As our locale is typified by climatic emergency, we must look to expand our accepted ecological concerns towards the “political field”. Dissolving our current anthropocentric epistemology in favour of the broader ontological expanse of eco-centrism, A Field of the Political proposes a decentralised court for the performance of environmental hearing.

Sited at Dunwich, Suffolk, A Field of the Political theorises how a decentralised polity may re-catalyse this ubiquitous buffer zone, enshrining nonhuman matter under the protection of legal personhood. Discussions of place return to place, as politically subjugated actants, both human and nonhuman, are granted vital agency.

In A Field of the Political, ‘Form matters, but not so much the form of things as the forms between living things’ (Allen,1997). Architecture mimics and augments existing ecological dynamics, envisioning spatial forms as temporal: breathing, growing, evolving, and decaying in harmony with the nonhuman. The court’s form appears as a dynamic landscape of societal, political, and physical matters and its resultant horizontal spatial positioning. The cycles of architecture mimic the natural cycles of a field.