Rumbling and Tangling

Quoting this line from Milan Kundera to describe the genesis of a character, Jane Bennett begins her book The Enchantment of Modern Life with the idea that ‘a discomforting affect is often what initiates a story, a claim, a thesis’. Similarly, Avery Green, as an architectural character and ‘house-person’, was born through the rumblings of unease about some persistent architectural habits and assumptions, and of a hunger for something else.

Avery Green is part of a larger project that pursues an architectural movement away from anthropocentrism – aiming to dislodge the human as the centre or ultimate reference point of concerns. Here, I am specifically seeking to develop an architectural approach to ‘vital materialism’, as described by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. This approach builds on Bennett's brave suggestion that:

The primary task of this essay, then, is to explore how one might approach anthropomorphising without falling into its indisputable dangers. Another way of thinking about the value of anthropomorphising is that as the ‘chord is struck between person and thing’, we enter an arena of ‘mutual inclusion’. This is where the work of Brian Massumi becomes key, as another who has tackled problems of both anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism head on. Through his exploration of play and animals he assembles the concept of mutual inclusion, as a ‘reciprocal imbrication of differences’. His intricate, radically empiricist thinking provides a sympathetic counterpoint to the melody of Bennett's often more tangibly intimate observations. Massumi's work is also relevant here for his attention to processes of architectural production, which help move Bennett's vital materialism towards architecture. I draw on thinkers who share Massumi's philosophical lineage – such as Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Peirce. The developmental psychologist Daniel Stern becomes another important shared point of reference.

The pursuit of an architectural escape from the anthropocentric might seem a near impossibility: buildings are perhaps ‘unnatural’ environments that seem inseparable from humans, being more ‘culture’ than ‘nature’ – architectural history could be seen as a physical prescience of the Anthropocene.