The Architecture of Extraction: Land as a Political Technology and the Grounds for Kinship Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Freya Marchant University of Plymouth | UK This dissertation investigates architecture’s complicity in the climate crisis by examining the normalised trajectory of human-land relationships and contrasting them with alternative ontologies. The line of enquiry is situated within a wider context wherein architectural epistemologies have been universalised and often upheld by the profession as truth.Extraction is embedded in architecture’s origin myth of Laugier’s Primitive Hut, which initiated the raw extraction of materials and separated humanity from the cosmos. This architectural myth can be argued to have been ideologically reinforced by John Locke’s theories of property, which rendered land an exploitable asset accumulated through human labour. Together, Laugier and Locke established a dual paradigm: Laugier provided the framework of thinking through physical means of extraction. In contrast, Lockean property dynamics provided the structural framework of living through legal justification. By reducing the landscape to a site of legal ownership and material harvest, human relationships with the living world have been weakened, ultimately precipitating global ecological collapse. When forced to confront the climate crisis however, the architectural profession has turned to sustainability frameworks; yet, these mainstream approaches have been reduced to decontextualised managerial checklists.Through a decolonial critique that centres Indigenous Knowledge systems, this dissertation challenges the architectural profession’s sustainability discourse.Ultimately, this dissertation argues that the climate crisis is not a technical challenge, but a political and epistemic one: architecture must either confront its extractive foundations or remain complicit in planetary destruction. Tutor(s) Nikolina Bobic