Situating Architecture of The Everyday

<p><strong>Situating Architecture of The Everyday explores how architectural practice might reckon with the conditions of the Capitalocene while cultivating more-than-human modes of cohabitation. This thesis develops a situated, design-led methodology that draws from expanded theories of Site, Ground, Building, and The Everyday to generate speculative practices grounded in local material and ecological conditions.</strong></p><p>The research unfolds through a series of experimental engagements–including archival gatherings, microbial cultivation, embodied fieldwork, speculative drawing, and sketch modeling–that collectively reframe the erased Waitangi Stream in central Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) as a dynamic site of environmental entanglement. These situated experiments resist conventional site analysis by working with overlooked debris, institutional records, and more-than-human flows. A post-orthographic visual language emerges through analogue, hybrid, and clay-based representation methods, developed to think-with the site’s unruly materialities.</p><p>Findings are tested through the design of a speculative housing system that resists commodified typologies and instead proposes a mode of inhabiting alongside dynamic ecological conditions. Drawing on case study research and site-generated programmatic images, the architectural proposal seeks to balance architectural legibility with environmental uncertainty.</p><p>The contribution of this research lies in the development of a methodology for speculative, materially entangled design that foregrounds the more-than-human. It expands the tools available for contextualising site in architectural practice and suggests that architecture can act as a collaborator in urban ecological transformation.</p>