The Witch's House

Congratulations to Vic Mantha-Blythe, recipient of the RAIC Medal, RAIC Honour Roll, Ron Sims Purchase Prize, Excellence in Architecture TA Award, Nominees for Canadian Architect Student Award of Excellence, and a Commended Thesis Award.

A dissident in society, the witch and her respective home are both grounds for resistance and a place of refuge. The Witch’s House Thesis is a playful and experimental investigation of feminist architectural principles explored through narrative, writing, and drawing and is presented as a speculative architecture.

Assembled fragments of knowledge – in the form of suppressed women’s history, feminist artwork, critical architecture theory of sexuality and space, and theories of abjection – weave an architectural bricolage of the witch’s house in three forms: the cave, forest, and hut. These threadbare clichés of the witch’s home are transformed into textured narratives centering the perspective of women’s resistance as complex spatial relationships intertwined with social, ecological, economic, and spiritual implications.

This thesis aims to deconstruct an authority to forge a new understanding of enclosure, materiality, connection to nature, tectonics, and domesticity that is rooted in women’s innate and ancestral power.

Vic (they/them) is currently building a home by hand in Nova Scotia with their partners and more-than-human kin. Through landtrusts, workshares, and community care, they are exploring the ways disability justice, Landback, food sovereignty, smashing the binaries and anti-capitalism can take root in architectural design.