Sympoietic Architecture: Making with Lina Ghotmeh

An exploration of architecture star Lina Ghotmeh's "sympoietic" approach - or "making with" people, materials and the environment. Sympoietic Architecture Making with Lina Ghotmeh investigates the concept of sympoietic living in the work of Lina Ghotmeh. Defined by Donna Haraway as making with and worlding with, Ghotmeh's work epitomizes this approach. As a multi-ethnic architect, working across countries, cultures and values, Ghotmeh's work can be understood as a rich, sensible and articulated process of building that enshrines the practice of inclusive architecture as a matter of care and responsi-bility. In caring about the environment, the materials, the resources, the users, the clients, the land and its heritage, in caring about the concept of beauty, Earth and earthlings, her work displays a position which is at once poetic and political in its ecological approach to architecture. Ghotmeh's work exemplifies a mode of design that reflects an understanding of architecture as a living system rather than a static artifact. The project responds to the pressing social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, arguing that architecture must shift from the paradigm of control inherit-ed from late modernity toward a practice that thinks with the world. Through this research, the book argues that the future of architecture depends on its ability to create empathy, attentiveness and relational intelligence. AUTHORS: Ilaria Di Carlo, PhD, is an architect, scholar and writer whose research explores aesthetics, affect and practices of care through relational thinking and transdisciplinarity as developed in the book The Aesthetics of Sustainability: Systemic Thinking and Self-organisation in the Evolution of Cities (ListLab, 2016). She is Senior Lecturer at The Bartlett, UCL and Co-Director of the AA Visiting School (Milan). Daria Ricchi, PhD, is a writer and architecture historian. Her research focuses on narratives, history and memory as explored in Writing Architecture in Modern Italy (Routledge 2020) and biographies such as Maggie's Centres: an Architecture of Care (Bloomsbury 2026). She is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University and faculty at New York University, London. 350 illustrations