Agnosia

(Close)

Image Credit Sara Leimbach

Program
A speculative architectural research project exploring feminist pedagogy and collective worldmaking.

Resaerch Focus
How can architecture become a tool for feminist emancipation, collective learning, and new forms of architectural pedagogy?

Agnosia is a speculative architectural research project examining how architecture can become a tool for feminist pedagogy, collective worldmaking, and critical spatial practice. Drawing from overlooked histories of women in architecture, the project challenges canonical narratives through speculative writing, installations, films, drawings, artifacts, and architectural experimentation. Rather than documenting the past, Agnosia reimagines it, proposing new ways of learning, making, and practicing architecture through collective action and intellectual emancipation.

At the center of the project is the Theory of Rooms, an architectural framework that understands the room not simply as an enclosed space, but as a site for experimentation, dialogue, and transformation. Each room functions as both a physical installation and a theoretical proposition, exploring how architecture can cultivate critical awareness, tactile knowledge, and alternative forms of collective practice. Together, these spaces imagine architecture as an evolving cultural project capable of reshaping education, authorship, and the ways we inhabit the world.

The Theory of Rooms

The rooms are not destinations but methods of thinking. Each one offers a different way of seeing, touching, remembering, and imagining architecture. Moving from room to room is less like walking through a building than passing through a sequence of ideas, where architecture shifts between object and atmosphere, memory and performance, criticism and possibility.

Drying Hall

Tobacco leaves hang overhead like quiet banners, carrying the memory of labor while calling for another kind of work. Here stories are read aloud, ideas circulate through the room, and architecture begins not with construction, but with conversation, care, and the slow cultivation of collective thought.

Room of Impossible Flights

Forgotten artifacts gather in the shadows: a wing too heavy to lift, roses left to dry, a ladder that leads nowhere. Together they whisper another history of the avant-garde, one where anonymous figures quietly reclaim the monuments they were never allowed to build.

Playwright’s Room

Masks wait for their next wearer while fragments of stories scatter across the floor. In this room blindness becomes a gift, asking visitors to navigate through touch rather than sight and to discover an architecture shaped by the body before the eye.

Casting Room

Every surface remembers. Castings preserve the impressions of walls, objects, and forgotten corners, allowing ordinary spaces to speak long after they have been abandoned. What was once unnoticed slowly transforms into a landscape of tactile memory.

Post-Novis

Architectons emerge from behind veils of pattern and cloth, no longer monuments to singular authors but vessels for many voices. The familiar forms of architectural history begin to shift, carrying with them quieter stories that were always present but rarely acknowledged.

Worldmaking

Hidden among plants and fragments, the rooms open toward another future. Here architecture is no longer measured by the permanence of its monuments, but by its ability to gather people, sustain imagination, and leave behind worlds that others can continue to build.

Toward the Manifesto

The rooms do not arrive at a conclusion; they gather into a proposition. Each space contributes to a larger architectural language that ultimately unfolds as the Intergalactic Manifesto—a call to reimagine architecture through experimentation, collective authorship, and feminist worldmaking.

The Intergalactic Manifesto

Notes

Variations of text from the following writings were appropriated and creatively modified for this manifesto

- Walter Gropius, “Bauhuas Manifesto and Program,” (1919)

- Boris Groys, "Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Flew into Space from his Apartment"

- Hal Foster, “Veiling in Surrealist Photography Woman as Fetish, as Shattered Object, as Phallus”

“Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

Everyone knows most manifestos preach the liberation of the individual to a new constructed future. A promised utopia where there will be “no difference between the beautiful and strong sex.” Everyone also knows utopia is a long time coming. For the construction of the ultimate utopia is a slow historical process that requires the collective effort of generation upon generation.

In the case of the architectural manifesto, the promised liberation was the liberation of utopian equality, but most architectural manifestos were made by men, and men came first in this liberation.

To cultivate new perspectives in architecture and architectural pedagogies, a feminist approach will be necessary-through the act of experimenting and engaging with women’s overlooked contributions, we will engage in emancipatory ideas and practices to reshape our shared spaces.

We are unwilling to wait until the rest of society is ready for utopia; we are the collective heroes that will leap forward, jumping into our intellectual emancipation and establishing our emancipation through worldmaking, the manifestation of our contemporary notion of utopia, the manifestation of our contemporary manifesto.

The manifestation of a ‘feminine’ manifesto is the first of its kind and rewrites.

“Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future,” which will embrace the philosophical notion of the cosmos, a cipher for the corporeality and materiality of our ‘feminine’ world. The notion of the cosmos is used to designate a new environment, where our ‘feminine’ cognitive capacities are reached in relation to the body, in relation to the tactile. It is declared in the manifestation, not restricted within this constructed space where our world exists. Critical spatial practices through tactile experiments are the privileged way of working; anything else is considered outdated and suppressed by our ‘feminine’ code of culture of corporeal concerns.

“Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future,” which will embrace ‘feminine’ subversions of masculine, hierarchical works in architecture and sculpture and painting. Icons subjected to subversions are selected out of iconic anger of the ‘crystal symbols of a new faith.’

It is without utopian vision but a call for the collective to cultivate an awareness and to create a revolution in an artistic process in a new theorization of art, to revolutionize our society through our artistic production of worldmaking.

We are…

non-hierarchical
anti-formal
anti-traditional
anti-classical
anti-ordinary
an experiment
a reset

(Return to Projects)

studio ammonite

Info

studio ammonite

Info