Exhaustion of environment-worlds, and the possibility of moving beyond exhaustion towards beautitude and joy is the main theme of Hélène Frichot’s book Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (2019). As a reader I am inspired by the idea presented already in the introduction: architecture as a vast and differentiated discipline that we can learn from through an indisciplined approach. Frichot asks her readers to look away from the iconic celebrated objects and figures; to acknowledge and trace the creative practices of minor characters, many of which are women, who challenge the core assumptions of the discipline. The book has three parts: environment-worlds, things and thinkables; each one asking philosophically burning questions. Exhaustion, Frichot convincingly argues, is not only a condition of being tired, but a situation when we have had enough. By telling stories and practice-scenes the book invites the reader to take part in creative practices saturated by responsibility and caring.

"Perhaps I was drawn to the language of exhaustion because I was travelling to my doctor for a health control on the 4th of November, the day when I read the book and made this first diary note. Or maybe Frichot’s book is so thought provoking in the way it unexpectedly awakens the reader’s attention to the richness of theoretical language that exhaustion offers that it speaks to many readers who will feel that they have waited a long time for this book to be written?" This article is Mona Livholts reading of Hélène Frichot's book Creative Ecologies. Theorizing the Practice of Architecture published by Bloomsbury 2019. The article is published in the inaugural issue of Reading Writing Quarterly (December 2019), where Professor Jane Rendell invites two writers to read each other’s work, to explore ways of ‘reading writing’ that practice ‘reviewing’ from a situated perspective and re-write the genre and texture of the ‘critical review essay’.