Principles of Practice

1. CRISIS SUSPENDS THE NORM
   Crisis is not simply infrastructural failure. It de-universalises the systems we take for granted and temporarily suspends distinctions between architecture and infrastructure, ecology and technology, domestic and territorial, ritual and technical, nature and culture—revealing that these separations were constructed in the first place.

2. MAKING THE REAL EXPLICIT
   We do not invent or idealise entanglement. Water, land, labour, bacteria, forests, weather, law, pipes and households already coproduce one another. Dominant infrastructures obscure, distance and silence these relations. Architecture can make materially explicit what is already real.

3. INFRASTRUCTURE IS THE IN-BETWEEN
   Infrastructure is both a thing and the relationship between things. It is the material, spatial, legal and technical interface through which relations acquire particular forms: between house and spring, kitchen and farmland, city and river, body and energy system.

4. TYPE IS DEEP STRUCTURE OR FORM OF RELATION
   Types are not simply formal models. They crystallise repeatable ways of seeing, relating, governing, working and living. We study types closely in order to understand the relations they reproduce—and how they might be misused, hybridised, loosened or made otherwise.

5. CRISIS IS A CRISIS OF SEPARATION
   The problem is not only that extraction exhausts resources. Crisis is intensified by producing impermeable separations between beings and forces whose reproduction depends upon one another. Abstraction silences the rhythms, needs and limits operating across relations of dependency.

6. FROM SECURITY TO NEGOTIATED VULNERABILITY
   Modern infrastructure promises security through distance, enclosure and the elimination of uncertainty. We seek neither insecurity nor exposure for its own sake, but forms of shared and negotiated vulnerability in which dependencies become perceptible and can be worked on collectively.

7. INFRASTRUCTURE → INFRASTRUCTURING
   Infrastructure should not be understood as a finished object delivered by experts to passive users. Infrastructuring is the continual practice of maintaining, negotiating, repairing, governing, enjoying, ritualising and transforming the relations upon which life depends.

8. BRINGING OTHER RHYTHMS INTO POLITICS
   A cosmopolitical or sympathetic architecture attends to the rhythms, desires, needs and limits of the beings and forces upon which we depend. Rainfall, wind, water levels, migration, growth, fertility, decay and human desire are not simply external variables to measure and control, but presences capable of altering the terms through which a problem is understood and negotiated.

9. SLOWING DOWN / CONFOUNDING REASON
   We do not oppose reason, science or expertise, but resist their capacity to prematurely close a situation. Following Isabelle Stengers, cosmopolitics seeks to slow down reasoning: allowing what appears irrational, irrelevant, uncertain or outside the problem to confound its established terms. Architecture can construct situations of hesitation in which no single expert, category or world is authorised to decide in advance what matters, what is real, or what the problem and its solution are.

10. SYNCRETISM WITHOUT SYNTHESIS
    Syncretism places radically different ways of knowing and relating into contact without requiring one to subsume the others. Scientific, ritual, ecological, legal, technical and embodied realities can coexist, hybridise and contest one another without resolving into a universal truth.

11. KEEPING WORLDS IN AGONISM
    Difference should not automatically be reconciled through consensus. Architecture can construct situations in which incompatible worlds remain in political confrontation, forcing each to encounter the limits of its own categories and opening space for negotiation and transformation.

12. CULTIVATING DIVERGENCE
    Schismogenesis complements syncretism. If syncretism concerns entanglement, schismogenesis concerns the capacity to differentiate—to develop forms of life from within and against dominant systems without being assimilated by them.

13. ALLYING WITH CHANGE, NOT PRESERVATION
    We are not interested in preserving stable architectures, cultures or ecologies against transformation. We ask how architecture might become allied with water, melt, movement, fire, collapse, erosion, regrowth and other forces that can be destructive, generative and life-giving at once.

14. BEGINNING WITH WHAT IS ALREADY EMERGING
    We do not begin by inventing alternative worlds in the studio. We learn ethnographically from people already experimenting with different ways of maintaining, governing, celebrating and negotiating their dependencies.

15. ARCHITECTURE AS MAKING ALLIANCES
    Our task is not to provide solutions from outside, but to identify, bolster and intensify experiments already underway—opening existing architectures and infrastructures to new, free and common uses and giving latent forms of relation space to develop.