The funnel found us.

Storm

saturated the subsoil—

filled our spiderpit

with liquefied street

and stratum.

Our helical flight—

up, where we corroded,

gazing into char:

ultraviolet

corneal rubying.

Guests quartered a cow,

silent.

We felt sick.

The world is an undersized grater.

1    Mirrorwork

Fishermans Bend may be Naarm-Melbourne’s densest palimpsest; or pentimento, if we trace that word to its root, paenitēre—to regret, or repent. Either way, this place is troubled. Its atmospheres, spaces, surfaces, and objects are more than an archive, and more than a ghosted overlay. They materialise anthropocentric weather.

Here, we settlers find ourselves refracted: warped, crystalline. We are steel, asphalt, silt, runoff. We are constructed parkland, traffic-island flora, warehousing, embankment—and the contaminated lap of river against it. We are Coode’s shipping canal, slashed through swamp. Northerlies spin freight dust into cul-de-sacs and derelict lots. Gulls circle cranes. Puddles gather rainbow films, fed by leaking sumps.

The land is visibly and invisibly overcoded by industry, policy, and speculation. It is at once an erasure field, an industrial precinct, a development horizon, and an unsettled ecosystem. It is a crucible, too—for a spectral mode of love,¹ in which attention to entanglement becomes both architectural method and ethical task.

On a far mound,

we witness a tree

accelerate through age,

sprout-gnarl branches

in curlicues.

The sense

is of poison—

a syringe slow-pierced

into root tissue

scuffed visible by dig.

Globes ascend,

droning.

Subfrequency—

a cavern

of molten sound;

pharynx of antennae

prickling, 

umbilical depression

above.

2    Provisional Mesh

This piece is part of a project we commenced in 2023. It occurs here, in Fishermans Bend, because its territory is unstable; and because instability—economic, aesthetic, ecological, epistemological, ontological, neurological—frames our architectural praxis and its substructure, including the poetry and artmaking that seeded it.

We started designing for nonhumans after digesting books on metaphysics and animal ethics. These explorations—like many others—continue to infuse our work, and we view the public realm as its most philosophically coherent path. There, in Naarm-Melbourne’s small-practice architectural ecology, civic opportunities are doubly destabilised. They are often driven by low-budget, design-insensitive municipal procurement processes, and are consistently pressured by the design-and-construct sector.

These commissions—shade structures, pavilions, public-toilet upgrades, community-centre refurbishments—are not glamorous, but they are the cartilage of the civic skeleton, and they present unassuming chances for design excellence. They are also structurally provisional. Briefs may be indecipherable or inaccurate, or may seek unpaid return-briefing before a contract is awarded. Tenders may be lost on price by a few hundred dollars, or may be issued without any certainty of work being undertaken. Projects may vanish between budget cycles. Bureaucracy and maintenance issues may complicate the durability of completed buildings and renovations.

Nonetheless, we now theorise this provisionality not as an obstacle, but—in parallel with Hélène Frichot’s teaching on object trajectories at the Melbourne School of Design—as a material.² Here, provisionality is not a cage, but an instructive, asymmetric armature. It is a substrate, prompting us to sculpt layers of entangled inquiry. We believe it can support a mode of architectural behaving, being, and knowing—an entwined ethic, ontology, and epistemology—that nourishes compositional and intellectual expression by reconfiguring compromise. 

This mode is a design stance grounded in process, with implications beyond plan and section. In contrast to segmented, solutionist, masculinist philosophies that pursue clarity through compartmentalisation, we might term it “ethico-onto-epistemological,” after Karen Barad.³ It is pliable, adaptable, and it opens space for what we call, in accord with Jill Stoner,⁴ minor architectures—small, prosthetic design gestures that deterritorialise dominant logics from within, dense with ethical and affective charge.⁵

Lemon-wheel sun,

flaring—

spokes jet through blue

gulf.

Veiled,

we blossom

beneath the plum.

Tubers sprout,

wrap us—

thighs to loam,

vitrifying with sugar

grit.

Sun.

Two: you and I. Rotating.

The flick-granulated fieldwork

basin of dandelion,

cypselae

in tremulous, infraglottic jolt.

3    Little Door, Vast Room

Minor architectures are self-consciously peripheral. Against the field’s ongoing preoccupation with mastery (even along many of its covertly hegemonic fringes), they are inversions of normativity. The minor eye scans. The minor ear parses sales talk. The minor hand fumbles. Eventually, it draws, nurturing little structures that unfurl questions of dynamic, transdisciplinary resonance. They enable not just partial but substantial agitation of hierarchical assumptions, even reverberating ontologically—by disturbing the primacy of human existence—in ways that many tendencies in other aesthetic disciplines still avoid, like poetry that privileges the “lyric I.”

Minor architectures can be conventional, speculative, or both, and resist the temptation to scale up as a measure of significance. They sidestep the logics of prestige that dominate architectural culture and development economies. Imagine a bat roost bolted to a pier girder; a fungal inoculator in a median-strip stump; a rain-sensing sound device strung from a streetlamp. Their success is measured not in foot traffic, press, or client curiosity, but in a quieter register: the return of nightjars to a nesting chamber; the first bloom of mycelium in compacted soil; the thrum of a gutter in a downpour; the phytofiltration of nitrogen from a slow-dripping tank.

These gestures are both conjectural and real—devices of fabulation as well as function.⁶ They reflect an architectural epistemology and ethic that emerges from dreaming and worlding, but also from procedural realities: in our case, from the unsteady mechanics of tendering, the limits of municipal budgets, the occasional flash of a sensitive project officer willing to trial something odd. 

Among these petals and roots, minor praxis is the rhizome. It is the day-to-day work of helping to keep a small practice solvent while making room for such gestures. This practice could be formal or informal: a billable process of service delivery, or a recursive commitment to built-environment contemplation and knowledge production. For us, depending on luck, it may be both—or just the latter. 

Regardless, by principally concerning itself with “making room,” minor praxis is inseparable from its exhalations—from minor architectures themselves. It enables them, and illuminates the ideas they adjoin, including their own core operation of making room for more-than-human possibilities—through doors so small they risk invisibility or ridicule. This act of allocation, of making room, is the key. Praxis becomes practice becomes thinking becomes praxis. As we sketch birdsong, we hear it intensify. Tendrils grow, bifurcate, interlace. One informs the other. Each keeps the other supple.

Asphalt cartograph,

holed soil—

some hypercube,

undulating

abalone

hydrofoil, rising

iridescent

through shrugged crumbs

of clod.

Your warm hand

folded in mine.

A root hums;

crystallising tendrils

of hyphae crawl

into filigree,

wrapping a trunk.

Calyx,

wavering.

4    Spectral Love as Eco-Gothic Method

If provisionality is our material, spectral love is our method: an ethic of care that neither denies harm nor seeks purification, but works through residues and impurities. This is love’s shadow—imperfect, unresolved, and frequently in tension with the forces it reflects and hopes to reorient. It resists reinscribing commercial culture’s veneer of exceptionalism and solutionism, instead advocating a practice of attention that carries grief, obsession, and monstrosity within its affective range. Spectral love aligns with Sara Ahmed’s argument that emotions are not private states but social orientations: they reveal unacknowledged relations and press our bodies into them, often uneasily.⁷

The eco-gothic, a subfield of the environmental humanities, is where this love finds its architectural idiom. Gothic conventions chart love as embodied, compulsive, and uncertain, while the eco-gothic extends these intensities—via ecocriticism—into contaminated, extractive landscapes like Fishermans Bend.⁸ Space and material are pollinated with feeling, which operates as a critical mechanism. It ventriloquises and registers the anxieties of environmental crisis, as Elizabeth Parker and Harriet Stilley note while describing the journal Gothic Nature.⁹

Among these emotive textures, repair is never restorative; it cannot reinstate a past condition. Instead, it makes futures differently liveable. Karen Barad’s “agential cuts,”¹⁰ and Donna Haraway’s notion of “response-ability,”¹¹ articulate this stance: commitments to stay with the trouble while experimenting with ethical intervention, rather than trying to resolve it prematurely. 

In Fishermans Bend, the trouble is palpable. Petrochemical yards abut public paths; stormwater outfalls darken the river; batching plants shed dust. In this zone, prosthetic interventions take on a double charge: they acknowledge toxicity, then fold another use into it. A bee hotel grafted near an exhaust stack does not cleanse the plume, but reframes it as vertical terrain where pollination and petrochemical residue cohabit. A salt wick drawing brine from water—like the crystallised car lodged beneath the surface of Westgate Park’s Pink Lake—traces mineral scars, registering climate encroachment rather than masking it. A fungal windharp transforming decay into soundscape renders entropy audible. A set of modules under the Salmon Street bridge utilise its empty undercroft for artist residencies. Above them, sprouting gutters arc, trimming the carriageways. Their steel fins glint. Leaves absorb chromium. Stems separate oil from rainfall.

These prostheses are not solutions, but invitations to inhabit dissonance—and to acknowledge that we already do. Spectral love, expressed in an eco-gothic mode, argues that architecture works most powerfully not by dispelling unease, but by holding it: attending to sorrow, toxicity, and persistence.

Silent, paralytic grid.

Subzone: yolking.

We trace an aperture

together.

Showed me the vein

first spoiled,

before the rest followed;

time is marked

by your tentative sips.

The russet dusk,

darkening

dropped peach;

bladed slant

of a fog-sluiced shiplight—

wavelets shiver.

A quiet octopoid breach.

5    Procedural Realism

Love becomes praxis when speculative ethics meet the procedural grind. A tender for playground renewal might specify “pergola to match existing.” We suggest drawing a planted canopy, sown for pollinators. In most cases, it would be value-managed out. In some, it could survive.

Such manoeuvres adapt to turbulence. A prosthesis might be designed as modular, installable in stages as budgets allow. It might be instrumentalised: pitched rhetorically, in alignment with published policy priorities. While the territory is arid, every crack reveals a hinge where council strategy and more-than-human ethics could pivot together. 

We are testing this approach in practice through a bolt-together nursery for Westgate Park, commissioned by Bili Nursery, Westgate Biodiversity, and the City of Melbourne. These organisations carry the spectres of two grassroots we knew as children: the St Kilda Indigenous Nursery Cooperative and the Port Phillip Ecocentre.¹²

Sited under the bridge, on a windswept sliver beside Boeing’s aerostructure factories, the project extends minor-architectural principles—modularity, civic prosthesis, habitat provision—into an operational setting, under timeline and multi-stakeholder constraints. It balances ecological and cultural ambition with cost, maintenance, and council process. Speculative design becomes procedural realism: a site-specific prototype for attunement.

This mode of practice looks unremarkable from the outside: narrow allocations, incremental improvements, adjustments buried in tender packages, fragments of habitat smuggled into routine civic works. However, these are the interstices through which minor architectures grow. Against spectacle, procedural realism advances by persistence and repetition, by learning the idioms of civic procurement and bending them toward other ends.

It is also a practice of patience. Most gestures do not endure: they are stripped out for cost, postponed across budget cycles, or erased by shifting priorities. To work this way is to live with repeated disappointment—and to continue. That persistence is itself a form of care: a willingness to remain with civic rhythms that are slow, frustrating, yet fertile.

In this sense, procedural realism is not the opposite of speculation but its companion. It grounds dreams in the temporality of bureaucracy, where even slight dissonances can resonate. It is a form of attunement: not to an idealised design future, but to the everyday moments through which small public works, and the lives they touch, come into being.

We watch the river

circulate a spiral

of nitrogen—

our lilypad

buoyed by its crenations

in the current.

The orb—

teal opalescence,

hovering moss.

A susurrus.

Radial linework:

spoked periwinkle core,

glistening

in flicker.

We draw closer

to the infrasound

shrouding its black splinters—

a transparent sphere,

distorting the willow

behind.

6    Machines for Attunement in the Capitalocene

Our prosthetic interventions are machines. They connect, collect, divert, host, and shield. They are also devised to attune human and non-human bodies to shared conditions. Attunement is a sensory recalibration: a reorientation of how one inhabits space. These machines are resonators—tuning forks. They vibrate, establish resonance, invite response.

A tripartite fountain offers water to dogs, birds, and people. A network of planters on power poles transmits pollen-legged butterflies, reconnecting the Royal Botanic Gardens with Westgate Park. A freeway sign becomes a wildlife crossing. A nestbox shelters wagtails. A myco-bench in a riverside park, built from mycelium-bound panels, asks its sitter to share time with decay’s quiet metabolism. A spider gallery on a bridge truss frames webs against the sky, recasting arachnid presence as tracery. These interventions do not moralise or preach. They stage atmospheres that linger after the encounter, carrying a minor charge of dislocation and recognition.

Their field is the Capitalocene: our geohistorical condition. Futures are patterned by extractive logics,¹³ and Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” naming a mutual epistemological limit, insists that no alternatives exist: that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.¹⁴ In this context, minor architectures resist through disproportionate offerings. They do not aim to solve systemic crises, but to interrupt inevitability. An owl hollow will not “fix” Fishermans Bend. However, it creates a slender cut in the development-as-destiny narrative. 

As Karen Barad identifies, each “agential cut,” or intervention, enacts a material-discursive incision in the fabric of possibility.¹⁵ In practice, these cuts are often too normative to register: a thick, sectional line through a drawing; a price or scope chop to keep a tender alive in a downturn. Even then, they are also conceptual fissures: disruptions that make new relations thinkable. 

Machines for attunement carry dual force: they recalibrate perception, and slice into inevitability. Their value lies less in permanence, and more in the affective and ontological shifts they instigate—provisional, but real.

Our swingset creaks,

falls

into oxide ash.

A pulse.

Fingers of aquifer

emerge

through peat,

sputtering,

gyrate upward—

accelerant plaits,

each a geyser

in unison twist.

A dome of silk.

7    Love, Complicity, and Staying with the Trouble

Love in the shadow is necessarily complicit. To work in the city is to participate in its ecologies of harm. We draw salaries from councils that invest in highways. We specify materials from destructive supply chains. We inhabit infrastructures of settler-colonial extraction. The question is not how to remain or become pure, but how to work with impurity—how to turn complicity toward repair, without pretending that harm has been erased.

This is where the eco-gothic intimately converges with practice. Beauty, horror, care, and decay are inseparable; they surface together in architectural gestures. A bat roost attached to a warehouse may, within five years, be demolished for apartments. Yet for a time it shelters a colony, seeds conversations, and reframes a skyline. A propped branch for boobooks may rot, happily clawed. A salt-encrusted wick may vanish with waterbody management, but in the meantime it renders climate fragility tangible. These acts are provisional, but they resonate, neither denying nor disguising impermanence.

To stay with such gestures is to accept architecture’s limits while refusing its abdication. It is a discipline of complicity, but also possibility. As Donna Haraway teaches us, trouble is ongoing, irreducible, and not to be engineered away.¹⁶ Accordingly, minor architectures are chords struck in the composition of the city—intervals that recalibrate attention rather than monuments that endure. They show that even small, civic-oriented practices, working under budgetary precarity and bureaucratic inertia, can create openings where other ways of living-with become perceptible. 

From a drone scan, these openings may be invisible. Yet on the ground—in a bat’s wing, a salt-shard bloom, the hum of a mildewed windharp—they register as something else: a spectral love made tangible, ghosted by alterity. If we suppress anthropocentrism and quietism, along with our predilection for solution and salvation, we may locate a practice that dwells with complicity, acknowledges harm, and keeps crafting nonetheless.

One—

your fallen tear,

venturing

into my—two—

fallen hands,

cupped.

Three;

four eyes—

one fixed,

two filling.

The beep.

Fingers pressing.

Oculus,

ghosted

by a dusting sunbeam.

Five—

the dilation, percussion

of iris:

dissipating

the eye.

¹ María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 8.

² Hélène Frichot, “ABPL90421: Design – Philosophy – Architecture,” https://handbook.unimelb.edu.au/2025/subjects/abpl90421.

³ Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 89–90. 

⁴ Jill Stoner, Toward A Minor Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 22–23. 

⁵ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xxiii. 

⁶ Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 10. 

⁷ Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 10–11. 

⁸ Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds., EcoGothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 5; Elizabeth Parker, The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3–5. 

⁹ Elizabeth Parker and Harriet Stilley, “About the Journal,” Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic, https://gothicnaturejournal.com/about-the-journal. 

¹⁰ Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 139–141. 

¹¹ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 34. 

¹² Bili Nursery and Westgate Biodiversity, “SKINC’s Story,” https://westgatebiodiversity.org.au/our-histories/skinc. 

¹³ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 47–48. 

¹⁴ Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 76–77. 

¹⁵ Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 139–141. 

¹⁶ Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 3–4.