Situated architectural historical ecologies

Abstract

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved.This chapter reveals the author's discussion with Adrian Forty about non-standard biological thinking and his work on the geopolitics of concrete and the politics of the commons. And, while Adrian does not personally express himself through these particular vocabularies, the role of the historian in 'taking care' of understanding the co-mutual relationship between the individual and his/her environmental, cultural and technological contexts, and the consequent impact of these for human and non-human relations are, for the author, vibrant throughout his work. The author also see his work as contributing to the 'care of the self and others' that defines those thinkers and practitioners who also, perhaps more explicitly than Adrian, examine their ethical, poetic and ecological architectural relations. The discussion here also follows Alison Stone's helpful identification of Irigaray's later work as 'realist essentialism' in which male and female sex differences are real, naturally existing expressions that are independent of a society's particular cultural expression of sexual difference, and which consequently also construct relations between women and men, and their respective environments.