Spirit Structures of Papua New Guinea: Art and Architecture in the Kaiaimunucene

This book investigates the art and architecture of Papua New Guinean spirit structures with a multi-perspectival approach that combines cultural and social sciences with building, architectural, and spatial research. It offers the first comprehensive study of the spirit houses of New Guinea that exists to date.

The book’s aim is twofold: First, it aims to investigate the spirit structures and their associated cultural cosmos in detail. For this purpose, a representative selection of traditional buildings and artworks from different regions of Papua New Guinea is documented and analyzed, and theories for their understanding are formulated. In this course, the author develops a spatial theory of anthropological concepts - such as myths, signs, persons, and rituals. Secondly, this analysis is then situated in the broader context of the Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene. Transforming the historical spirit structures into models for future-oriented cultural imagination, the consequences for contemporary productions of space and ways of worldmaking in light of existential challenges are traced.

The book thus offers more-than-human and more-than-secular concepts for building, art, and worldmaking that are of critical importance in the ongoing Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene. It will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, anthropology, cultural studies, environmental humanities, and adjacent disciplines.

Part I of the book was translated from German by Melanie Janet Sindelar.

Michael Hirschbichler works across the disciplines of art, architecture, and anthropology. He is the director of Atelier Hirschbichler and a researcher at TU Delft. His work focuses on spatial constructions in the Anthropocene/Kaiaimunucene, with a particular emphasis on the interrelationship between their material and immaterial aspects (narratives, memories, ideologies, beliefs), between facts and cultural fictions. Michael Hirschbichler studied at ETH Zurich and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and completed his doctoral dissertation on ＂Mythical Constructions＂ at Berlin University of the Arts. He was a lecturer at ETH Zurich, a visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and director of the Architecture Program at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize by the German Academy Villa Massimo.