Cosmotechnologies of Community and Collaboration in Vandana Singh’s Speculative Architectures

Yuk Hui, referring both to climate change and its accompanying social upheavals, writes that ‘to confront the crisis that is before us’, humans will have to rethink the idea of technological universality and how it constructs our relationship to each other and to the natural world. For architects, this means considering how much architecture today is constrained by a singular technological paradigm, and how architects can think the many technologies of architecture differently. This essay considers architectural cosmotechnology through discourses in global speculative fiction (SF), fictions proceeding from different ways of understanding and being in the world, to explore the future implications of these fictions for architecture and other technological practices in contrast to the hegemony of global modernism – what I have called cosmotechnologies of community and collaboration. The short fiction of SF author Vandana Singh supplies an image of architecture that proceeds from different images of and concerns about the future, and is an exemplary practice in cosmotechnology. She reframes existing technologies and invents new technologies in a mode of practice that centres the experience of diverse cultures in technologies of community and collaboration where architecture becomes central to new ways of being in the world.