CARE AND CURIOSITY
In a recent presentation we delivered at Assemble and later to university students, we discussed how ideas about care and curiosity - as developed by Joan Tronto, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Donna Haraway - are emerging in our practice.
It is easy to identify the disfunction of the systems within which we live and work. Whether it is the soulless speculative commercial buildings we are constructing, the housing crisis and lack of social care or environmental damage we are causing.
It has been harder to work out how to use our practice to address these challenges. As structural engineers, a fundamental motivation is of course to contribute to a better built environment. But when many of the buildings are built speculatively for investment, making sense of this state and finding fulfilment is problematic. Through our practice as Public House, we have been chewing on these questions whilst also trying to earn a living. On reflection, themes of care and curiosity emerge as common themes within our projects and suggest a way forward for us.
Care firstly was our reconnection with a practice we love. Joan Tronto's definition of care consists of two parts: "everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair 'our world'...." and "all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web". Our 'world' includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment. As in many areas of late-Capitalist life, this lack of care beyond the narrow values of commercial profit is not just damaging to our environment but to our wider connected communities and our own sense of fulfilment and purpose. Reconnecting with projects as purposeful endeavours ensures that the work we deliver and build are positive, useful acts, collaborating with complex webs of people, and bringing a personal sense of fulfilment.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa expands these ideas through "thinking and living in more than human worlds" , "decentering human agencies, as well as remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings.". This helps define two other threads in our practice: first our focus on "more than human worlds" as a way to "repair" and "interweave" our existence - a narrow focus on only embodied carbon for instance fails to understand the diverse implications of building on our environment beyond the human world. And secondly these ideas are a reminder that we are still stuck in the tangled mess of the modern world and are committed to working within it!
For both Tronto and Puig de la Bellacasa, the idea of care clearly goes beyond the human-centric world and emphasises our connection to a "complex, life-sustaining web". Our understanding of care is linked closely to concepts of curiosity and embracing this complexity. In many ways this could be a bleak and overwhelming exercise: we are in the midst of multiple interlinked crises. And we are largely powerless to make a difference from within the social, political and economic systems we have built.
Donna Haraway has developed the idea of curiosity as a way of "Staying with the trouble": embracing the challenges we face in a lively and serious way. It is learning to live on a damaged planet, in End Times, in our late-Capitalist world. It is "a commitment to living and dying with response-ability in unexpected company". We wish to engage with sticky questions, challenge our ways of practice, experiment and explore new ideas and embrace the messiness of getting stuck in the mud.