To create a fundamentally new architecture, and more specifically, one that is created through the female gaze and lens, requires not only a new architectural product but a new architectural process. This process must come from each of us. It is my femininity and it is yours working for ourselves and working for each other. The process is entirely separate from masculinity and not in opposition to it necessarily. It is a resistance to its practice, but this new process should not just be the other binary, it is without binary. The female gaze, my femininity, and yours is gooey; it encompasses a respect for oneself, but also a deep empathy and compassion for others. There is no clear distinction between what one person needs or experiences, but rather all these needs and experiences exist on an overlapping and tangled spectrum. No person's experience is the same, but it is not completely isolated either. The gooey female gaze recognizes this co-productive, co-existence of each of us and thus, recognizes that only a co-liberation is possible. Goo, slime, blobs, overarching plasma, substances that are not quite solid and not quite liquid are sticky and they are blended as are our experiences.

Architecture created through the female gaze is no different. This architecture is about making space for different needs to be addressed in different instances. There is no stagnant purpose for a building to serve and the creation should not pretend as such. Feminine architecture does not make presumptions about how we should act or how we do act. She considers not only the female presence but the presence of human beings, of the unique qualities and experiences people add to the process of creation. Elizabeth Gross discusses the thing and its emphasis on making in “Architecture from the Outside”. She rejects the criticism of feminine architecture as the excess or the decorative and instead places that excessiveness in relation to the essentially anti community, “the community, collective of those who have nothing in common. This concept of community of the lost, of strangers, of the marginalized, and outcast is borrowed form the work of Alphonso Lingis, and especially from his concern with the community not as that which is united through common bonds, goals, language, or descent, ut as that which opens itself to the stranger, to the dying, to the one with which one has nothing in common, the one who is not like oneself”.1 The residual community, as she refers to it is what the feminine addressing and what the masculine leaves out, disregards. The masculines narrow definition of even community is neglectful and violent. It makes people invisible and architecture the righteous monument. But architecture should reach into its own excesses. It should reach out to those people deserted and give space for them to be together. Gross argues for asking, “following tis understanding of the place of the excessive transgression, how to engender an architectural ‘bestial monstrosity’, a radically antifunctional architecture, an architecture that is anti-authoritarian and antibureaucratic”.2 The feminine rejects the systematic functioning and the hierarchical and artificial constructs of order that only seek to perpetuate patriarchies and becomes a messy matrix of excess, of endless creation.

“Architectural discourse and practice must not forget its connection to the imoule to shelter and covering first provided by nothing but the mother’s body. The very concept of dwelling is irresolvable bound up with the first dwelling, itself a space of residues or aftereffects of the placental and body membranes. Rather than return to more primitive material or openly avow this primitive maternal connection, establishing a parallel between the placental universe and the social space in which housing provides shelter.. Architects may well find something else of value in this maternal origin: something of immense expenditure, an economy of pure gift, of excessive generosity, which, even if it cannot be repaid, architecture could perhaps produce elsewhere, in design and construction”.3

The creation of feminine space, or now feminine process, becomes a new reproductive system of architecture. It is almost as if the site’s existing conditions, materials, and events as well as the pasts memories, infrastructures, and holding places, become the embryo that life proliferates from. The past and present do not disappear but become another layer in the accumulation of time and memory. A construction of temporal space and spatial time. The feminine process privileges growth. It does not prescribe activity, but makes space for it.

“The thing is our provocation to action and is itself the result of our action. It functions as a promise, as that which in the future, in retrospect, yields a destination or in effect another thing”.4

The consequences of designing systems on the basis of existing patterns in society coincide with the result of inadequate representation in design and decision making processes. They fall back on the default: men and the masculine perspective. Existing architectural practices of justice that simply created a system similar to what Benjamin coins as the “New Jim Code.. [that] allow racist [and also, therefore, misogynistic] habits and logics to enter through the backdoor of tech design [and architectural design], in which humans who create the algorithms are hidden from view”.5 Architectural practices currently claiming to be working to produce spatial qualities and conditions of justice and equity have not broken free from processes tainted with histories of racism, misogyny, and capitalism and therefore, have only created a new face to old oppressive practices. Thus, creating simply a “New Jim Code”.6 Only hiding the oppressive social constructions surrounding race, gender, sexuality, class, and hierarchy under more years of implementation and embedding it in the built environment even further and deeper, to the point where it is almost subconscious, which makes it even more difficult to point to the specific evidence of where it went wrong. This cultural coding of oppression makes these practices seem inevitable rather than constructed and therefore, possibly deconstructable. In many instances we have been able to wash over and forget the ways that neighborhoods were designed to be inaccessible to anyone outside of a certain amount of privilege, the ways that resources have been distributed in areas of cities based on racial lines, and, in most specific relevance to this text, the way the female body has quite literally been prescribed onto space itself to the point where it cannot be disentangled.

Up to this point in the narrative, this work has been to first establish the way menstruators oppression was constructed and upled. And, second, the existing presence of discriminatory design practices that either specifically or subconsciously uphold hierarchies and thus, reproduce these social divisions and power relations. This work has progressed to not compare itself to masculine processes or center their involvement in the work. A feminine process does not eed to be placed in relation to masculinity in order to be understood. Long standing traditions of adaptation and reform have only worked to perpetuate existing systems of oppression and thus, an architecture that is to produce equity and justice must come from a completely deconstructed and reconstructive process. A process free of designated program and space but prioritizing growth and spaces of care.

This process has been applied at the site of the explosion in Beirut in the form of a Reproductive System. The Reproductive System is a shift from architecture as an outcome to a practice or tool in supporting growth and in Beirut, protecting the space needed to cope. The process takes time and attention because if “we are not simply “users” but people committed to building a more just society, it is vital that we demand a slower and more socially conscious innovation”.7 This Reproductive System of Architecture could be applied and practiced in many realms but is being specifically prototyped here in response to a vital need and a moment where reinvention is possible. The explosion left loss, a void, and potentially room to reimagine what this place could be and what it could represent.

The Reproductive System of Architecture is a form of resistance applying principles of Abolitionist Toolmaking as outlined by Ruha Benjamin. In Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin discusses the transformative potential of “Abolitionist Toolmaking” as a radical process/approach to the way the we fundamentally approach STEM education. This toolkit, of sorts, is produced to provide a guiding framework for the implementation of this Reproductive System. The tools are not isolated but must be co-productive in critically examining each other, to include diverse representations and narratives, and always have a decentralized and demystified built environment. The toolmaking is a way to “cultivate [an] ongoing practice of unflinching accountability”.8 The strategies are grounded in solidarity: stressing that co-liberation is the only way for anyone to be uplifted. Solidarity is about our linked oppressions and the ways in which all oppressions are related. We are all harmed by the upholding of a white cis hetero patriarchy.


Abolitionist toolmaking is the production of co-dependant and co-existent approaches and practices in creating architecture of justice. These tools should never be isolated in their practice and there is no linear process to their application, but rather can be intermingled and used as the need arises. Ruha Benjamin urges us, as designers, to avoid the pitfalls of jargon and “buzzwords” that imply a solved approach that works everytime. There is no “five-steps… to human-centered design”. She specifically calls our attention to the common lean on claiming empathy. Empathy should always be present but it is not the answer. The thought is not all that counts. These efforts require work and active participation. They require critical thinking: critically examining your own inherent biases and the biases existing around us even when it is uncomfortable. Architecture is late to the game. These practices and efforts have been worked on and theorized for years, the Reproductive System proposed here is another desperate cry to finally act. How do we act? Ruha Benjamin, Elizabeth Grosz, and so many others have already told us.

First, it is vital that this process is always slow and carried out with great care and intention. Here, in this project and on this site, Auditing Arachnids carry out the narrative of this slow process of creation. They are slow, soft robots carrying out some of the labor upon the direction of people in the city. We reject the way capitalism and efficiency do not allow the time and space to be more socially conscious. Especially, in Beirut, to come in and take over the site by some heavy handed construction would be not only oppressive, but unproductive in memorializing for healing. But also to allow for the unflinching accountability to do its job. To slow down the process of creation and look more critically at the effects each step of the way has, allows for more correction and adaptation as the need arises. There are many questions to ask along the ways but Benjamin provides us with a few:

“1. What are the unintended consequences of designing systems at scale on the basis of existing patterns in society?

2. When and how should [architecture] prioritize individuals over society and vice versa?

3. When is introducing an [architecture] the right answer-and when is it not?”.9

This brings us to our first tool, one that Simone Brown coins while participating in the LAPD Spying Coalition, sousveillance”. Sousveillance is the “active inversion of power relations that surveillance entails”.10 It inverts who is typically seen and who is typically watched. Sousveillance provides access of oversight to public eyes and public voices. The Accountant Arachnid acts as the peoples eyes and ears. Overseeing the construction of space around the crater. They watch, listen, and record the progress. Occasionally reporting to people throughout the city or gossipping while giving someone a ride to the store or home after spending the day at the crater. Input can come through the Arachnid and disperse through other Arachnids on site and alter their work. Need a bed for the night, she is on it. Need a room to cry with your girls, she can put in the request. Need an ear to listen, she can be that for you, although you should probably also get a room with friends she might not be the best conversationalist.

Where do these stories go? How are they translated? For the spiders, they know how to weave. The narrations of life in the city, of the pain of another trauma, of anger, of joy, of friends who supported you find their way into the process through the weaving. Colored threads and different patterns talk through the stories of the city. The spaces they create give space for them to exist and memorialization to them happening. The Scribe Arachnid participates in the act of recording all the narratives coming through from the Accountant: needs, dreams, expectations, criticism, memories, anxieties, silence. The Scribe tells and records stories through weaving, showing care for the place and people along the way. Taking from Ruha Benjamins, Race After Technology, “A more holistic approach to framing is vital, the problem extends well beyond retooling social science communication. It calls for a justice oriented, emancipatory approach to data production, analysis, and public engagement… the master narrative must be abolished – including the subplot that says ‘that a technology is loyal to the master’”.11 The Scribes hears all the narratives unfiltered and takes them all in and performs them all. This may lead to knots or reweaving certain parts of the web but the stories are all present in some form layered and nested in with each other.

At all points in this Reproductive System we must be critical, as designers, as citizens, as people in which architecture inevitably impacts. This critique is embedded into the construction of the way that all Arachnids perform imperfection but in particular certain Arachnids are programmed to only come in a wreak havoc, to mess up the web as they please, and to force the endless creation and recreation of the growth. This Critic Arachnid comes into question, they stand to disallow prioritization of one narrative. Constantly snipping and slashing through the web to force adaptation and reconstruction. This means the growth will never be done because the Critic will never stop being critical.

Here, the feminine architectural process eliminates the underlying assumptions entirely by literally creating voids as memorialization. There are no underlying assumptions by not telling it what to be. This thing created relates the void to the explosion through a gentle process of creation. The thing is less about the thing itself and more about the process of making it, happening alongside, parallel to the healing of a city in need of the space to do just that. This new feminine process of architecture, in this case, is a reincarnating performance of creation. One that is open. It will be a decentralized memorial of sorts. It begins with a recollection and rerecording of the past and imprinting it on the site. Followed by the radical repair. Caring tediously for the hole and the void of what was lost so as to set up a foundation to be able to be reborn in the future. The process is slow as is healing.


The recovery and also the recognition comes from this subtle creation process. The gentle spindling of the spidrs as they weave their way through the mess of what happened. Trying to navigate the turmoil, the trauma. They work slowly. Stringing together the events of the past, the events of the explosion, the events of the present, and eventually imagining events of the future. One cannot predict what the city may need but as we work to make something beautifully messy out of the chaos could something not be reborn? Regenerated? And possibly Reimagined?

This process is slow. While maybe this little refuge stands tall, glowing reflecting the current and previous events of the site, the growth of the cocoon from the steel of the site and the gradual repair of the earth itself won’t be done for maybe decades, centuries.

The program is always radical care but evolves and transforms based on ever-changing needs of people and place. The present program cannot be known until it is birthed. But, the feminine space itself is a process or framework approach and menstrual empowerment through acknowledgment or non erasure, the non silencing,

Making visible what was already beginning to go unseen, And completely rebirthing and regenerating what was.

“Does making proceed through the hierarchical assembly of preformed parts into larger whole, and these latter into still larger ones, until everything is joined up and complete? Or is it more like weaving a pattern from ever unspooling threads that twist and loop around one another, growing all the while without ever reaching completion?

Is making a matter of building up or carrying on?"

In the latter there are initially no parts and no wholes. Rather the form of a thing emerges from the process itself, within a field of forces established through the engagement of the practitioner with materials that have their own inclinations and vitality”12

This reproductive system of architecture sets out to produce space that is permeable, that does not function as a finished object but rather as a spatial process. The thing does not claim to predict future needs, it cannot be the container of determined expectations, but instead as merely a facilitator of making space for the unpredictable futurisms that will occur in this place. “The thing is our provocation to action and is itself the result of our action”.13 The thing does not remain fixed , it is a reflection of things being made. The site’s existing conditions, materials, and events as well as the past’s memories, infrastructures, and holding places, become the embryo that life proliferates from. The past and present do not disappear but become another layer in the accumulation of time and redefined collective memory. A construction of temporal space and spatial time is formed.

This idea of unrelenting questioning of design becomes an act of Critical Making. Matt Ratto in Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life, is concerned with this process of making as being a “mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to bridge the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration”.14 A process of making that is not product oriented but process oriented, prioritizing the development of prototypes or captured moments rather than finding a singular solution. The prototypes imagery displayed in the end of this work is not final and cannot necessarily speak for itself but rather must be examined in conjunction with critical discourse and knowledge production that prioritizes justice and equity. The focus is on the act of creating itself rather than the prototypes that are constructed as an “activity and site for enhancing and extending conceptual understandings of critical socio technical [and political] issues”.15

The thing grows out of the place of the explosion itself, maybe weaving into the site over time. It creates a relationship between the void, the loss, and the explosion. It is not trying to fill the void, one cannot just put a tampon in it, but to capture the past present and future in both the ethereal qualities and spatial implications.

There are two elements at play in this memorial, of sorts, one being the explosion itself, the literal moment that years of toxic masculine oppression exploded and violated the landscape, but also the void left behind. The void is the memory of the loss, of the absence of innocence lost, if there was any to begin with. Years of shrouded violence, oppression, and neglect were laid bare in forty five seconds.

So what is to be here? How can we even begin to tell it what to be?

Possibly, “the form of the thing emerges from the process [of active discovery] itself, with a field of forces established through the engagement of the practitioner with materials that have their own inclinations and vitality”.16

The spiders, my femininity and yours, are this life force of the materials themselves, born out of their continued strong will. The memorial is tethered to the site of the silo, of what was in the void and radiating away from the hole. And in this absence and loss is the collective memory that is important to recognize. This location of tether is the holding place of the power disbursed as this new life of the site.

To create a feminine space means to return to the very basis of what it means to create architecture and essentially start over. If what I have been doing is deconstructing everything we know about architecture and exposing it as the violent, oppressive perpetuator of toxic masculinity it seems as though a complete recreation of the fundamental way in which we approach architecture is necessary. Much like feminism, this cannot simply be adjustments within the already constructed framework. While we exist within the masculine framework, especially in this place, it does by no means imply that this is the framework we must be working with. A feminist architecture is not manipulating what is existing. That is working exactly how it was made to work. It is not broken. It is not flawed in its application, although arguably in its founding logic. A feminist architecture is abolishment it is not reform. We need a new approach.

This new feminine process of architecture in this case is a recarnating performance of creation. One that is open. It will be a decentralized memorial. It begins with a recollection and rerecording of the past and imprinting it on the site. Followed by radical repair. Caring tediously for the hole and the void of what was lost so as to set up a foundation to be able to be reborn in the future. The process is slow as is healing.


The hole remains the memorial to the loss, but the spaces being woven, endlessly, radically resist previous architectural memorial that do not address the moment of need but rather, stand stagnant preserving the moment and thus, upholding them. This memorial cares.