Rituals of Architecture: Using Ecosystems as Co-Designers

This body of works brings New Materialist theories and sensibilities into working architectural design practice. Eric Guibert’s ‘gardener architect’ approach re-frames architectural practice as a form of co-design, in which the architect collaborates with different types and scales of ecosystems, including clients, users, climates, landscapes, plants, soils and other agents to propose a new ecological and cosmopolitical approach to architecture. The research focuses on ‘rituals’ for engaging in architecture with an emphasis on time, maintenance, care, and co-creativity in a New Materialist framework for what architectural practice could be. This offers an alternative to conventional design approaches which focus primarily on humans and prioritise a ‘finished’ final design product. The research considers what ‘useful’ rituals as architecture could be, as well as the tangible and intangible elements that constitute them. Projects were developed through Guibert’s work as a sole practitioner, especially through projects which ran over extended periods of time, unusual in such practice. The renovation and rewilding of a rural landscape and farm buildings acts as an effective laboratory for testing these ongoing methodologies over time, another key project being the redesign of the building and landscape of a charitable organisation in central London. Other projects allowed further aspects of this ‘gardener’ architecture to be tested and developed. Guibert argues that, where most design approaches block the creative capacity of ecosystems and focus primarily on humans, these projects nurture complex capacities of resilience and agency as a central architectural aim and investigate ecological ways of design using emergent capacities of ecosystems. The research has been presented in lectures, exhibitions and debates in various international research and practice forums, and will be published in Geohumanities, and the ‘Modern Animism’ lecture being co-organised with the Garden Museum in London, both delayed by Covid-19 into 2021.