Approaching Architecture


Book Description

The study of the architectural discipline suffers from an increasing disconnect between its teaching and its professional practice. In this edited collection, 18 architectural voices address this disconnect by reflecting on the ways in which they exercise the architectural discipline in three ways: research, teaching, and practice. This book argues that the totality of activities encompassed by the architectural profession can be best fulfilled when reconsidering the critical interactions between these three fields in the everyday exercise of the profession. Split into three parts, "Architecture as Research," Architecture as Pedagogy," and "Architecture as Practice," each section focuses on one of these three dimensions while establishing continuity with the other two. In doing so, the book not only favors a more fulfilling interaction between academia and the profession but also reinforces the implementation of design theory and research in everyday teaching and practice. The contributions come from 18 teams of architects operating from geographically diverse locations, including Pezo von Ellrichshausen in Chile, Kengo Kuma & Associates in Japan, Barclay & Crousse in Peru, Shift in Iran, Heinrich Wolff in South Africa, and People’s Architecture Office in China, opening the design conversation to larger contexts and framing continuity and inclusion in time. Written for students, instructors, and practitioners alike, the inspiring reflections in this volume encourage readers to grow as architects and play an instrumental role in transforming the built environment.




The Re-Use Atlas


Book Description

This book is a highly illustrated “map,” using photos, infographics and statistics, showing designers how they can successfully navigate the emerging field of resource management and the circular economy. Using the Brighton Waste House Project as a basis for this, the book will look at key moments and landmark decisions made during its design and construction, as well as the people and projects from around the world that inspired them.




Tabula Plena


Book Description

Edited by Bryony Roberts, a collaboration of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation In contrast to tabula rasa urbanism, this book considers strategies for tabula plena -- urban sites that are full of existing buildings of multiple time periods. Such dense sites prompt designers to work between the fields of architecture, historic preservation, and urban planning, developing methods for collaborative authorship and interlocking architectural forms. The book grew from a collaboration between the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation on the planning of the government quarter in Oslo. Emerging from this process, the book asks larger questions about how we practice, teach, and theorise engagement with existing architecture on an urban scale. It contains a compilation of short essays addressing theoretical questions, a sampling of design projects offering different July formal strategies for architectural design, and a series of discussions about pedagogical strategies. 149 images




Re-readings: 2


Book Description

Re-readings 2 is a companion book to Re-readings, originally published in 2004. This second volume is testament to the growing interest and demand for clarification of the re-modelling, adaptation and transformation processes within the existing built environment. With increased interest in the sustainability and heritage agenda and emerging interest from non-European-centric areas of the world in this type of work, this book explores how the re-modelling of existing buildings is a sustainable and viable alternative to the construction of new buildings. Throughout this highly-illustrated book, drawings and photos of various projects from around the world highlight how the new fits into the existing. Case studies are analysed holistically, and include information on the practical issues and challenges of individual projects.







The Geopolitics of Region Building in the Black Sea


Book Description

Offering theoretical insights on region building, this book explores the attempts to formulate a political and institutional vision for the Black Sea region in the post-9/11 era and in the context of the enlargements of the EU and NATO. It investigates in depth these attempts, viewed as a failure by the key actors involved, in order to understand how regions emerge in international politics as well as how and why they may fail to come into being. To this end, the book explores a range of factors that impacted region building in the Black Sea, considering the role of region builders involved, their practices and the context of their actions, and the spatial representations and security discourses that were integral to the region building process. Hence, attention is paid to how these factors both enabled and constrained the discursive construction of the Black Sea region, thus identifying the elements that distinguish the Black Sea from other successful cases of region building. Based on critical approaches towards international relations and political geography, this book both expands and deepens the scope and understanding of regions and will thus appeal to academics and students in the fields of International Relations, Security Studies, Political Geography, and Regional Integration.




Identification and Character


Book Description

This book tells the reader all about psychological identification, the single most important process for becoming, maintaining, or changing who we are as characters. The book's emphasis, though, is decidedly on identification's role in our becoming who we are. It is one thing for people to have an image of who they are or of who they would like to be, it is quite another for them to actually become that image. Through genuinely identifying with these sorts of things, we turn what otherwise would be mere mental pictures of traits into character traits that we psychologically own. Readable to laypersons as well as to academicians, this book offers a new perspective for understanding the formation and nature of human character. Kamler also discusses some important issues in psychoanalysis and philosophy. He clarifies the current psychoanalytic debate about identification's place among the primitive processes of self development; offers new ways of looking at the relationship between the infant self and the adult character; and addresses topics such as personal identity and identity crisis. In addition, the book speaks to a current philosophical debate about the fundamental nature of self, offering the author's own thesis and showing how all the protagonists in the discussion share a basically flawed position about the role that having values plays in our being persons.




Emergent Urbanism


Book Description

In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today’s urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.




The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design


Book Description

This handbook brings together expertise from a range of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts to address a key question facing prison policymakers, architects and designers – what kind of carceral environments foster wellbeing, i.e. deliver a rehabilitative, therapeutic environment, or other ‘positive’ outcomes? The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Design offers insights into the construction of custodial facilities, alongside consideration of the critical questions any policymaker should ask in commissioning the building of a site for human containment. Chapters present experience from Australia, Chile, Estonia, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – jurisdictions which vary widely in terms of the history and development of their prison systems, their punitive philosophies, and the nature of their public discourse about the role and purpose of imprisonment, to offer readers theories, frameworks, historical accounts, design approaches, methodological strategies, empirical research, and practical approaches.




The Art of Remembering


Book Description

Focusing on the non-Western context and case studies, this book explores theories of interdisciplinary architectural thinking and the construction of urban memory in Chinese cities, with an emphasis on contemporary architecture and the diversity of agencies. China has undergone one of the fastest urbanisation and urban renewal processes in human history, but discussions of urban memory in China have tended to be practice-oriented and lack theoretical reflection. This book brings together interdisciplinary architectural scholarship to interrogate the production of urban memory and examine experiences in China. The 14 chapters explore different processes, projects, materials, architecture and urban spaces in different Chinese cities by analysing cityscapes such as temples, bridges, conservation projects, architectural design, historical architecture, memorial hall, market street, city images, custom bike, food market and so on. The book deals with different agencies and methods, tangible and intangible, in the construction of memories aimed at promoting hybridised multiple identities, and explores the interplay of different versions of memory, i.e. state, public, regional, local, individual and collective memory. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of architecture and urbanism, cultural studies and China studies, as well as architects, urban planners and historians interested in these fields.