Infrastructural Love: A Support System for Critical Feminist Design Tools

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.