Drawing on the format of the urban guidebook, A Guide to the Dirty South--Atlanta generates a new discourse about the architecture of the American South. By guiding readers on a tour of Atlanta, this project seeks to reclaim a regional identity for cities otherwise deemed to be a "backwoods" by the East and West Coasts. Borrowing from the hip hop industry and recognising the rivalry between the two coasts, A Guide to the Dirty South--Atlanta redirects our attention to a 'third coast'. Steeped in geography, historical events, typology, storytelling, and popular culture, trajectories through the city that the guide takes are idiosyncratic but urge the discipline of architecture toward a long overdue reading of Dirty South regionalism. Part tour guide, part architectural manual, the publication also features oral histories in a set of interviews with prominent architects, theorists, chefs, community leaders, and hip hop artists, from Architectural Historian Mario Carpo to hip-hop group Goodie Mob.Authored by Jennifer Bonner, the TVSDesign Distinguised Studio Critic at Georgia Tech, A Guide to the Dirty South--Atlanta takes the reader on a tour of "Rap City", "Pop up Surface Lots", "Architecture of Quarantine" and a "Geography of Smells". Wittily designed, and featuring beautiful illustrations throughout, A Guide to the Dirty South--Atlanta is perfect for those new to the architectural delights of Atlanta, and long-time fans alike.

This book weaves a much needed and transformational narrative about making architecture through paying close attention to cross-laminated timber as a material for today. The material becomes the site of experimentation, innovation, and research in search of specific meanings of CLT in architecture at various scales by selecting the "CLT Blank" as the building unit. The structure of the book brings together work and texts from a diverse group of theorists and practitioners, who make material central to their inquiry, to suggest design approaches that will broaden the cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry. The outcome focuses on materiality through fast slippages between art, architecture, and science, that we hope will invigorate and expand new discourse to act as an antidote to the current conversations about the material, that is fixated on its making and mass production, disappointingly portraying it as a bland and lifeless product-a notion we want to be distant from in preference to seeking areas we feel were not yet conceptualised or theorised. The potential to see the spatial properties of its use and what kind of world that might suggest is shown in the book, with selected striking visual materials, to reposition its architecture though new forms of representation and responses that continue to stay in touch with pragmatics. Aesthetics of CLT with a connection to wood and art practice is a central thread though the book.