Critical Care


Book Description

How architecture and urbanism can help to care for and repair a broken planet: essays and illustrated case studies. Today, architecture and urbanism are capital-centric, speculation-driven, and investment-dominated. Many cannot afford housing. Austerity measures have taken a disastrous toll on public infrastructures. The climate crisis has rendered the planet vulnerable, even uninhabitable. This book offers an alternative vision in architecture and urbanism that focuses on caring for a broken planet. Rooted in a radical care perspective that always starts from the given, in the midst of things, this edited collection of essays and illustrated case studies documents ideas and practices from an extraordinarily diverse group of contributors. Focusing on the three crisis areas of economy, ecology, and labor, the book describes projects including village reconstruction in China; irrigation in Spain; community land trust in Puerto Rico; revitalization of modernist public housing in France; new alliances in informal settlements in Nairobi; and the redevelopment of traditional building methods in flood areas in Pakistan. Essays consider such topics as ethical architecture, land policy, creative ecologies, diverse economies, caring communities, and the exploitation of labor. Taken together, these case studies and essays provide evidence that architecture and urbanism have the capacity to make the planet livable, again. Essays by Mauro Baracco, Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Jane Da Mosto, Angelika Fitz, Hélène Frichot, Katherine Gibson, Mauro Gil-Fournier Esquerra, Valeria Graziano, Gabu Heindl, Elke Krasny, Lisa Law, Ligia Nobre, Meike Schalk, Linda Tegg, Ana Carolina Tonetti, Kim Trogal, Joan C. Tronto, Theresa Williamson, Louise Wright Case studies aaa atelier d'architecture autogérée, Ayuntamiento BCN, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury/Urbana, Cíclica [Space.Community.Ecology] + CAVAA arquitectes, Care+Repair Tandems Vienna (including Gabu Heindl, Zissis Kotionis + Phoebe Giannisi, rotor, Meike Schalk + Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Cristian Stefanescu, Rosario Talevi and many others), Colectivo 720, Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, EAHR Emergency Architecture & Human Rights, Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña CLT, Anna Heringer, Anupama Kundoo, KDI Kounkuey Design Initiative, Lacaton & Vassal, Yasmeen Lari, muf architecture/art, Paulo Mendes da Rocha + MMBB, RUF Rural Urban Framework, Studio Vlay Streeruwitz, De Vylder Vinck Taillieu, Xu Tiantian/DnA_Design and Architecture, ZUsammenKUNFT Berlin Copublished with Architekturzentrum Wien




Caring Architecture


Book Description

Architecture is hard stuff. It is formed by walls, roofs, floors, all components of hard materials, stone, glass and wood. It distributes people in space and directs their doings and movements. Institutions are even harder stuff. Order is pushed a step further by the coerciveness of discursive architectural models and caring practices, restricting options to certain ways of thinking and acting. This book illuminates how people and spaces negotiate, and often challenge, regularities and patterns embedded in the meeting between architecture and institutions. It contains a number of essays by authors from disciplines such as human geography, architecture, planning, design, social work and education. The contributions discuss different examples from institutions in which care is carried out, such as assisted living facilities, residential care for children, psychiatric care facilities, hospitals, and prisons. By adopting a non-representational perspective, emergent practices render visible capacities of being flexible and mouldable, in which institutional architecture is defied, contested and transformed. New situations appear which transgress physical space in partnership with those who populate it, whether humans or non-humans. This book reveals the relational and transformative conditions of care architecture and the ways in which institutions transform (or not) into caring architecture.




Architecture for Residential Care and Ageing Communities


Book Description

Architecture for Residential Care and Ageing Communities confronts urgent architectural design challenges within residential innovation, ageing communities and healthcare environments. The increasing and diversified demands on the housing market today call for alterability and adaptability in long term solutions for new integrated ways of residing. Meanwhile, an accentuated ageing society requires new residential ways of living, combining dignity, independence and appropriate care. Concurrently, profound changes in technical conditions for home healthcare require rethinking healing environments. This edited collection explores the dynamics between these integrated architectural and caring developments and intends to envision reconfigured environmental design patterns that can significantly enhance new forms of welfare and ultimately, an improved quality of life. This book identifies, presents, and articulates new qualities in designs, in caring processes, and healing atmospheres, thereby providing operational knowledge developed in close collaboration with academics, actors and stakeholders in architecture, design, and healthcare. This is an ideal read for those interested in health promotive situations of dwelling, ageing and caring.




The Architecture of Hope


Book Description

Since the mid-1990s, an exciting building project has been underway: new cancer care centers that offer a new approach to architecture and health. Named after Maggie Keswick and cofounded with her husband, the writer and landscape designer Charles Jencks, these centers aim to be at all the major British hospitals that treat cancer. "The Architecture of Hope" showcases these structures where, under one roof, patients can access help with information, benefits, psychological support, and stress-reducing strategies. The book offers a history of the centers, as well as profiles of individual centers throughout the U.K. "The Architecture of Hope" is a testament to these places of hope and healing, available to anybody, whether or not they are afflicted with this terrible disease.




On Site


Book Description

'On Site' presents projects and strategies in landscape architecture from Berlin to Bordeaux. The projects are supplemented by essays on European cartography, the cultural landscape, the history of ideas in landscape architecture, the role of ideal landscapes, urban policies, and the pioneers from Portugal.




Health and Architecture


Book Description

Health and Architecture offers a uniquely global overview of the healthcare facility in the pre-modern era, engaging in a cross-cultural analysis of the architectural response to medical developments and the formation of specialized hospitals as an independent building typology. Whether constructed as part of Chinese palaces in the 15th century or the religious complexes in 16th century Ottoman Istanbul, the healthcare facility throughout history is a built environment intended to promote healing and caring. The essays in this volume address how the relationships between architectural forms associated with healthcare and other buildings in the pre-modern era, such as bathhouses, almshouses, schools and places of worship, reflect changing attitudes towards healing. They explore the impact of medical advances on the design of hospitals across various times and geographies, and examine the historic construction processes and the stylistic connections between places of care and other building types, and their development in urban context. Deploying new methodological, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the analysis of healthcare facilities, Health and Architecture demonstrates how the spaces of healthcare themselves offer some of the most powerful and practical articulations of therapy.




The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture


Book Description

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions. It identifies ways that planned-for and latent functions of hospital spaces work jointly to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased scope for care provider communication and more intelligible corridors. By advancing space syntax theory and methods, the volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the sequence of chapters takes an unusually comprehensive view that pairs spaces and occupants in hospitals: the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic as it reveals how healthcare institutions must evolve to be adaptable in entirely new ways. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion. The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture makes the case that latent dimensions of space as experienced have a surprisingly strong link to measurable outcomes, providing new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology and other areas of the social sciences.




Architecture for an Ageing Population


Book Description

This compilation of more than 20 outstanding projects in the areas of assisted living, continuing care retirement communities and nursing homes represents the best current work designed by architects for the ever-increasing population of the ageing and elderly. Produced by IMAGES Publishing in association with the IAHSA, Architecture for an Ageing Population complements the successful Design for Aging series. Each project is presented with photographs, detailed plans and statistics, illuminating the high level of research, planning and community involvement that goes into these advancements in living environments for seniors. This comprehensive review of architectural design trends in aged-care facilities will appeal to aged-care providers, developers, users, and advocates, as well as architects, interior designers, landscapers and other design professionals.




The Social (Re)Production of Architecture


Book Description

The Social (Re)Production of Architecture brings the debates of the ‘right to the city’ into today’s context of ecological, economic and social crises. Building on the 1970s’ discussions about the ‘production of space’, which French sociologist Henri Lefebvre considered a civic right, the authors question who has the right to make space, and explore the kinds of relations that are produced in the process. In the emerging post-capitalist era, this book addresses urgent social and ecological imperatives for change and opens up questions around architecture’s engagement with new forms of organization and practice. The book asks what (new) kinds of ‘social’ can architecture (re)produce, and what kinds of politics, values and actions are needed. The book features 24 interdisciplinary essays written by leading theorists and practitioners including social thinkers, economic theorists, architects, educators, urban curators, feminists, artists and activists from different generations and global contexts. The essays discuss the diverse, global locations with work taking different and specific forms in these different contexts. A cutting-edge, critical text which rethinks both practice and theory in the light of recent crises, making it key reading for students, academics and practitioners.




The Architecture of Good Behavior


Book Description

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs. In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design. In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents.