Investigating the Affective Experience of New School Buildings: Animism, Plasticity, and SF design

• In Event: Posthumanism, Feminism, Critical Theory

Abstract

The paper investigates the sensory affective experiences of school buildings through an interdisciplinary study across education and architecture collaborated which involved a six-month ethnography of a new school building, involving students and staff. The paper thinks with and across critical (post)humanisms, sensory ethnography and speculative architectural design to interrogate new school design and how it serves a future characterized by spatial fragmentation and information extraction, which makes living and learning in school buildings a matter of calculation. Contrapuntally we engage the concepts of animism, plasticity and SF to recognize the ways school dwellers engage in practices of material inventiveness and animation to rematerialize and resist the experience of extractive, fractured and uneven spaces.

Authors

• Laura Trafi-Prats, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University