Architects and fiction writers share the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being. Every architectural proposition is a kind of fiction before it becomes a built fact; likewise, every written fiction relies on the construction of a context in which a story can take place. This collection of essays explores what happens when fiction, experimental writing and criticism are combined and applied to architectural projects and problems. It begins with ficto-criticism – an experimental and often feminist mode of writing which fuses the forms and genres of essay, critique, and story – and extends it into the domain of architecture, challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and political realities, and placing architecture in contact with such disciplines as cultural studies, literary theory and ethnography. These sixteen newly-written pieces have been selected for this volume to show how ficto-critical writing can be a powerful vehicle for creative architectural practice, providing new opportunities to explore modes of writing about architecture both within and beyond the discipline. The collection represents a broad range of geographical and cultural positions including indigenous and non-Western contexts, and includes a foreword and afterword by important thinkers in the domains of architectural criticism (Jane Rendell) and cultural studies/ethnography (Stephen Muecke).

Combining theories and methodologies drawn from diverse disciplinary terrains, the after effects of research presented in this volume are aimed at strengthening future thinking and practice in architecture. We challenge the traditional assumption that theory occupies a position that is detached from the production of architecture. Instead we assert that theory can operate recip­rocally with methodology toward experimentation in both critical architectural discourse and projective modes of practice. At stake here are the emergent possibilities of new socio-political and ecological challenges and contexts, where ethical and material conditions must be tackled jointly.

At the nexus of the architectural and environmental humanities issues of decolonization have extended into a consideration of human and more-than-human ecological relations. Given the entanglement of today’s social and environmental crises, we need to decolonise our imaginaries as much as our western European enlightenment predilections when it comes to our architectural habits and habitats. In this co-written paper we ask: How do we explore relational architectural ecologies (Rawes 2016) and engage in creative ecologies (Frichot 2018) from the midst of our pedagogical practices? This team of teacher-researchers presents work undertaken in the design studio context within Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture KTH Stockholm, a division well known for its emphasis on feminist and intersectional theories and practices. Our project, Infrastructural Love, looks to infrastructural systems that support human and more-than-human actors with the aim of rethinking the majoritarian tendencies too often expressed in architecture. We propose to share our developing feminist design (power) tool kit, which aims to challenge the norms of architectural representation so as to re-orientate our points of views on the worlds we daily share with diverse peoples and vibrant things.

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 contemporary feminism.

Following an instructional mode I argue that writing is an activity that is practised, and that practice operates according to transversal relays between thinking and doing. Reformulating Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Literature and Life’ as an instruction manual composed of eleven steps, a reading is undertaken of the landscape encounters of the artist-architect Margit Brünner. Brünner places an emphasis on the intimate and reciprocal passage between affecting and being affected, and how this produces either a diminution or increase of joys relative to sadnesses. These movements and transitions of a life create what Brünner calls atmospheres, thereby calling attention to the deep imbrication of human practitioners in their environment-worlds. This chapter is presented as an experiment, and the emphasis is on writing-with, whether that means writing-with landscapes, or writing-with other bodies (human and non-human).

Set against the background of a ‘general crisis’ that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

Over the years, colleagues at the Architecture School of Stockholm have developed a most remarkable and inspiring approach to architecture and writing in terms of performances and the performative while integrating feminist and queer theory. Of particular interest are the Critical Studies in Architecture group, the group Fatale for feminist architecture theory and practice, and the Mycket collaboration. By way of an interview between Footprint editors Dirk van den Heuvel and Robert Gorny, and the Stockholm colleagues Brady Burroughs, Katarina Bonnevier, Katja Grillner, and Hélène Frichot questions of pedagogy, research and methodology are further investigated, how to ‘stay with the trouble’ and where to situate newly emerging knowledge models.