Nawratek, K.B., 2026.

Beasts Sleeping Furiously: An Investigation into Transdisciplinary Creative Practices on the Intersection of Creative Writing and Architecture

This chapter traces the entangled trajectory of the author's practice across architectural pedagogy and creative writing. What first appears as a neat split between disciplines, languages and audiences - architecture taught and written in English, fiction written in Polish - is re-read as a single weave through four perspectives: temporal, linguistic, spatial and translative.Drawing on childhood in Upper Silesia's post-industrial landscapes, the author develops a volumetric understanding of space, in which underground mines and surface edgelands form an embodied geometry of vertical and horizontal axes. Mythic underworlds, edgeland childhoods and more-than-human urban ecologies become laboratories for thinking with and against dominant spatial narratives.The translative perspective follows the author's teaching across Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester, where concepts such as edgelands, polyphony, posthuman community and care crystallise in studio projects and research. This chapter argues that creative writing and architectural education co-produce a situated, polyphonic, more-than-human approach to design: one that treats architecture as world-building and repositions the architect from sovereign author to implicated participant in complex, shared landscapes - offering both inspiration and quiet resistance to reductive, instrumental models of architectural education.