Houses of Flood, Silt and Shadow explores how architecture can engage with the performative and poetic to challenge dominant discourses that prioritize technological and scientific responses to the climate crisis. The book showcases how architecture that manifest conditions of the performative and poetic can foster embodied and emotional awareness of the environment – highlighting its fragility and unpredictability – to deepen our understanding of climate change.

The book operates as a critical and propositional enquiry, moving fluidly between architectural design practice, art practice, and historical and theoretical research. Structured around three main chapters, it focuses on four of Matthew Butcher’s speculative architectural design projects: Flood House (2016), Silt House (2015), Bang Bang House (2017) and Measure House (2017). These works exist as drawings, models and 1:1 built structures, and are presented in dialogue with the practices of environmental architects and artists who influenced them, such as architects Raimund Abraham and Gianni Pettena, artists Alan Kaprow and Robert Morris, and performance artist Joan Jonas. Butcher argues that these historical figures offer vital inspiration for alternative forms of architectural design today. Their work viscerally emphasizes – through physical and emotional experience – natural processes such as growth and decay, entropy, weather patterns and celestial forces.