The Some Kind of Nature atelier adopts a post-humanist approach, drawing inspiration from the writings of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Rosi Braidotti, and others. Our roots lie in the feminist posthumanist philosophy. Our primary focus is a response to the ongoing climate crisis, which we consider the greatest challenge facing both the profession and humanity. By embracing a post-humanist framework, we decentre humans and emphasise relationships.

By adding a temporal lens, we see building interventions as spatio-temporal structures reaching far beyond their external shell into the past and future. This perspective allows us to consider the conditions of the production of architecture and the importance of care and maintenance. We regard demolition as an act of violence, asserting that all energy embedded in the construction process must be accounted for and justified.

Our design process is contextual, ‘care-ful', open for multiple, often conflicting voices (Mikhail Bakhtin’s Polyphony) and entangled (Donna Haraway). We are collaborative, transdisciplinary and dialogical.

The focus of our atelier has been on context, preferring multifunctional briefs aimed at an in-depth understanding of tangible expressions of human and non-human relationships expressed through space, materiality, technology, and time. This year, the MLA Students chose their territories of intervention from across several sites across the isles of United Kingdom. Over the span of the academic year, the students worked through their projects as speculative resolutions often re-examining and testing their initial design gestures. The final outputs of their research journey demonstrate an in-depth understanding of the issue of their interest, a continuous experimentation and testing process, a resolved and sophisticated landscape architectural response with a critical reflection on the process, methodology and tools.