Joseph Altshuler Launches New Book "Creatures Are Stirring: A Guide to Architectural Companionship"
The book, co-authored with Julia Sedlock, is launching in-person on Monday, November 8th at 6:00pm at the Chicago Cultural Center, in a program hosted by the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The program will include panel discussion with respondents Joyce Hwang, Design With Company, and Fred Scharemn, and an audience Q&A moderated by Jayne Kelley. A limited number of advanced copies will be for sale at the event.
The book combines flash fictions written from buildings’ point-of-view, creative essays, and case studies that re-conceptualize buildings as our intimate companions by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments and fictional enhancements that suggest animal-like agency. How might the buildings in our lives become more like friends that we can enjoy long-term relationships with, and less like piles of inert materials that merely serve our basic needs? The book rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture to imagine playfully compassionate and co-habitable futures.