Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common

Drawing from a diverse range of interdisciplinary voices, this book explores how spaces of care shape our affective, material, and social forms, from the most intimate scale of the body to our planetary commons.

Typical definitions of care center around the maintenance of a livable life, encompassing everything from shelter and welfare to health and safety. Architecture plays a fundamental role in these definitions, inscribed in institutional archetypes such as the home, the hospital, the school, and the nursery. However, these spaces often structure modes of care that prescribe gender roles, bodily norms, and labor practices. How can architecture instead engage with an expanded definition of care that questions such roles and norms, producing more hybrid entanglements between our bodies, our collective lives, and our environments? Chapters in this book explore issues ranging from disabled domesticities and nursing, unbuilding whiteness in the built environment, practices and pedagogies of environmental care, and the solidarity networks within ‘The Cloud’. Case studies include Floating University Berlin, commoning initiatives by the Black Panther party, and hospitals for the United Mine Workers of America, among many other sites and scales of care.

Exploring architecture through the lenses of gender studies, labor theory, environmental justice, and the medical humanities, this book will engage students and academics from a wide range of disciplines.

Brittany Utting is an assistant professor of Architecture at Rice University and co-founder of the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. Her work examines the relationship between architecture, collective life, and environmental care. She previously taught at the University of Michigan as the 2017-2018 Willard A. Oberdick Fellow. Utting is a registered architect in New York and practiced at Thomas Phifer and Partners as a project designer for the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.