RACHEL ARMSTRONG

Professor of Experimental Architecture

Planning & Landscape

School of Architecture, Newcastle University, UK

Worldling
“ The Biltong was dying. Huge and old, it squatted in the
center of the settlement park, a lump of ancient yellow
protoplasm, thick, gummy, opaque. Its pseudopodia were
dried up, shriveled to blackened snakes that lay inert on
the brown grass. The center of mass looked oddly sunken.
The Biltong was gradually settling as the moisture was
burned from its veins by the
weak overhead sun... The Biltong's central lump
undulated faintly. Sickly, restless heavings were noticeable
as it struggled to hold onto its dwindling life... On the
concrete platform, in front of the dying Biltong, lay a heap
of originals to be duplicated. Beside them, a few prints had
been commenced, unformed balls of black ash mixed with
the moisture of the Biltong's body, the juice from
which it laboriously constructed its prints.”
[[Dick, P.K. 1991. Pay for the Printer. In: Second Variety.
The collected stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume III. New
York: Citadel Twilight, pp. 239–252.]]

In Philip K. Dick’s short story Pay for the Printer, the

technology on which an entire civilization has depended
is failing and its civilians simply have to figure out how the portfolio of biotechnology into the chorography of
they are going to start the process of living and making space, using these insights to develop work that confers
again. In other words, they have to figure out how they environments and structures with some of the properties
will re-relate to the actual condition of their times, not of living things like movement, sensitivity and self-
how generations lived before them. repair, that are not necessarily given the full status
of being “alive”. These soft living architectures are
This question of “worlding” is at the heart of my practice, alternative territories – or parallel worlds, whose
a term that is associated with Martin Heidegger’s notion construction incorporates the fields of architecture,
of “being in the world” that speaks of the actual process ecology, the origins of life, space and the body. Seeking
of living as fundamental to how the world is made. alternative modes of experience, soft living architectures
aim to discover how inhabited spaces may be valued
I bring the process of worlding into realization through differently than those that currently bolster an urban
the design discipline of experimental architecture that international property markets.
explores the possibility of living through alternative Projects include Future Venice – growing an artificial
modes of experience than those currently experienced limestone reef underneath that historic city using
and anticipated within our current global urban programmable droplets called protocells, Future Venice
industrial communities, which are built around the II – making a new island for the city from biofilms and
idea of buildings as sealed environments made of inert plastics and The Temptations of the Nonlinear Ladder
materials on plots of land, which are valued in terms of – a contemporary circus performance at the Palais de
their square footage and spatial location. Tokyo, Paris, where unstable media worked in synergy
with radical bodies to produce unstable, ectoplasmic
“Land-owning, shopping malls, corporate commerce, expressions of new spaces that exist between worlds.
factories, and indeed the very concepts of wealth and Yet experimental architecture –the mode of inquiry
poverty that drive much of social dynamics are all that informs the theory and practice of worlding – is not
underlaid with theories of economics that establish the defined by any one discipline. Indeed, it does not seek
relative value of products and labor, of things and of virtuosity in any particular specialty but constantly
people. The broad principles addressing individuality strives to develop an understanding of emerging
and community are, in effect, made tangible by these insights, tools, methods and obsessions that arise
theories. In modern times, two rival economic theories from the collision between these knowledge fields and
have come to dominate the discourse about what is the practices, to enable the synthesis of new opportunities
best way for people to live. It is important to realize that and approaches towards the choreography of space,
these theories do simply explain post facto why things bodily awareness and the nature of matter.
work as they do but actually inspire and instruct people
about what to do in the first place…” As such, experimental architecture is a form of
[[Woods, L. 12 October 2010. Knots: The architecture of knowledge making that is fundamentally synthetic,
problems. [online] Available at: https://lebbeuswoods. rather than analytical, reductive or expert – which is
wordpress.com/2010/10/12/knots-the-architecture-of- typical of Enlightenment approaches. It is an apparatus
problems/. [Accessed 10 September 2016].]] for inspiration; a framework for making spaces whose
details vvand events can never be fully known, but in
their making can be completely reworked, torn down
Here, within alternative spaces for habitation, my work and re-proposed as many iterative processes. But this
produces new apparatueses that shape the worlding is not a practice bedeviled by post-modern disassembly
experience – materials, technologies, methodologies, – murdering contradictions and imperfections as soon
installations –all expressed through the development of as they are exposed as endlessly ironic stances; it is a
“prototypes”. These are not however, the precursors of a collision, remodeling and propositioning of material
homogenizing model that is ready for mass manufacture events and their teleologies as an active coupled
but more like a form of embodied thinking and reflection. exploration of being in the world – where “the world
My work incoproates many different disciplines itself is part of the fundamental constitution of what it
from medical sciences, to origins of life experiments, means to be human”
performance art, contemporary circus, modeling, [[Critchley, S. 22 June 2009. Being and Time, part 3:
computing and creative writing. Each of these skill sets Being-in- the-world. The Guardian.[online]. Available
enables a different exploration of the worlding process. at:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/
belief/2009/jun/22/heidegger-religion-philosophy.
One of the core prototypes of my practice is to fully engage [Accessed on 10 September 2016]]
 The current idea of the “future” is woefully outmoded
My work is therefore not the pinnacle of a body of – it is disconnected from the “now” and riddled with
incontestable knowledge but nor is it a post-factual technotopian narratives that are universally played out
proposition based on rhetoric, or aesthetics alone – but an in amorphous places that all resemble San Francisco. Here
ongoing birthing, testing and experiencing of alternative “genius entrepreneurs” become millionaires by the time
spaces, disciplines, concepts, relational possibilities, they’re teenagers and develop products that further cleave
collisions, contradictions, subversion and paradoxes. For it the material from the digital
is only by clashing matter, ideas and values together – and realms. The horizons of these futures are speculative
inhabiting them – that we may challenge what we assume markets and commercial empires that are synthesized
to be true, and find new meaningful ways forwards that from linear trajectories, typical of Information Technology
we rehearse until they become adopted as culture – rather business forecasts, which are thrust like fishing lines
than become stranded in an ironic island of intellectual towards convergence points where mathematical scrying
inaction from which we disdainfully watch our world boil tools can no longer function. These “singularities” are
and drown, declaring to the sweet melody of a Kurtzweil invisible spaces and the site of existential apocalypses
keyboard violin, “there, we told you so”. for the digitally enlightened. There is no end to the
innovation in these line-casting futures. No limit to the
There is no remedy for the present apocalypse. The tipping profit that can be made. When framed by innovation and
points of the world we once thought we knew, have already product development new “apps”, new “hardware” and
collapsed and irreversible changes are afoot. There is new “virtual” experiences spontaneously appear, which
simply no going backwards from our present situation. change absolutely nothing about the present reality but
And while we can limit further damage through considered employ diversionary tactics that look for gaps in “futures
remediation and make ourselves more comfortable by investment”, which make a lot of the same kind of line-
clinging to familiar experiences and modes of existence for casters even more wealthy than they already are. So,
as long as we are able, this is not the same as developing the developed world, coveting the prospect of unlimited
a new paradigm for worlding – the way we shape and personal gain, wants “in” on all these “get hyper rich
dwell in our habitats. In this extraordinary time there are quick” schemes, and lauds and invests in these “futures” –
no fixes, no single moments of technological salvation by smart cities, epically profitable Moonshots, and reworked
transforming our fleshy bodies into the techno fossils that hardware that guzzles renewables rather than fossil fuels.
shape machines as a willful process of self-mummification, These
or uploading our consicounesses into urn-like digital markets meld with the body, transforming its investors
storage vessels. into immortals, while the rest of the globe rots in the
Nor is it ethically acceptable to simply stand by as the world leftovers - its filth, its non-degradable materials, non-
collapses according to an accelerationist death-drive. It is recyclable i-Products, smogs, rising waters, proliferating
time to reach escape velocity and start a different way of plastics, collapsing ecosystems, insatiable consumerism,
living. exploitation by stealth and depletion of rare metals, on
which this whole gadget empire teeters.
But where should we turn?
“Futures thinking” is triumph of the modern will, where
“Once upon a time, the future was where wondrous and the only rebellion is dystopian. Yet this is not revolution,
terrible things were going to happen, where the present its submission to more of the same kind of thinking where
would be transformed, for better or worse, and in a sense we are ironically aware – as if awake during our own brain
reach fruition. surgery – that this “progress” will inflict suffering on
The idea of the future has all but vanished from architectural those that have already been extorted before. And yet,
conversation and discussion. Perhaps because the present because this is not in a real space, but happening some time
is one of self-satisfaction—there is nothing to ripen and in “the future” – a time and place that is distant from the
mature—and no great chances being taken that can here and now – it stands without accountability. Without
succeed, or fail. Perhaps the future has become just another ethics. Sans community. One way missions to Mars, island
place we already know, or hope we know.” states for refugees, penthouse enclaves for the super rich,
[[Woods, L. 18 September 2008. Dead words. Lebbeus Woods. untouchable charlatans and cruel despots can all thrive
[online] Available at: https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress. without consequence, because in valuing “the future”, the
com/2008/09/18/dead-words/. [Accessed 15 September present is no longer “real”.
2016]]
The process of worlding turns this paradigm around. It is
not based in another space, time, or distant location – but While we provoke the unknown, we will not remain in this
in a deep and responsive present. It is fully engaged in the state of unknowingness.
opportunities, contradictions and difficulties of existence
in the here and now – but also takes a longer view of the As we immerse ourselves in strange assemblages,
impacts of these same conditions, and considers them as prototypes, models, installations and enactments, new
ongoing. modes of thought, forms of making and expert practices
will begin to condense. In orienting ourselves around these
Worlding does not seek absolution or sanitization of the spaces and reading its fields and interfaces like language,
countless difficulties faces in the present but, as Donna it may be possible to generate new kinds of design
Haraway notes, fully expects to “stay with the [current] weather – metamorphic entities, which precipitate fresh
trouble” downpourings of words and ideas that enable strange things
[[Haraway, D. (2013). SF: Science Fiction, Speculative to spring up everywhere – even from out of the ground.
Fabulation, String Figures, So Far. Ada: A Journal of Gender, Worlding embodies rather than represents the processes
New Media, and Technology, No.3.[online] Available at: it discusses by curating and producing texts, ideas, quotes,
doi:10.7264/N3KH0K81. [Accessed 14 th September 2016].]]. themes, poetic expressions, narratives and stories, which
are collided to become condensations of new modes of
thought. This book channels these fragments as a form of
It therefore accepts risk, uncertainty and surprise as choreography that suggests the beginnings of a theatrical
being part of the fabric and responsibility of (collective) space and performance laboratory for the practice of
existence. worlding. As such, students, amateurs and professionals
And yet, the modern world has not equipped us for that, alike, enter into a participative spatial experience, more
so we must first begin our worlding process by thinking akin to an exhibition space than a sequential set of
radically and differently. What words should we use, what rhetorical arguments. Yet these are not fictions, designed
ideas do we explore, what tools are appropriate, how to entertain – but parallel worlds that offer insights and
should we live? tactics about how we might conduct new experiments
that keep us off balance in our thinking so that we evade
Indeed, the process of “worlding” is a time of question consensus, universality, homogeneity and equilibrium.
shaping – questions that we are yet to inhabit and discover
answers for. Perhaps we will encounter a weird Baroque of performance,
drama, tension, exuberance, grandeur, experiment and the
“Fergesson grabbed the cup. Trembling, he turned it over poetry of life, which may become those seeds that enable
and over. "You made it with what? I don't us to invent new stories about our collective livability
see how! What did you make it out of?" "We and mark our first steps towards a (re)worlding of this
knocked down some trees." From his belt, Dawes planet. Observed from within a Cambrian explosion of
slid something that gleamed metallically, dully, in the design choices, excesses, diversity and an abundance of
weak sunlight. "Here -- be careful you don't cut vibrant spaces an apparent Tower of Babel will gradually
yourself." become comprehensible and even familiar to us. Through
its diplomacy we will find coherence in the diversity of
The knife was as crude as the cup -- hammered, bent, tied experiences and paradoxes that these changing times
together with wire. "You made this knife?" provoke. The time of homogeneity, theories of everything,
Fergesson asked, dazed. "I can't believe it. universalities and one-stop techno fixes will be subsumed
Where do you start? You have to have tools to make this. by a flourishing of possibility and further refined by the
It's a paradox!" His voice rose with hysteria. processes of living.
"It isn't possible!"
[[Dick, P.K. 1991. Pay for the Printer. In: Second Variety. Indeed, our inhabitation of these emerging spaces is
The collected stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume III. New the measure of success of soft living architectures.
York: Citadel Twilight, pp. 239–252.]] Their ambition - to enrich the material flows and
movement within our living space to generate alternative
choreographies, which are asserted through their own
And while such a task seems daunting, impossible, harder poetics and articulated in sensible metrics. Soft living
to imagine than the end of the world – we must, as in Dick’s architectures will no longer be constrained by existing
short story, take our first steps by accepting imperfection, conventions –such as post occupancy surveys and energy
risk, change, uncertainty and chance with no more efficiency evaluations – but will even spill into spaces
intellectual or technical status that that of the amateur. beyond our native, and terrestrial environments, from
which our inhabitation of them will bring about new
modes of existence. Ultimately, worlding aims to create
the conditions whereby an ongoing relationship with this
incredible planet and all its diverse living systems is the
natural condition of humanity.