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Architects, with the deep material entanglements their buildings embody, do well to engage with ecofeminist ideas and practicesAgroup of women huddle around a table, pulling nowatsome woollen thread, now at some reclaimed plasticrubbish.Together, they are crafting a compositionthat creatively resists planetary devastation. Across more than27 nations, groups of women have been gathering at museums, schools, universities and even at a girls juvenile detention centre, crocheting complex hyperbolic planes to form fibrous and frilly coral atolls, thereby contributing to a planetary consciousnessraising exercise. Mixing environmental activism withmathematics, sciences and the arts, they are handweaving aprosthetic accompaniment to the Great Barrier Reef and its kin. Located on the east coast of Australia, and arguably Earths largest organism, this impressive coral reef suffered its fifth mass bleaching event due to climate change last year. This constitutes a process ofslow death.In her 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (ARFebruary 2022) celebrates the interdisciplinary knowledge andhandson loopy materialities of sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheims Crochet Coral Reef, a collective action that has been unfolding for nearly 20 years now. In the process, theAustralian sisters have been fostering what I would call anecofeminist practice of care, creating an art of living on this damaged planet. What can be witnessed in the Crochet Coral Reefisa remarkable performance of infrastructural love, suggesting ways of rethinking architectural practice as a material and spatial art that places us in intimate sympoietic (Haraways term for collective-creative) relationships with environmental milieus.Ecofeminism, also known as ecological feminism, makes the basicclaim that there is a profound connection between the domination of women and minority groups and the domination ofnature. Failing to acknowledge this connection means that werisk continuing to exploit both. This is something that First Nationspeople the world over have known as practical wisdom formillennia. Ecofeminism argues against the conceit of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, and in so doing asksdifficult questions about inherited western rationalist philosophical frameworks, and how they posit progress and growthas inherently good.The Crochet Coral Reef isan ongoing and evolving artwork that depends on a global community of hands to crochet forms for the worlds dying coral reefs. Organised by the sisters Christine and Margaret Wertheim since 2005, the Crochet Coral Reef is an impassioned and militantly un-tech response to the climate catastrophe, they write a one-stitch-at-a-time meditation on the anthropocene (lead image). In 1984, during a cross-country road trip, the US artist Betsy Damon observed many dried-up riverbeds caused by extensive damming and water diversion. They revealed to me the dried bones of the earth, she says. A Memory of Clean Water was her creative response: using handmade paper, she cast 75m of the Castle Creek riverbed in Utah (above), which haddried out after the construction of a dam upstream. The result was adeath mask of the riverCredit:Betsy DamonA contemporary understanding of ecofeminism emerged alongside the environmental movement of the late 1960s and 70s. French feminist, activist and prolific writer Franoise dEaubonne is usually credited with formulating the concept of ecofminisme in her 1974 manifesto Le Fminisme ou la Mort, recently translated by Verso into English as Feminism or Death in 2022. What dEaubonne calls for here is an end to the destructive manifestations of patriarchal power. At the time it was first written, the stark choiceit presented was understood in the context of nuclear catastrophe, and death was one of a planetary scale. Yet, in the halfcentury since it first came out, we have continued to pursue what feminist maintenance artistMierle Laderman Ukeles calls the death instinct whose characteristics are development, separatism and individualism over the life instinct, which Ukeles also calls maintenance, in the ongoing rape and plunder of planet Earth.Back in the 1990s, an orientation towards ecofeminism wasmarked by a special issue of the feminist journal Hypatia. Introducing the special issue, Karen J Warren claimed that the 1990s would be the decade of the environment. If that was the case,then the long 90s have extended into the present day whileplanetary systems have come unhinged, and no warnings notfromthe 1970s, nor from the 1990s have been heeded.More recently, in 2017, for Avery Review, N Claire Napawan, EllenBurke and Sahoko Yui offered an ecofeminist approach toenvironmental design. Drawing attention to a deeper history, theyturned to early work in the ecological sciences led by the US industrial and safety engineer Ellen Swallow at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in the 1870s. Swallow drew attention to thepractical embodied knowledge associated with domestic duties, usually devalued as being mere womens work, and how a custodianship of the environment might be better managed based onthese insights. As the authors of the Avery Review article stress, practical connections can be forged between domestic ritual and thecreative process, as demonstrated in the work of artists like Ukeles and Jo Hanson. Through acts of public sweeping and cleaningperformatively, Ukeles and Hanson make visible the otherwise unseen labour of basic environmental care. Ecology, afterall, pertains to the household of nature, and what architects can learn is that the repetition of daily rituals, the cultivation ofgood habits, and material resourcefulness can go some way towards making a planetary difference. Those who spend a great number of unpaid hours performing reproductive labour within thehome already know this.Ecology pertains to the household of nature those who perform hours of unpaid reproductive labour within thehome already know thisIn 2023, Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken locate ecofeminism on their volcanic Chronograms of Architecture, a vast map of feminist spatial practices from around the world charting how such practices are thoroughly interwoven with unfurling worldhistorical events. I call their lively cartography volcanic because it represents the power of feminist theories as something like dynamic geologic forces, rendered in fiery magenta, blazing orange and calm doses of green. It demonstrates that feminist discourse is not a sedentary nora settled affair but alive with collective actions. Such maps are crucial. They lay out for all to see the diversity of feminist theories and practices, including ecofeminism. Courage gleaned from this impressive feminist genealogy can help in unsettling thestatus quoof architecture by challenging the insistence of patriarchal, capitalist and colonialist systems. The protean ecofeminist architect can be motivated, write Roberts and Aiken, totry out experimental storytelling, communitybuilding, educating, materialtesting, and fabricating new architectures.In this regard I think of the tireless work of the architect Doina Petrescu. With the Parisbased Atelier dArchitecture Autogree, Petrescu, Constantin Petcou and their collective have been undertaking participatory work for nearly three decades now,spending months and then years embedded within local communities rebuilding relational ecologies through architectural acts of commoning and care. Their materials are drawn from a reduced palette, using simple building systems that a community might work on together, and in the process gain new knowledge. EcoBox, for example, is an early systemproject from 2001 which engaged marginalised migrant communities and matched them withunderutilised spaces in theLaChapelle area of Paris to developneighbourhood practices such as gardening. Importantly forPetrescu, as the concept of systemproject suggests, architecture is not just an object, but an unfolding process and aprompt for critical thinking. The rhizomatic connections between ecological and community concerns continue to develop in their praxis as they transfer knowledge from one systemproject to thenext.In Spmi, the scholar Karin Reisinger has been working alongside women from the local Smi community to embroider memories of the town ofMalmberget. Here, theSwedish state-run ironmine is displacing populations to make way for further extraction. This collage shows a 1957 drawing by architect Folke Hederus, together with Reisingers photograph of the housing being demolishedCredit:Karin Reisinger / ArkDes Collections / Photo: Bjrn StrmfeldtKarin Reisinger, a spatial practitioner of care from Austria, worksclosely with a collective of women in the far north of Swedenin a mining town called Malmberget. Her work is also one ofcommunitybuilding and learning, combining handicrafts with critical thinking. The community she visits embroiders memories of a town displaced to make way for the everexpanding, yawning hole that is a local iron ore mining pit. All the while, Reisinger listens keenly to crossspecies stories, understanding that the local ecology is animated by the concerns of many actors including the Smi andtheir cultural tradition of reindeer herding. Here, architecture isas simple as the embroidery thread that recomposes through stitches the memoryimages of a town that once was. As Reisinger observes, the humble work of this community contributes toarchitectural heritage work, documenting a town whose livelihoodand subsequent upheaval is entangled with largescalemineral extraction.On the other side of the world, a woman and her family, working with an expanding and contracting collective of creative practitioners in and around Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, clears invasive blackberries from a former quarry on Gadubanud Country in the Otways. Here, she convenes regular Quarry Camps as pedagogical events, calling on participants to take the time to slowdown and express care for the local ecologies upon which they depend. Her name is Millie Cattlin. She composes modest labels, likethose sewn on childrens clothing for their first day of school TheFuture is Maintenance, Give Us Space and Time deploying humble domestic arts to enunciate urgent environmental imperatives. These days she has been spending time with the humble container technology that is the jar, working on preservation and fermentation. Container technologies, as Ursula Le Guin and Zo Sofia argue, have been fundamental to human sustenance and cultural development for time immemorial. As LeGuinputs it, before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. Architecture, for Cattlin and thecollective These Are the Projects We Do Together, intersects with the domestic arts, fostering opportunities for gathering andcollective learning. For the Quarry Camp, this has ledto theconstruction of the simplest of pavilions dedicated to bathing, eating, cooking, and gathering to listen and learn from oneanother. All the construction material is reclaimed, and only thescrews are new, because a screw facilitates not just assembly butdisassembly, meaning materials are at the ready for future adventures, rather than destined for the rubbish heap.Julieanna Preston, based in Wellington, New Zealand, combines feminist concerns with environmental ones as she engages in the mixed materials of local environmentworlds. While studying at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, she pursued many side jobs anything from repairing peoples houses, to gardening, to cleaning peoples homes. She explains how all these things composed a repertoire ofconcern dedicated to daily life and how one lives. Her creative practice persistently pushes the conceptual limits of what it might mean to undertake material tests. Endangering her own health, shehas hauled mud from a toxic river to a main street; wrapped herbody around coastal rocks seeking ecological communion; andwitha broom and cleaners dustcoat explored the legacy of maintenance art by drawing attention to all those marginalised, underrepresented and toooften racialised workers who render our environments liveable. For the ecofeminist the live body is involved, and certainly not inviolable. Her work acutely demonstrates the continuous tradition of feminist embodied and performative practice, including a recognition of the longtime focus of the feminist spatial practitioner on the material of their own body. Hercongress with rocks and stones, for instance, is reminiscent ofBetsy Damons early 80s feminist embodied project, Meditation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet, performed in front oftheAmerican Museum of Natural History in 1983 and on West Broadway in 1984, where the artist simply lay herself down on the pavement amid an assembly of gathered stones. Here, the continuity between the intuition of human embodiment and the vibrant material relations of environmentworlds is extended. The lesson tobe learnt: when our environments sour and wither, so do we.When a woman is penalised for pointing out that manels are not on, then your local institutional ecology has likely gone awry. A little bit weedy, a little bit toxicThere is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology ofweeds: this helpful refrain from Gregory Bateson, reiterated byFlix Guattari in his essay The Three Ecologies, reminds us thatwe need to think with ecologies in an expansive sense. We need to think of worldwide webs of relations that weave together mental, social and environmental ecologies; that crosscut institutional milieus and threatened natural habitats. It is about thinkingfeeling inextricable connections. You will have read about the sour ecologiesblighting schools of architecture where toxic masculinity environmentally takes hold like an algae bloom. A great deal of feminist mopup work, as architect and theorist Jennifer Bloomer would put it, is needed to clean up these messes. It is no easy task transforming a culture inside a petri dish, and the work is often quiet, underpaid and undervalued. The ecofeminist claims sorority with Sara Ahmeds feminist killjoy, someone who calls out everyday misogyny and racism and argues that policies and visionary strategy statements are meaningless without material evidence of practice on the ground. So, for example, when a woman is penalised for pointing out, again and again, that the allmale critical review panel in architecture (a manel) is not on, then things in your local institutional ecology have likely gone awry. A little bit weedy, alittlebit toxic.Despite its resilience and perpetual return, feminism and its critical and creative methodologies are too often sidelined, and atworst, maligned. This means that the work of the ecofeminist must be vigilant and resolute, for violent reprisals are always closeat hand. Sometimes we need an amulet to ward off evil, anadornment to empower us as we make our way through the negativespaces ofurban landscapes. This is especially the case forBlack women, racialised subjects, and any who are forcibly othered, as Miriam Hillawi Abraham argues with her project Objectsfor the Othered. Abraham is a multidisciplinary designer from AddisAbaba, Ethiopia, with a collaborative practice called aIn its current form, the LosAngeles River consists of a concrete 1930s flood control measure funnelling wastewater from the city directly to the sea. Lauren Bon and the Metabolic Studios ongoing Bending the River project redirects a small portion of the lowflow channel through a wetland treatment centre, and then to a number of local parks.This collage of 500photographs taken byDavid Baine in 2021 shows the first 90m of vitrified clay pipes installed as part of the projectCredit:Courtesy of Metabolic StudioLike the monster, the maligned figure of the witch shares a genealogy with the ecofeminist spatial practitioner. Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers and US author and selfproclaimed witch Starhawk, for example, use the conceptual persona of the witch to draw attention to the historical and continued violence against women and their modes of practical knowledge and how their intuition of ecological relationality has been overlooked. Thewitch, like the ecofeminist, stands in for material knowledge practices in contact with environmentworlds, performing rituals and practices that have been denigrated or dismissed. Since at leastthe enclosure of the commons, the guardians of knowledge, asStengers calls them, have divided the world into Exclusive Knowledge Zones, much like Special Economic Zones. In vocal opposition, an ecofeminist fights for the commons as they fight fortheir life and the livelihood of their community. Rather than cordoning off knowledge practices, the ecofeminist shares their expertise and builds community relations, much as the Wertheim sisters have done. Witches and monsters are unlikely figures in the practice of architecture, but they can be reclaimed and celebrated by ecofeminists who aim to joyously and disobediently draw attention to counterpractices by challenging disciplinary and societal norms.What use have architects for ecofeminism? In architecture, aspeculative discipline dedicated to imagining new worlds, andaprofessional practice hooked on the highs of development andrenewal (mixed with the anxiety of where to secure the next job), practitioners forget at their peril that they are not outside theenvironment for which they design. Architects material admixtures and spatial ambitions have lingering aftereffects onhuman and nonhuman communities and ecosystems. Ecofeminism asks us to slow down, to consider the enduring impactof our actions, lift our eyes from the plans and sections thatwe have lovingly drafted to consider the ecological milieus inwhich our best intentions will hit the material ground. As Zosia Dzierawska and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes have argued (AR November 2021), this mightmean radically rethinking the kinds of jobs the architect should be training for: Maintenance architect? Materials nurse? Environmental housekeeper? The imperatives for planetary maintenance and caregleaned from the practices outlined read: Follow the material! Pay close attention! Cultivate curiosity! Andstay with the trouble what choice do we have?This is the Keynote essay from AR March 2025: W Awards. Buy your copy at the ARs online shop, or read more from the issue here2025-03-10Kristina RapackiShare AR March 2025W AwardsBuy Now
