on a crucial question: if AI is trained on data that reflects human-centred, patriarchal architectural traditions, how can we retrain it: ethically, critically, artistically, to generate spatial imaginaries that go beyond the human, beyond the patriarchal, toward something more equitable and ecologically entangled?

References: Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of Being. Farrar, NYC: Straus and Giroux. Haraway, D. (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto. In: Simians, Cyborgs and Women. London: Routledge, pp. 149–181. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. Yaneva, A. (2022). Latour for Architects. Oxford: Taylor & Francis. Rendell, J. (2006). Art and Architecture: A Place Between. London: IB Tauris.