Architecture on the Borderline interrogates space and territory in a turbulent present where nation-state borders are porous to a few but impermeable to many. It asks how these uneven and conflicted social realities are embodied in the physical and material conditions imagined, produced or experienced through architecture and urbanism. Drawing on historical, global examples, this rich collection of essays illustrates how empires, nations and cities expand their frontiers and contest boundaries, but equally how borderline identities of people and places influence or expose these processes. Empirical chapters covering Central Asia, the Asia Pacific region, the American continent, Europe and the Middle East offer multiple critical insights into the ways in which our spatial imagination is contingent on 'border-thinking'; on the ways of being and navigating frontiers, boundaries and margins, the three themes used to organise their content. The underlying premise of the book is that sensitisation to border conditions can alter our understanding of the static physical spaces that service political or cultural ideologies, and that the view from the periphery opens up new ways of understanding sovereignty. In exploring these various spaces and their transformative subjectivities, this book also reveals the unrelenting precarity of contesting and living on the margins, and related spaces and discourses that are neglected or suppressed.

This book introduces architects to a philosopher, Immanuel Kant, whose work was constantly informed by a concern for the world as an evolving whole. According to Kant, in this interconnected and dynamic world, humans should act as mutually dependent and responsible subjects. Given his future-oriented and ethico-politically concerned thinking, Kant is a thinker who clearly speaks to architects. This introduction demonstrates how his ideas bear pertinently and creatively upon the world in which we live now and for which we should care thoughtfully. Kant grounded his enlightened vision of philosophy's mission using an architectural metaphor: of the modest 'dwelling-house'. Far from constructing speculative 'castles in the sky' or vertiginous 'towers which reach to the heavens', he tells us that his humble aim is rather to build a 'secure home for ourselves', one which appropriately corresponds at once to the limited material resources available on our planet, and to our need for firm and solid principles to live by. This book also explores Kant's notions of cosmopolitics, which attempts to think politics from a global perspective by taking into account the geographical fact that the earth is a sphere with limited land mass and natural resources. Given the urgent topicality of sustainable development, these Kantian texts are of particular interest for architects of today. Students of architecture, who are necessarily trained in negotiating between theory and practice, gain much from considering Kant, whose critical project also consisted of testing and exploring the viability of ideas, so as to ascertain to what extent, and crucially, how ideas can have a constructive effect on the whole world, and on us as active agents therein.

Northern Ireland has a complex urbanism with multilayered socio-spatial politics. In this environment, issues of communication, self-representation and expression of identity are central to the experience of urban space and architecture where the dichotomy of division and shared living are spatially exercised in everyday life. Unlike other studies in the area, this book focuses on the everyday experiences of local communities in both public and private spheres - issues of 'shareness' - challenging conventional approaches to divided cities. The book aims to layer its narratives of architectural and social developments as an urban experience in post-conflict settings over the past two decades.

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch--whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro's collected essays--here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him over the last thirty years.
In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the fields of art history and cultural studies, it will be welcomed as a powerful argument for utilizing in an urban context interpretive approaches developed for the analysis of spatial and visual phenomena. Though architecture has served since Descartes as a structural analogy for philosophical discourse and has played a similar role in literature, contemporary studies on architecture have tended to be very specialized, with little regard for their accessibility to scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This book, however, with its solid grounding in architecture and urban theory and its profoundly humanistic approach, will prove deeply rewarding to specialist and generalist alike.
The book engages a wide range of subjects, including reconstructions of the Egyptian labyrinth, architectural museums, European visions of New World cities, the great spaces and national parks of the American West, and landscape gardening in the United States. These subjects work together to develop a unique way of looking at the city and its architecture, the landscape and its spaces.

The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture is the first systematic architectural history of Romania under socialism written in English. It examines the mechanisms through which modern architecture was invested with political meaning and, in reverse, how specific architectural solutions came to define the socialist experience. Each of the book's three parts traces the historical development of one key aspect of Romania's architectural culture between the years 1949-1964: the planning and construction of housing districts in Bucharest; the role of typification of design and standardization of construction in a project of cultural transformation; the production and management of a folk architectural tradition. Going beyond buildings and architects to consider the use of photography, painting, and novels, as well as narrations of history and the formation of an ethnographic architectural heritage, the author explores how buildings came to participate in the cultural imagination of socialism-and became, in fact, a privileged medium of socialism. Part of the growing interest in the significance of Soviet Bloc architecture, this is an important contribution to the fields of architectural history, cultural history, and visual culture.

The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture's increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture - research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called 'nature'. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes - History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice - supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.

Riverscapes are the main arteries of the world's largest cities, and have, for millennia, been the lifeblood of the urban communities that have developed around them. These human settlements - given life through the space of the local waterscape - soon developed into ritualised spaces that sought to harness the dynamism of the watercourse and create the local architectural landscape. Theorised via a sophisticated understanding of history, space, culture, and ecology, this collection of wonderful and deliberately wide-ranging case studies, from Early Modern Italy to the contemporary Bengal Delta, investigates the culture of human interaction with rivers and the nature of urban topography. Riverine explores the ways in which architecture and urban planning have imbued cultural landscapes with ritual and structural meaning.

Mid-20th century sacred architecture in America sought to bridge modernism with religion by abstracting cultural and faith traditions and pushing the envelope in the design of houses of worship. Modern architects embraced the challenges of creating sacred spaces that incorporated liturgical changes, evolving congregations, modern architecture, and innovations in building technology. The book describes the unique context and design aspects of the departure from historicism, and the renewal of heritage and traditions with ground-breaking structural features, deliberate optical effects and modern aesthetics. The contributions, from a pre-eminent group of scholars and practitioners from the US, Australia, and Europe are based on original archival research, historical documents, and field visits to the buildings discussed. Investigating how the authority of the divine was communicated through new forms of architectural design, these examinations map the materiality of liturgical change and communal worship during the mid-20th century.

Built environment surrounds us for 90% of our lives but only now are we realising its influence on the environment, our health, and how we think, feel and behave both individually and socially.Spirit & Place shows how to work towards a sustainable environment through socially inclusive processes of placemaking, and how to create places that are nourishing psychologically and physically, to soul and spirit as well as body. This book's unique arguments identify important, but often unrecognised, principles and illustrate their applicability in a wide range of situations, price-ranges and climates. It shows how to reconcile the apparently incompatible demands of environmental, economic and social sustainability; how to moderate climate to make places of delight, and realign social pressures so places both support society and maximise economic viability. Thought provoking and easy to understand, Christopher Day uses everyday examples to relate his theories to practice and our experience.

ILS-Innovative Learning Space is a Summer School organised in 2016 by the Ecourbanlab research facility, founded by Massimo Faiferri within the DADU (Department of Architecture, Design and Urbanism) at the University of Sassari. It was formed as a project activity SPIN-APP: Innovative Learning Spaces (Regional Law No. 7 Promotion of Scientific Research and Technological Innovation in Sardinia) in collaboration with the INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) and with contributions from Sardegna Ricerche through the project Scientific School 2015. The general objective of the Scientific School is as an innovative project for learning environments which can serve as a reference and model for the new realisation or adaptation of school education. To intervene on the project of school space means to reflect responsibly on the role that space itself covers in the dynamics of learning processes as well as to think about the renewal of the didactic organisation. The prerequisite is the articulation of a modular and multi-functional space suited to the subjective needs of the individual pathways of pupil skills, and which incorporates principles and material linked to good sustainable practices as their constituent elements, which can accept new technological tools as a form of enhancement of real space.

The aim of this book is to expand the subject and matter of architecture, and to explore their interdependence. This book acknowledges architecture far beyond the familiar boundaries of the discipline and reassesses the object at its centre: the building. Architectural matter is not always physical or building fabric. It is whatever architecture is made of, whether words, bricks, blood cells, sounds or pixels. The fifteen chapters are divided into three sections - on buildings, spaces and bodies - which each deal with a particular understanding of architecture and architectural matter.
The richness and diversity of subjects and materials discussed in this book locates architecture firmly in the world as a whole, not just the domain of architects. In stating that architecture is far more than the work of architects, this book aims not to deny the importance of architects in the production of architecture but to see their role in more balanced terms and to acknowledge other architectural producers. Architecture can, for example, be found in the incisions of a surgeon, the instructions of a choreographer or the movements of a user. Architecture can be made of anything and by anyone.

Public Interest Design Education Guidebook: Curricula, Strategies, and SEED Academic Case Studies presents the pedagogical framework and collective curriculum necessary to teach public interest designers. The second book in Routledge's Public Interest Design Guidebook series, the editors and contributors feature a range of learning competencies supported by distinct teaching strategies where educational and community-originated goals unite. Written in a guidebook format that includes projects from across design disciplines, this book describes the learning deemed most critical to pursuing an inclusive, informed design practice that meets the diverse needs of both students and community partners. Featured chapter themes include Fundamental Skills, Intercultural Competencies, Engaging the Field Experience, Inclusive Iteration, and Evaluating Student Learning. The book consists of practice-based and applied learning constructs that bridge community-based research with engaged learning and design practice. SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design) academic case studies introduce teaching strategies that reinforce project-specific learning objectives where solving social, economic, and environmental issues unites the efforts of communities, student designers, and educators. This comprehensive publication also contains indices devoted to learning objectives cross-referenced from within the book as well as considerations for educational program development in public interest design. Whether you are a student of design, an educator, or a designer, the breadth of projects and teaching strategies provided here will empower you to excel in your pursuit of public interest design.

That the topic ofdesign review is somehow trou My biases are clearfrom the start: I am among blesome is probably one thing all readers can those who believe that, despite all signals to the contrary, the physical structure of our environ agree on. Beyond this, however, I suspect pros pects of consensus are dim. Differing opinions ment can be managed, and that controlling it is on the subject likely range from those desiring the key to the ameliorationofnumerous problems control tothosedesiringfreedom. Saysonecamp: confronting society today. I believe that design our physical and natural environments are going can solve a host ofproblems, and that the design to hell in a hand basket. Says the other: design of the physical environment does influence be review boards are only as good as their members; havior. more often than not their interventions produce Clearly, this is a perspective that encompasses mediocre architecture. more than one building at a time and demands As a town planner and architect, I am sympa that each building understand its place in a larger thetic to the full range of sentiment. Perhaps a context-the city. Indeed, anyone proposing discussion of these two concepts-control and physical solutions to urban problems is designing freedom-and their differences would now be or, as may seem more often the case, destroying useful. But let me instead suggest that both posi the city."

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – ‘naming’ through timber, ‘process-based’ through concrete, and ‘performance specification’ through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or ‘Preliminary Operations’ as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

Everyone is a designer. But while many practitioners may be looking for solutions or ideological certainties, Easterling argues that solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Instead, Medium Design speaks to anyone looking for alternative approaches to the world's unresponsive or intractable dilemmas-from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. Such an approach joins many disciplines in considering not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new innovations but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but put them together into productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organization of all kinds

Narrative Theory in Conservation engages with conservation, heritage studies, and architectural approaches to historic buildings, offering a synthesis of the best of each, and demonstrating that conservation is capable of developing a complementary, but distinct, theoretical position of its own. Tracing the ideas behind the development of modern conservation in the West, and considering the challenges presented by non-Western practice, the book engages with the premodern understanding of innovation within tradition, and frames historic buildings as intergenerational, communal, ongoing narratives. Redefining the appropriate object of conservation, it suggests a practice of conserving the questions that animate and energize local cultures, rather than only those instantiated answers that expert opinion has declared canonical. Proposing a narrative approach to historic buildings, the book provides a distinctive new theoretical foundation for conservation, and a basis for a more equal dialogue with other disciplines concerned with the historic environment. Narrative Theory in Conservation articulates a coherent theoretical position for conservation that addresses the urgent question of how historic buildings that remain in use should respond to change. As such, the book should be of great interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students from the fields of conservation, heritage studies, and architecture.

If data is the greatest collective treasure of a digital society, basic material for business and politics: Why are the places where it is stored still so invisible? Niklas Maak, architectural critic and Professor for Architecture at Stadelschule Frankfurt, explores this question in his new publication and envisions radical solutions for the future.

Examines how both artist and writer in the Victorian era responded to the shared challenges, assumptions, and dilemmas of their time, often unaware that the same problems were being confronted in the kindred media. The placing of such writers as Dickens, G.Eliot, Hopkins, and Henry James within the context of Victorian painting, architecture, and interior design offers fresh insights into their works, as well as reassessments of such themes as the mid-century representation of the Fallen Woman or the impact of commodity culture upon contemporary aesthetic standards.

The relationship of architecture to the human body is a centuries-long and complex one, but not always symmetrical. This book opens a space for historians of the visual arts, archaeologists, architects, and digital humanities professionals to reflect upon embodiment, spatiality, science, and architecture in premodern and modern cultural contexts. Architecture and the Body, Science and Culture poses one overarching question: How does a period's understanding of bodies as objects of science impinge upon architectural thought and design? The answers are sophisticated, interdisciplinary explorations of theory, technology, symbolism, medicine, violence, psychology, deformity, and salvation, and they have unexpected and fascinating implications for architectural design and history. The new research published in this volume reinvigorates the Western survey-style trajectory from Archaic Greece to post-war Europe with scientifically-framed, body-centred provocations. By adding the third factor-science-to the architecture and body equation, this book presents a nuanced appreciation for architectural creativity and its embeddedness in other sets of social, institutional and political relationships. In so doing, it spatializes body theory and ties it to the experience of the built environment in ways that disturb traditional boundaries between the architectural container and the corporeally contained.

Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a 'Third Ecology' emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, 'star' buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a 'desert flatland', environmental inequality and unhappiness. This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.