Hélène Frichot Bücher

This anthology radically resituates architecture as a support system in the service of infrastructure. A collection of 12 critical essays and creative projects explore the interaction between architectural spaces and infrastructural systems with the aim of responding to contemporary environmental, social, and political crises. In addition, the book presents a selection of 10 speculative design experiments undertaken in Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH Stockholm and within Design, Philosophy and Architecture at the University of Melbourne. With its integrative approach to pedagogy, practice, and theory the book contributes to an understanding of the vulnerability of planetary life and the importance of fostering relations of care in architecture.

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for our precarious environment-worlds. Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Professor of Architecture, KTH Stockholm, and in 2020 joins the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia as Professor of Architecture and Philosophy. Her research traverses the dirty interdisciplinary domain between architecture and philosophy where she places an emphasis on feminist theories and practices and how to maintain a creative ecology of practices.

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruc- tion guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dog- matic status quo that celebrates major gures, while overlooking the care and labour of minor gures and practices.

Architect and philosopher Hélène Frichot examines how the discipline of architecture is theorized and practiced at the periphery. Eschewing a conventionally direct approach to architectural objects – to iconic buildings and big-name architects – she instead explores the background of architectural practice, to introduce the creative ecologies in which architecture exists only in relation to other objects and ideas. Consisting of a series of philosophical encounters with architectural practice that are neither neatly located in one domain nor the other, this book is concerned with 'other ways of doing architecture'. It examines architecture at the limits where it is muddied by alternative disciplinary influences – whether art practice, philosophy or literature. Frichot meets a range of creative characters who work at the peripheries, and who challenge the central assumptions of the discipline, showing that there is no 'core of architecture' – there is rather architecture as a multiplicity of diverse concerns in engagement with local environments and worlds. From an author well-known in the disciplines of architecture and philosophy for her scholarship on Deleuze, this is a radical, accessible, and highly-original approach to design research, deftly engaging with an array of current topics from the Anthropocene to affect theory, new materialism to contemporary feminism.