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Description
Examining our relationships with architecture beyond human-centric perspectives, Xenoaesthetics challenges conventional views of design and space inhabitation by exploring the architectural project as an autonomous entity.
Drawing together insights from philosophy and architecture, this book delves into the conditions, roles, and implications of architectural encounters, conceptualising the architectural project as a site of unity-multiplicity tension, and introducing the concept of xenoaesthetics as a cognitive mode attuned to this structure. This approach invites readers to reimagine architectural experience as a dual action that reveals the project to us and realizes itself through us.
As well as implying disciplinary consequences for design questions, Vaillo's work holds socio-political significance for our everyday architectural interactions, contributing to the quest for practices and discourses on equality. Methodologically, his argument draws from Object-Oriented Ontology and the architect Enric Miralles, offering an additional retrospective crossover that enriches both references.
A resource for students, architects, scholars, and enthusiasts interested in exploring architecture beyond assumptions and prescribed value systems, Xenoaesthetics encourages a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between humans and the architectural project.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: The Xenological Framework
1. The Architectural Project as Object
2. The Cognitive-unit
3. The Xenoaesthetic Approach
Part II: Deep cognition
4. The Immaterial Experience of Unity
5. The Role of the Cognizer
6. Vertical techne
Part III: Open Cognition
7. The Infrastructure of Experience
8. Designing
9. Inhabiting
Conclusion
Bibliography
Product details
| Published | 06 Aug 2026 |
|---|---|
| Format | Hardback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | 9781350515031 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
| Series | Posthumanism in Practice |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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What is there left for architects to theorize after post-structuralism? The majority has stopped theorizing architecture altogether, while a small group wants to do so afresh. Gonzalo Vaillo is right: we may theorize architecture only in its totality and its self-enclosed strangeness. Vaillo's book is an essential read to see how this may work out.
Lars Spuybroek, Professor of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, US
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Gonzalo Vaíllo's Xenoaesthetics: A Posthumanist Approach to Architectural Encounter is a welcome addition to contemporary discourse on architecture and aesthetics. Vaillo provocatively lays out an alternate position for design, one where architecture does not pretend to solve the problems of the day but instead operates as an open-ended process articulating strange realities, disturbing familiar backgrounds, and helping us to engage in architectural projects that cannot be reduced to their existence as buildings.
Michael Young, Dean, The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, USA

























