Peg Rawes: "Architectural Ecologies of Care"

This lecture examines the philosopher Luce Irigaray’s work as a biopolitical and ecological philosophy of life. It argues that Irigaray (like Guattari, Braidotti and Haraway) generates positive expressions of life differences as zoe or ‘care of the self’ rather than the negative biopolitics of exclusion or normative self-management that Agamben and Eposito take from Foucault’s Lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics.

Such biopolitics of care are especially relevant now given the crisis in human, non-human and environmental relations which require ‘another way of entering into relation with oneself, with the world, with the other(s)’. In these biopolitical ecologies, Irigaray emphasises the cultivation of diverse relations between places and patterns of inhabitation as powerful modes of imagining and building diverse psychophysical ecologies for individual women, men, communities and societies in the present, and in the future.

Peg Rawes is Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of Research at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture where her teaching and research focus on how built and social architectural cultures are informed by philosophical ideas of aesthetics, ecology, materials, subjectivity and technology. Her current AHRC-funded research examines how ‘equalities of wellbeing’ informs affordable housing design in the UK, developing from her recent publication, Architectural Relational Ecologies (2013), which examines political and material forms of architectural sustainability, and her earlier studies into Spinoza’s ‘geometric thinking’ for socially- and environmentally-focused architectural design. Publications include: 'Spinoza's Geometric Ecologies' in Interstices 13: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts (December 2012);  ‘Spinoza's architectural passages and geometric comportments’, in B. Lord (ed.) Spinoza Beyond Philosophy (2012); Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and Towards Deleuze (2008), andIrigaray for Architects (2007).

presents the sixth and final public evening lectures to be held this term at the KTH School of Architecture within the Architecture + Gender Lecture Series, part of the course Architecture + Gender: Feminist Design Power-Tools . 

The talk by Peg Rawes is the second part of a double lecture special event in collaboration with the lecture series "Today's 20th Century: Modernism and after", and will be preceded by a lecture by Teresa Stoppani of the Leeds School of Architecture.