The Architecture of Human Exceptionalism Redrawing Our Relationship with Other Species

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Chiara Bottici 

Introduction: From architecture to ecotecture – an ecofeminist critique

Part I | Rethinking the Speciesist Framework

Chapter 1: Human Exceptionalism and Its Persistent Dualisms     

Chapter 2: Alternate Cartographies to Human Exceptionalism      

Chapter 3: WithIn Environments     

IUNCTURA I - Expansion Joint 1: drawing Parasitism

Part II | huMan Exceptionalism in Architecture

Chapter 4: Rise of the Inorganic                                                                  

Chapter 5: Architectural Rectitude              

Chapter 6: Typological Frameworks                                                            

IUNCTURA II - Expansion Joint 2: drawing Commensalism

Part III | Ecological Cartographies

Chapter 7: Ecologies of Consciousness                                                       

Chapter 8: Enmeshed Architectures                                                                         

Chapter 9: Ecological Empathy in Architecture                                          

IUNCTURA III - Expansion Joint 3: drawing Mutualism

CODA: Drawing as a Mode of Thinking

Index

Biography

Eva Perez de Vega is an architect and educator, philosopher, and co-founder of e+i studio, an architecture and design practice based in New York City. She teaches architecture and design at Parsons School of Design where she heads the Multispecies lab, and at Pratt she developed the Ecological Cartographies theme for degree project thesis. She holds degrees in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM) and a PhD in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research, with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies, as well as professional training from the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance. Through her practice and academic work, Eva advocates rethinking human exceptionalism by engaging architecture as a multispecies practice, choreographing spaces and environments that promote aesthetic innovation and ecological empathy. She lectures widely on topics related to architecture and ecology, animal ethics, and ecofeminism, and published her first book, Choreographing Space, in 2021.

In her timely and poignant work, The Architecture of Human Exceptionalism, Eva Perez de Vega explores a different kind of world-building – a world in which architecture offers a vehicle for ecological empathy to live more intelligently with, and not merely on, our earth.

Robert Kirkbride, Parsons School of Design + PreservationWorks

Humans are niche constructing animals – but so are an indefinite number of other species.  Eva Perez de Vega’s The Architecture of Human Exceptionalism is a timely and original intervention that joins a critique of human hybris with a compelling multi-species construction of the forms of what she calls ecotecture.  This book should change everyone’s understanding about the meaning of architecture.

J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research