RICHARD FADOK

My research in cultural anthropology examines the politics of architecture at a time of ecological crisis. Bringing together the anthropology of design and multispecies ethnography, I conduct fieldwork across the United States to understand how contemporary architects are reconfiguring our relationships with other species, and with each other, through emerging design practices that engage with nonhuman life. These practices include biomimicry, the subject of my first book project, as well as multispecies design and biodesign. My interdisciplinary scholarship integrates concepts and methods from science and technology studies, architectural history and theory, and the environmental humanities, particularly animal studies and posthumanism.

Two questions drive my research program on the material culture of building today: (1) How have anthropogenic changes in climate and biodiversity, and the political logics around them, prompted transformations in the discipline of architecture – its epistemologies, materialities, and subjectivities? Following my formal training in biology, I am especially curious about how architects have turned to scientific discourses of ecology, ethology, and molecular biology to comprehend animals, plants, and other organisms. (2) How do these disciplinary transformations alter the political economy of nature and the phenomenology of the built environment more broadly? By answering these questions, I aim to contribute ethnographically informed visions of sustainability and anthropological theories of architecture in its more-than-human dimensions.

In tandem with my theoretical interests, I am interested in experimental forms of ethnography that dialogue with architects. On an abstract level, I am interested in the history, structure, and function of interdisciplinarity between anthropology and architecture. On a practical level, I have served as a consultant with HDR on their regenerative design framework; I have written book reviews on architecture, for anthropologists, inThe Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and on anthropology, for architects, in Domus; I have organized a symposium with architects, historians, and anthropologists; and I am working on two digital humanities projects that will benefit practicing architects: a visual encyclopedia of animal architecture (e.g., nests) and a public database of blueprints for DIY multispecies design.