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Use Matters
From participatory architecture to interaction design, the question of how design accommodates use is driving inquiry in many creative fields. Expanding utility to embrace people’s everyday experience brings new promises for the social role of design. But this is nothing new. As the essays assembled in this collection show, interest in the elusive realm of the user was an essential part of architecture and design throughout the twentieth century. Use Matters is the first to assemble this alternative history, from the bathroom to the city, from ergonomics to cybernetics, and from Algeria to East Germany. It argues that the user is not a universal but a historically constructed category of twentieth-century modernity that continues to inform architectural practice and thinking in often unacknowledged ways.
Neoliberalism on the Ground
Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.
The Social Project
Winner of the 2015 Abbott Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum Winner of the 2015 Sprio Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians Winner of the 2016 International Planning History Society Book Prize for European Planning History Honorable Mention: 2016 Wylie Prize in French Studies In the three decades following World War II, the French government engaged in one of the twentieth century’s greatest social and architectural experiments: transforming a mostly rural country into a modernized urban nation. Through the state-sanctioned construction of mass housing and development of towns on the outskirts of existing cities, a new world materialized w...
Decolonising the Built Environment
Decolonising the Built Environment: Process, Product, and Pedagogy provides an important and much-needed comprehensive overview of how decolonisation is shaping the built environment in theory, in practice, and as a process/project today. The contributors provide an inclusive and trans-national conversation between a diverse set of academics, design practitioners and thinkers, and activists. This book is structured around three thematic and practical categories: Part 1 studies decolonisation conceptually; Part 2 studies decolonisation as a process; and Part 3 studies the products of decolonisation as materialised in the form of buildings, urban design, planning, policy, and social practices. Essential reading for students, teachers, and practitioners, this book presents the project of decolonisation as a pedagogy and an ongoing process.
What Is Critical Urbanism?
A methodological and pedagogical toolkit for urban research. Understanding and managing urban change in our global era demands a high degree of specialized and interdisciplinary knowledge. At the same time, city planners, architects, researchers, policymakers, and activists are deeply immersed in the chaotic and often contradictory urban realities that they are asked to address. What is Critical Urbanism? offers an innovative toolkit for engaging these present realities across disciplinary specializations and geographic purviews. Central to the book is the research and pedagogy of the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel, established in collaboration with the African Centre ...
Spaces of Uncertainty
Archivists of the discontinuous: Architecture at the edge The city as machine. The city as collage. Urban agglomeration as the interim city, as the ersatz or even the abandoned city? Even designations such as the murdered city have been used. Slogans with different meanings and orientations as well as theoretical concepts adopted by very different ideologies and schools of urban planning have entered the intellectual, conceptual discourse on urbanism and urban life, on plannability and entropy, on civil society, ecological urban culture and informal urban economy. The architects Kenny Cupers, a Belgian living in London, and Markus Miessen, a German educated in Scotland, have created an archi...
Use Matters
Bringing together promising young authors, prominent scholars, and cutting edge practitioners, Use Matters explores how the user has been a critical source of invention over the past century, prompting us to reconfigure the processes and premises of design.
Landscape Is...!
Landscape Is...! examines the implicit biases and received meanings of landscape. Following on from the previous publication Is Landscape...? which examined the plural and promiscuous identities of the landscape idea, this companion volume reflects upon the diverse and multiple meanings of landscape as a discipline, profession, and medium. This book is intended for academics, researchers, and students in landscape architecture and cognate disciplines. Chapters address various overlooked aspects of landscape that develop, disturb, and diversify received understandings of the field. Framed as an inquiry into the relationship of landscape to the forms of human subjectivity, the book features contributions from leading voices who challenge the contemporary understandings of the field in relation to capital and class, race and gender, power and politics, and more.
Modern Architecture and Climate
How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusi...
Re-Scaling the Environment
From 1960–1980, both eastern and western Europe experienced a construction boom of new dimensions. Cybernetics, the science of planning, and sociology, as well as the new possibilities offered by technology and production, paved the way to large-scale processes and systems in architecture and urban design, which favored technocratic and utopian concepts. Increasingly, architects and planners saw themselves as designers of comprehensive infrastructure and mega-structures in a technology-focused world. The authors assesses these developments on the back of a knowledge transfer between East and West. It confirms a change in attitude that can still be felt today – recession, social changes, and environmental problems led to criticism of the then contemporary concepts of modernity.
