From burrow to bungalow: The role of storytelling in regenerative architecture

Abstract

Regenerative architecture requires interdisciplinary knowledge instruments to help us reconceive research from post-anthropocene perspectives, initiating new conversations about how we creatively engage our world. In this paper, the author — a writer, prose poet, and professor of artistic research — explores the contribution of storytelling as a practice within artistic research to regenerative architecture, a form of architecture for which the ecological and ethical implications of each design decision are foremost. It argues, through a reading of Kafka’s last short story, The Burrow, that the current focus on maintenance and sustainability may be insufficient; we need, like Jack in the tale “Jack and the Beanstalk,” to explore the problem of survival on a higher level. Artistic research can help us navigate uncertainty, develop toolsets, integrate practices, and extend the concept of experiment. Artistic researchers develop knowledge-making through unconventional concepts, creative methodologies, and alternative practices that accompany and engender unique sensibilities, patterns of thought, and knowledge formats. Bringing established knowledge practices into dialog with non-conventional perspectives, such research provokes new mode(l)s of knowledge that serve regenerative architecture’s need for “worlding” narratives. Inviting us to think anew through remaking the world materially and relationally, the paper argues that storytelling allows us to mediate emergent encounters and alternative epistemologies. It summarizes the salient elements of narrative craft, provides examples of regenerative themes in different cultural narratives, including two Chinese folk tales, offers a reading of Franz Kafka’s The Burrow from a regenerative architecture perspective, and adapts Kafka’s story into a contemporary setting through an original short story — a fable for the consequences of ignoring ongoing signs of crisis. The paper, which is illustrated by the author’s original artistic images throughout, is a contribution from a foremost proponent of language-based artistic research, a practice that combines creative and critical writing. By enfolding creative and critical approaches to regenerative architecture, the paper demonstrates how stories can provide compelling models of ethical and political complexities that engage interdependencies within the ecological realm.