Cosmotechnologies of Community and Collaboration in Vandana Singh's Speculative Architecture

Philosopher 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 the architect, 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) – what Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay calls 'co-futures.' These fictions proceed from different cosmologies – ways of understanding and being in the world – to explore the future implications for architecture and other technological practices in contrast to the hegemony of global modernism. The short fiction of SF author Vandana Singh supplies an image of architecture that proceeds from different images of and concerns for the future, and is an exemplary practice in cosmotechnology. She reframes existing technologies and invents new technologies in a mode of practice which centres the experience of diverse cultures in technologies of community and collaboration where architecture becomes central to new ways of being in the world.