The Posthuman is the new paradigm of architecture. Encompassing related topics such as the post-Anthropocene, more-than-human, non-human, trans-human, anti-human and meta-human, this AD presents a synthesis of the architectural Posthuman. Proliferating and diversifying, the Posthuman is now as planetary as it is everyday, and as disruptive, contested and contradictory as it is sublime. From the detail to the interplanetary, and from real and fictional designs and spaces to more proleptic universe-building futures, the issue describes and speculates on these spectacular and shocking new species. It envisions the Posthuman through the array of emerging technologies, and features original contributions from academics, professionals, design studios and related disciplines and domains. These new spaces include the full electromagnetic spectrum and present new entanglements of Posthuman theories and technologies. Contributors: Mario Carpo; Paul Dobraszczyk; Alberto Fernandez; Ariane Harrison; Sandra Häuplik-Meusburger and Olga Bannova; Steven Hutt; Xavier de Kestelier, Levent Ozruh and Jonathan Irwan; Sylvia Lavin; Jacopo Leveratto; Tyson Hosmer, Roberto Bottazzi and Mollie Claypool; Colbey Reid and Dennis Weiss; Andrew Witt; and Brent Sherwood. Featured designers and architects: Blue Origin, Christian Rex van Minnen, Harrison Atelier, and Hassell.

For long, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people and for people only. And today, even though some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative researches still struggle to emerge. This is why this book collects, reconstructs, and discusses archetypal models of posthuman architecture, from the cabin of Henry David Thoreau to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. To show how architectural, landscape, and industrial designers, be they professional practitioner or not, redefined their tools in order to meet the functional and symbolic needs of new and different kinds of subjects. All this in ten monographic architectural tales, thought to trace the evolution of an extended idea of coexistence between humans and other species and technologies.

These essays by architects, theorists, and sustainable designers together provide a framework to help you develop your own guidelines to approaching to your work. Introductions define key terms, and nine case studies demonstrate the concepts.

What does it mean to think beyond humanism? Is it possible to craft a mode of philosophy, ethics, and interpretation that rejects the classic humanist divisions of self and other, mind and body, society and nature, human and animal, organic and technological? Can a new kind of humanities-posthumanities-respond to the redefinition of humanity's place in the world by both the technological and the biological or "green" continuum in which the "human" is but one life form among many? Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe-one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory-ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin's writings, Wallace Stevens's poetry, Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture. For Wolfe, a vibrant, rigorous posthumanism is vital for addressing questions of ethics and justice, language and trans-species communication, social systems and their inclusions and exclusions, and the intellectual aspirations of interdisciplinarity. In What Is Posthumanism? he carefully distinguishes posthumanism from transhumanism (the biotechnological enhancement of human beings) and narrow definitions of the posthuman as the hoped-for transcendence of materiality. In doing so, Wolfe reveals that it is humanism, not the human in all its embodied and prosthetic complexity, that is left behind in posthumanist thought.

Drawing on both the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, and more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Drawing both on the work of modern theorists like Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer and on more recent poststructuralist thought, K. Michael Hays creates an entirely new method of reading architectural production. Challenging much of the traditional wisdom about modernism and the avant-garde, Hays argues that a rigorously articulated "posthumanist" position was actually developed in the modernist architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. He reinterprets their buildings, projects, and writings as constructions of this new category of subjectivity.

The most significant architectural spaces in the world are now entirely empty of people. The data centres, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialised agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis. This issue is an atlas of sites, architectures and infrastructures that are not built for us, but whose form, materiality and purpose is configured to anticipate the patterns of machine vision and habitation rather than our own. We are said to be living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet. This collection of spaces, however, more accurately constitutes an era of the Post-Anthropocene, a period where it is technology and artificial intelligence that now computes, conditions and constructs our world. Marking the end of human-centred design, the issue turns its attention to the new typologies of the post-human, architecture without people and our endless expanse of Machine Landscapes. Contributors: Rem Koolhaas, Merve Bedir and Jason Hilgefort, Benjamin H Bratton, Ingrid Burrington, Ian Cheng, Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon and Kathy Velikov, John Gerrard, Alice Gorman, Adam Harvey, Jesse LeCavalier, Xingzhe Liu, Clare Lyster, Geoff Manaugh, Tim Maughan, Simone C Niquille, Jenny Odell, Trevor Paglen, Ben Roberts. Featured interviews: Deborah Harrison, designer of Microsoft’s Cortana; and Paul Inglis, designer of the urban landscapes of Blade Runner 2049.

The link between architecture and art and the sublimity it can create has a history that stretches back millennia. From cave paintings to the stained glass and saintly icons in churches and cathedrals, to the geometric and calligraphic treatments of mosques and contemporary artists channelling architecture and vice versa, and so much else. This AD is about the contemporary interactions between living artists and architects, and the artistic practices, such as poetry and abstractions, that architects adopt to develop ideas for their projects. The issue features artists, architects, curators, musicians, poets and designer craftspeople, illustrating the current rich mix of architectonic constructions, interventions and set pieces that range from musical performance to exhibition designs, glass works and digital 3D scanning. It lays out the wide spectrum and beauty of these sublime correspondences, with contributions from architects about their own artistic practices, and creative works viewed through the eyes of architectural commentators. An explosion of colour, form and creative tactics for making multifaceted work that above all is architectural, it offers a cornucopia of possibilities. Contributors: Peter Baldwin, Kathy Battista, Nic Clear, Mathew Emmett, Paul Finch, Paul Greenhalgh, Hamed Khosravi, Eva Menuhin, Felix Robbins, and Simon Withers. Featured architects and artists: a-project, Captivate, Brian Clarke, Andy Goldsworthy, Barbara Hepworth, Danny Lane, Ben Johnson, Brendan Neiland, Ian Ritchie, and Zoe Zenghelis.