Architectures of Relations: Environment Plus Organism (Routledge Research in Architecture)

This book examines how environments and organisms dynamically produce one another. As such, it takes its title very seriously (and very literally): to speak of environment plus organism is the only viable way where neither term gets to be reduced to the other. It is rather their coming together, what thinkers like Gilbert Simondon call transindividuation, and its unfolding that stand as the most exigent ambition of this book. In simple terms, this book claims that the minimum unit of analysis in any architectural account is always the environment, the organism, and their (technological) plusing, examined as one.

Architectures of Relations has three interrelated ambitions, which are fundamentally pedagogical: (1) Irreducibility: it ‘makes no sense whatsoever to try to understand the anatomy of half a chicken’ as Gregory Bateson puts it, and this book makes a constant plea for an architectural account of the Batesonian claim. (2) A Real Copernican Revolution: our ingrained anthropocentrism always sees the organism as antecedent to the environment. To counter it, this book cultivates an architectural ethos that sees organisms and environments as co-constitutive equals. (3) Exteriority of Relations: highlighting the power of plusing, this book underscores the ever-changing how of a form of life. A mode of existence never pre-exists an event of plusing environments and organisms.

Readers of this book will be exposed to an original philosophy of architecture that brings together transdisciplinary concerns through concrete architectural examples, while opening its audience to a broad population of interests, from social sciences to media studies and affect theory. Written in a playful manner, it wishes to make accessible notions, concepts and ideas that can transform contemporary architectural thinking and open it to a broad speculative logic. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, architectural theory, architectural history, and philosophy.

Stavros Kousoulas is Associate Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory, and the research leader of the Department of Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment in TU Delft. He studied architecture at NTUA Athens and at TU Delft and received his PhD cum laude from IUAV Venice. He is the author of the monographs Architectural Technicities (Routledge, 2022), Athens: Notes on Urban Immanence (Routledge, 2025) and multiple edited volumes.

Andrej Radman is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy at Delft University of Technology. Over two decades, his research examines the nexus between architecture and radical empiricism. His latest monograph, Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation, advances this inquiry. A licensed architect, he has delivered built and award-winning projects. Radman received the Croatian Association of Architects Annual Housing Award in 2002 and the Mark Cousins Theory Award in 2023, recognising his contributions to contemporary architectural theory.