Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural

Ambiguous Territory continues in the vein of recent Actar works focusing away from the anthropocentric in the built environment. The title is taken from a symposium and a series of exhibitions held at US universities from 2017 to 2019, which aimed to situate contemporary discourses of architecture and landscape within the ‘post-natural’ era of climate change, the Anthropocene and altered ecologies. The key question was, in an era in which humans have been displaced from a position of privilege, can these design disciplines also displace themselves to establish new approaches?

This book explores this area across a deep, engaging and generally speculative series of essays, which are related but not necessarily tied to the exhibition. Three ‘territories’ form the core parts: the atmospheric, the biologic and the geologic. Each is a cluster of referenced essays with its own foreword and afterword, and each also contains a collection of exemplary works of art and design that speak to the territory. The work is dense but makes for an absorbing and rewarding read.