September 2025
Worlding Airs

Taught by Dr. Marija Maric, Dr. César Reyes Nájera and Kristina Shatokhina

Graphic Design: Inès Hosni
Editorial Design: Julianne Sedan

Architecture, as a discipline, has traditionally been organised around the design and study of the built form. Yet, our understanding of soil and air—environments that both house and enable buildings as well as life in and around them—has remained largely outside of architectural discussions. In Western thought, soil has long served as the fundamental substrate of life, language, and housing, while air has been relegated to the background or rendered invisible. In The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray criticises this oversight and argues that Heidegger's privileging of earth and dwelling reveals a continuous “forgetting of air”. She suggests that air is not simply the background for habitation but “the whole of our habitation as mortals”, the substrate that sustains thought, existence and dwelling itself. Recognising air as this essential but unacknowledged terrain recalibrates architectural reflection, urging us to attend to the immaterial, the ephemeral, and the inseparable condition of life that eludes static representation. Following Irigaray's reading, we consider air as a critical field of inquiry, bridging the humanities, architecture, and environmental sciences.

This inquiry was intiated with the design studio Worlding Soils that centred soil as its subject matter and site for the analysis of histories and presents of capitalist extraction. With Worlding Airs we extend this exploration, asking: How can air serve as an entry point for critical research in architecture and practices of extraction, production, construction, demolition that shape (built) environment in the context of the Capitalocene? What would it mean to consider air not as void, empty space, but rather as an environment inhabited by 'air communities,' human and more-than-human alike? What could be the role of architectural design and urban planning in building interdependencies between all those who have been shaped by the same conditions of extraction and who share life in the ruins of environmental destruction?

Lecturers:
Marija Maric
César Reyes Najera
Kristina Shatokhina

Guest lecturers:
Nerea Calvillo
Olga Subirós
Elise Misao Hunchuk

Collaborators:
Charles Rouleau (Casino Display)
Filipa Lima (Casino Display)