Becoming Rocks understands the scope of architecture within the intricate swarm of the planet and our connections to it. Here, architecture plays a mediating role between animals, plants, and minerals, forming diverse configurations that traverse all equally. A mountain or a river and their interweaving with urban fabrics become the focus of research. In parallel, our own ontology is trained here, testing the ways in which, as affective and embodied beings, we engage in architecture based on the imaginaries that inhabit us. Our bodies themselves are affective, somatic, multispecies environments. Recognizing this is, in itself, a manifesto of architectural research.

Biologist Edward Osborne Wilson described our body as “a compound of matter—a rock—animated with electricity. When the charge is extinguished, our body returns to the earth. Over geological time, it will compress and turn back into rock, in an endless cycle.” “A rock is life in slow motion, and life is a rock in acceleration.”

This cyclical vision of materiality reconnects with the thought of Spinoza, Goethe, and Haeckel—perspectives that today are developed in architecture by figures such as Gokhan Kodalak at Pratt Institute alongside Manuel de Landa. At the same time, it aligns with an approach to architecture from subjective embodiments, as explored by thinkers like Rosi Braidotti or architects such as Ariane Lourie Harrison, director of Harrison Atelier. The innovation of this course will be to rethink our ways of practicing, designing, and researching—pushing these lines of work further—by operating with mineral intelligence. Recognizing ways of thinking, like those of mountains, is a tool to consider when addressing the present challenges facing architecture, along with its research and representations.

Geology—the science of the Earth aimed at understanding the evolution of the planet and its inhabitants through the analysis of certain landmarks, such as rocks—serves as a model, providing various architectural and research tools that traverse the corporeal and territorial in an interscalar manner. By taking landmarks—or rocks—both living and mineral as models of analysis, we can study the relationships we establish with them or how we embody them, revealing new narratives and (secondary?) worlds under which architectural research will be questioned from different perspectives.

The mineral realm unfolds here as a reservoir of inorganic intelligence, in which architecture can be both participant and ally. To achieve this, various modules will be proposed, exploring how the architectural is shaped by still-hidden strata emerging from affective and somatic shifts, as well as insights offered by geographical and crystallographic entities in terms of temporality and the articulation of material processes.

The affective-somatic dimension will serve as the axis through which we engage directly with architecture and its ecology in an experimental and innovative approach, designed to facilitate novel learning environments for architectural design, representation, and research. Mineral intelligences will provide new operative tools for:

A/ The way of understanding the temporality of projects.

B/ The relational mode of connecting to other entities.

C/ The representational approach to creating, configuring, and drawing these new architectural realities.

D/ The way of embedding the architectural project within a simultaneous bio-geo environment.

On the other hand, the scenario we have “in sight” today is not enough; we must move forward with a geological perspective—where the future is already here, projected even further, and where the mineral past speaks to us through cycles already traversed, from which we can learn.

Thus, in the Becoming Rocks seminar, we will experiment not only with new theories but also with highly idiographic methodologies—ones that do not follow global or statistical modes of practice but rather singular, unique, and personal approaches—while still being extrapolable to the methods we will need to develop this new perspective. When the global is exhausted, we must turn our attention to the sparks of the specific.

Mineral intelligences in architectural projects offer the opportunity to see architecture as part of something greater—not only following ecological premises but advancing toward the creation of a shared intelligence. An intelligence in which forests, oceans, vegetal and animal realms, and technical systems, among others, form an interwoven and collective system.

Architecture under this lens is both root and fruit, shaped not by the human intelligence of its author (individual or collective) but by the interaction of multiple intelligences that constitute common and planetary life. Let us momentarily imagine a geo-bio continuum. Consider the human-nonhuman continuum. Recognize knowing and non-knowing entities, as well as the material processes surrounding them. Let us think of sociotechnical and biomaterial intelligences that offer alternatives to logocentric and anthropocentric ways of knowing and thinking. Affectivity and somatic awareness are some of the modes of understanding beyond logos—they are direct relational extensions with the intelligences that compose the planet. Here, intelligence is defined as the ability to repair, recreate, redesign, react, and make decisions within a fluid and shared network, one that is multi-scalar and multi-material. What emerges is an affective techno-materialism, a somatic collective of bodies that articulate and separate through compounds, activating according to variable limits.

We propose structuring the seminar around four key axes:

1/ Multiple Bodies > Bodies are multiple not only because of the dimensions they harbor but also due to their ability to assemble in diverse and variable ways over time. For which bodies do we design? For how many species do we design? How does architecture engage with more-than-human bodies and other cognizant entities? What movements do we orchestrate? What role do somatic-affective agents such as the sun or mountains play? Can architecture be part of multiple bodies, assembling alongside organic and inorganic agents and integrating itself as part of them?

2/ Sentient Mineralogies > Compositions that generate processes, creating new perspectives on the mineral realm within an expanded temporal framework. Is architecture a form of distributed cognition? What kinds of connections does it establish when combined with AI-driven technical systems? Can architecture embed itself within a forest or a mountain? How does an architectural project amalgamate itself into cycles and processes, not only within its own systems but within broad-spectrum temporalities? What modes of affecting and being affected does a building possess? Can its systems react to the ecologies it is inserted into? Can architecture connect itself to these accidents and domains of organic/inorganic matter?

3/ Affective Materialism > Material as a highly organized state of relational affective processes that constitute reality. What affects traverse an architectural project? How can affect be integrated into urban, geographic, and architectural networks? What relationships do people establish with architectural and ecosystemic objects? What forces of attraction and repulsion shape the various social, material, or urban networks through which an architectural project moves? Can construction systems generate more-than-human connections? Can architecture itself be a form of affective mineral intelligence? What affects mobilize us today in the generation of innovation and knowledge in architecture as we embed ourselves within this broader system?

4/ Images and Imaginaries > Imaginaries determine whether something can or cannot happen in a society. What imaginaries shape our practices as architects and our vision of the parameters we work with? How can we reexamine archetypal images in novel ways? What radical new imaginaries emerge in architecture as a result of current crises led by climate emergencies? At what points in architectural history have we turned to imagination and utopia as methods for progress and innovation? What were the consequences, and how can we learn from those experiments to foster a radical and committed practice today? What new imaginaries can we cultivate to fully integrate architecture with living systems, mineral systems, and their associated material processes?

These are some of the key questions that the seminar will seek to answer through its various content and actions.

Becoming Rocks: Mineral Intelligences in Architectural Projects is, therefore, a seminar that initiates a relational weave, fostering discovery and advancement in architectural research—always understanding architecture as a construction fused with the planet, its layers and accidents; continuous with its fluids, gases, and states. Current ecological perspectives are thus expanded by a comprehensive, interwoven, and inseparable system, capable of multiple reconfigurations while maintaining solidity and consistency based on the coherence of its various scales—as if it were a vast multi-focal endocrine system in continuous transformation.

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