Minor architectures are an open repertoire of spatial practices and know-hows based on the immanent differentiating agency of bodies. They feed on the circumstantial and experimental, operating in the narrow margins and blind spots of major languages, structures and knowledge, unsettling them and creating other worlds. While minor architectures work with and within materially limited spaces, tools and conditions, they enlarge the world through forms of plural material entanglement. Minor architectures have been studied by different authors and under different names in the last few decades, from Gordon Matta-Clark’s and Robin Evans’ parallel anarchitectures to the work of Jennifer Bloomer or Jill Stoner. These practitioners have sought to unveil those practices affecting the organization of our everyday space—how bodies interact, how environments mediate. From those origins, we seek to conceive within this doctoral course what a minor architectural research could mean and bring to our practice.

Departing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari initial use of the term to read anew Franz Kafka’s literature, we will describe and frame this notion as a way of working with the living and material core of architectural practices, as well as its relations with the major practices and languages of the discipline and its institutions. We will consider the relation between that living and material core and political agency, to reframe the relation between spatial practices and the imaginaries and actions of the multitude around our living together. To do this we will contemplate the potentialities of studying, both in historical and operative terms, the conflict of the spatial forms and practices of the major languages and those of minor practices.

We will also consider a different genealogy of the architectural body, against (and beyond) the Vitruvian man and the ideal of a singular, male, able, white body and its ensuing geometries and decisions, we will follow the many (other) bodies of spatial practice, from the non-male and racialized body to the overflowing body, the plural body, the formless body, and a long etcetera. Around them, we will define a series of notions, from individual and plural spatialities, touch, traces, dispositions, and ecologies of signs. This exercise will help us articulate a minor vocabulary able to analyze otherwise material practices and conflicts from an architectural lens.

Alongside, we propose to explore the uneven relations of architectural research to temporalities both in its objects and subjects of knowledge. Effectively, the minor enables us to reconsider the proximities and distances of plural temporalities to our worlds, questioning the presents, pasts, futures, future pasts and past futures and their a/effect on the actual, and how they are produced and reproduced. It unveils in which way the past as an epistemological category has been used as an imperialist instrument of relegation and subjugation of practices and knowledge, and how the minor, as a contact zone, invites us to dissolve Time in plural temporalities to work with.

From that minor framework, we will then consider its consequences for architectural research and develop a series of considerations, explorations and tools to propose a minor conceptualisation of architectural methodologies of research. The participants in this doctoral course will be invited to apply them in a case study corresponding to their ongoing PhD thesis that will be worked upon throughout the duration of the course. The participants’ outcome will be this minor analysis, a preliminary outline of a minor research plan to follow up on their initial findings and a critical reflection on the notion of methodology in architectural research. For students who don’t have a situation of analysis (or not yet), one case study will be provided to develop their minor analysis.

With the swissuniversities doctoral course Unearthing Traces we propose to explore and learn about memory processes, power structures in archival practices in relation to the built environment and material architectural traces. With the participation of a wide array of thinkers and practitioners in archival and artistic practices, historians and researcher in architecture and social sciences, the course explores how imagined records and traces can be composed and grounded in the context of academic research in order to implement them into a historical argumentation. A particular emphasis will be made on architectural and spatial traces and records both through the methodologies of urban critical and postcolonial studies and through questioning the imperialist dimensions of the architecture of archives and built environments. After two days in the form of a conference, the fieldwork in Neuchâtel constitutes both an opportunity to actively apply these methodologies, and to question the colonial entanglements of Switzerland through a collective and embodied research process in situ. Students across different disciplines — architecture, history, arts, political sciences — will be solicited, in order to decompartmentalize disciplines in this process.

Caring is a reproductive work (Federici, 2014), of maintenance, of upkeep, of reproduction of the existing. The lexical field of the reproductive -verbs preceded by the prefix -re- indicates a priori an absence of imaginary and inventive act. However, by starting from these numerous bodies (human, non-human, architectural) and their uses, reproduction opens the field of possibilities, and makes room for their previously vulnerable existences.

From a shelter for teenagers who smoke weed when it rains to a play structure for children when the weather is good, the reproductive and programless project allows what (is) happening (time, people and the destruction of worlds by extractivist capitalism) to be the very space of invention, from marginality to room for maneuver. Leaving room for the futurities of the already-there and the uncertainties that characterize it, following the flow of materials and bodies to work with these inventive forces (Ingold, 2010), so many practices that allow us to consider reproduction as a transformative horizon (Haraway, 2016). In this paper, we wish to explore the inventive potential of care and reproductive work in architecture by interrogating it in the context of a pedagogical experiment.

To study and transmit the practice of this notion, we set up a transdisciplinary course within ENAC, EPFL. Intensive format over a full week, this workshop is part of a compulsory elective course and is aimed at 2nd year undergraduate students in architecture, civil engineering and environmental science. It brings together students who have already studied the subject for a year and who are at least interested in it.