Abstract/Summary

The work contained within this PhD by Published Work aims to encourage researchers and practitioners within the spatial disciplines to engage with the story worlds of sf. Through this commentary and the collected essays, I reflect on the moments where sf has illuminated my architectural thinking to demonstrate the critical creative potential of reading sf, particularly for those involved in our built futures. As depicted in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, the science-fictional operates as a doorway, as a manifestation of the unsettling and transformative presence of some-place other. These fictions and the worlds they contain are “doors that could take you elsewhere” (Hamid, 2017: 69), they hold open the possibility of alternatives, of strangeness contained within that which we have built. As an architect and architectural lecturer these imagined worlds are the landscapes through which I have oriented my research and my practice. In this work I trace how my research has developed in response to my engagement with sf, moving from sole author to collective research practices, from a focus on canonical texts to a centring of feminist sf, and from written works to acts of research through making. The commentary and the essays included in the portfolio are organised into four sections which relate to these shifts in approach. In Writing with fiction I consider verticality within sf texts and the slippages between the imagined and the designed, in Writing with practice I reflect on feminist sf to inform architectural thinking and practice, in Writing with others I undertake collective research with the Beyond Gender Research Collective, and in Writing with making I use sf in making practices to construct built responses to fictional worlds. Through this work I consider how the act of reading sf as a reflective and creative process might transform architectural practice. I see these fictions as more than a source of design inspiration, they offer us opportunities to engage with complex and critical spatial concerns, to reflect on the nature of architectural practice, and suggest alternative ways of making together. These are the ways we imagine elsewhere; this is how we determine the doorways to build.