Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon Donna Haraway, the turfhouse provides figures of human dwelling as a sympoiesis system (2016), or architecture as a collaborative, co-evolving assemblage of humans and nonhumans in the North.

Paper long abstract:

Early in the 20th century, turfhouses were identified as a national problem, affiliated with shame, and an official moral mission marked the turf house for extinction. Hostility towards the turf house became ingrained into local language in Iceland as an idiomatic expression for decline. In building new narratives and making room for non-human others, we propose relationality and creative forms, as fitting to return to the turfhouse, not as cultural heritage but as an investigative tool for building alternative and more earthbound temporalities into the compressed present where the order of the Anthropocene is "instantaneous time" (Pascal Gielen 2014). Drawing upon Donna Haraway, the turfhouse provides figures of human dwelling as a sympoiesis system (2016), or architecture as a collaborative, co-evolving assemblage of humans and nonhumans in the North.