Designing Otherwise: Architecture Beyond the Human

This essay explores how architecture can expand its imaginative and ethical capacities in response to the climate emergency by engaging speculative fiction, visual media and more-than-human perspectives. Drawing on science- fiction narratives, visual abstraction and exhibition practices, it argues that architectural thinking must shift from representation to relation, from designing for the world to designing with it. Fiction offers models of environmental cohabitation that unsettle anthropocentric assumptions, while drawings and exhibitions translate these imaginaries into spatial forms. The essay considers the pedagogical implications of this shift, proposing that architectural education must embrace uncertainty, narrative and care as core design tools. Finally, it positions architecture not as a solution to planetary crisis, but as a speculative practice capable of holding contradiction, listening to more-than- human conditions and rehearsing alternative futures.