Architectural imagination after human exceptionalism Architecture is facing multiple crises internal and external to its dominant culture. The twentieth century left many questions unanswered about the expression and meaning of architecture that we now have little choice but to answer through the frame of the environment. The PhD project begins by looking throughthelens of the burgeoning field of Environmental Humanities (EH). As a transdisciplinary field EH engages with fundamental questions of meaning, value, responsibility, and purpose in a time of humanmade crisis born from our way of being in the world.1The plural and diverse knowledges incorporated into EH facilitate the production of expanded notions of justice, revealing our entangled relationships with non-human others and suggesting acts of inclusionfor wider pools of critters than our humanocentric world serves to allow. EH puts forward core concepts such as ‘more-than-human worlds’ and ‘sympoiesis’, or ‘making with’, which I will explore as pivotal to future architectural imagination.As it was articulated by Giedion in the mid twentieth century, there has been an unsettling sense that a certain confusion exists in architecture, “a kind of pause” or “even a kind of exhaustion”. (2) These comments, relating to the field of humanistic concern, came before neoliberal transformations deepened this exhaustion through the transfer of agency from the architect toward the financier and the engineer.3Still burdened by the predicaments of the twentieth-century, architecture has now been confronted with itsgreatest challenge in the face of the climate emergency. While this challenge is now well recognised, the dominant discourse around addressing it is heavily skewed towards the technocratic and solutionist approaches of sustainability.4These approaches, ranging from greenwash to the darker corners of Post-humanism, do not sufficiently reflect on the reductive aspects of western-world-view that got us here. Rather they seek to further the project of disconnection with the natural world and the eradication of other ways of knowing and being.5The expansive EH practices of ‘thinking with’ and ‘through’ the environment are set in stark contrast to the positivist discourse of sustainability. EH invites us to reflect on our oldest forming myths that erected a wall between the wild and the cultivated, between the forest and the garden,6between the right brain and the left brain.7An architectural project that sought to enclose a space for humans, ‘othering’ the world outside.

1 Deborah Bird Rose et al., ‘Thinking Through the Environment, Unsettling the Humanities’, Environmental Humanities1, no. 1 (1 May 2012): 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3609940.

2 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition, 5th Edition (Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 2009).

3 Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

4 Rob Holmes, ‘The Problem with Solutions’, Places Journal, 14July 2020, https://doi.org/10.22269/200714; Jeremy Till, ‘Architecture after Architecture (Unpublished Research Proposal)(AF Lecture)’, accessed 19 October 2020, http://www.jeremytill.net/read/130/architecture-after-architecture.

5See for example -Benjamin Bratton, The Terraforming(Strelka Press, 2019).

6 Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, 1st Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1993).

7 Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Reprint Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

8 Kjetil Fallan, The Culture of Nature in the History of Design(Routledge, 2019), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429469848.