Manifesto
Creatures Are Stirring: A Guide to Architectural Companionship by Joseph Altshuler and Julia Sedlock is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and nonviolent future. The book re-conceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities, including formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In a burning world, such qualities may initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman life forms.
Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers toward a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors’ expository text and illustrated mythical interludes with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.
