Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic


Book Description

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic is a concise introductory guide to the design and planning of the built environments in the Arctic region. As the global forces of change are becoming more pronounced in the Arctic, the future trajectories for living environments, city-making processes, and their adaptive capacities need to be addressed directly. This book presents 11 new and original contributions from both leading and emerging scholars and practitioners, positioning the Arctic as a dynamic, diverse, and lived place at the nexus of unprecedented socioenvironmental transformations. The volume offers key concepts for understanding and spatializing Arctic cities and landscapes; similarities and differences in the development of design and planning approaches responsive to specific climatic and cultural conditions; and historical and geographic case studies that provide unique perspectives for the management of the built environment, from the scales of a building and infrastructure to cities and territories. Altogether, the contributions expand regional Arctic design scholarship to understand how the variability of the Arctic context influences the designed urban, architecture, and landscape systems, and offer numerous lessons for design and other forms of spatial practice both within and beyond the Arctic. This is a unique resource for researchers, creative practitioners, policymakers, and community decision-makers, as well as for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.




Mediating Environments


Book Description

By revisiting and reconfiguring the intersections between environmental and design systems, this publication aims to expand conceptual strategies in the arctic beyond the modes of insulation, stabilization, and optimization while repositioning the region as a central figure within the global network of exchanges. How can the 'arctic wall' as a defining feature of northern architecture be renegotiated? Can design, whether it is pavement assemblies or building foundations built on permafrost, escape the confines of technical precedence aimed to resist instability, and instead work with - take advantage of - dynamic environmental mechanisms, such as thermal cycles of ground, pronounced in the region? This study is not an argument against engineering but for greater synergies between engineering and design as well as between science and design, and for developing climatically responsive and arctic-specific paradigms for the construction and maintenance of arctic cities.




Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic


Book Description

Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic is a concise introductory guide to the design and planning of the built environments in the Arctic region. As the global forces of change are becoming more pronounced in the Arctic, the future trajectories for living environments, city-making processes, and their adaptive capacities need to be addressed directly. This book presents11 new and original contributions from both leading and emerging scholars and practitioners, positioning the Arctic as a dynamic, diverse, and lived place at the nexus of unprecedented socioenvironmental transformations. The volume offers key concepts for understanding and spatializing Arctic cities and landscapes; similarities and differences in the development of design and planning approaches responsive to specific climatic and cultural conditions; and historical and geographic case studies that provide unique perspectives for the management of the built environment, from the scales of a building and infrastructure to cities and territories. Altogether, the contributions expand regional Arctic design scholarship to understand how the variability of the Arctic context influences the designed urban, architecture, and landscape systems, and offer numerous lessons for design and other forms of spatial practice both within and beyond the Arctic. This is a unique resource for researchers, creative practitioners, policymakers, and community decision-makers, as well as for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.




Sustainable Design for the Built Environment


Book Description

Sustainable Design for the Built Environment marks the transition of sustainable design from a specialty service to the mainstream approach for creating a healthy and resilient built environment. This groundbreaking and transformative textbook introduces sustainable design in a clear, concise, easy-to-read format. This new edition includes fully updated exercises and online resources, an increased focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in design, more international examples, perspectives, and approaches, enhanced full colour visuals, and additional resources for further study. The book takes the reader deep into the foundations of sustainable design, and creates a holistic and integrative approach addressing the social, cultural, ecological, and aesthetic aspects in addition to the typical performance-driven goals. The first section of this book is thematically structured around the origins, principles, and frameworks of sustainable design, aimed at inspiring a deeper, broader, and more inclusive view of sustainability. The second section examines strategies such as biophilia and biomimicry, adaptation and resilience, and health and well-being, including recent developments following the COVID-19 pandemic. The third section examines the application of sustainability principles from the global, urban, district and site, building, and human scales, illustrating how a systems thinking approach allows sustainable design to span varied contexts and multiple scales. This textbook is intended to inspire a new vision for the future that unites human activity with natural processes to form a regenerative, coevolutionary model for sustainable design. Supported by additional resources including additional reading for each chapter and classroom assignments, this book will be essential reading for students of sustainability and sustainable design.




Planning and Urban Design for Attractive Arctic Cities


Book Description

This book takes a deep dive into the design and planning, and unique challenges of settlements in the European Arctic. Attractive Arctic Cities require job opportunities, good societal and commercial services, and importantly, high-quality built environments in order to thrive. The cities of the European Arctic are generally small and sit in sparsely populated regions, with large travel times between places, making them uniquely challenging from a planning and design perspective. The chapters detail the planning process and place-shaping in the Arctic. Emphasis is placed on the importance of urban design, microclimate, cultural heritage, and movement and transport. The objective is to provide an overview for students and practitioners of architecture, urban design and town planning, of the design and planning of Arctic settlements in the European Arctic (Finland, Norway, Sweden) as well as in North America, Canada, Russia, Iceland, Greenland, and China.




The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change


Book Description

International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.




Canadian Modern Architecture


Book Description

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.




Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment


Book Description

Reyner Banham was a pioneer in arguing that technology, human needs, and environmental concerns must be considered an integral part of architecture. No historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering on the design of buildings and on the minds of architects. In this revision of his classic work, Banham has added considerable new material on the use of energy, particularly solar energy, in human environments. Included in the new material are discussions of Indian pueblos and solar architecture, the Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings, and the environmental wisdom of many current architectural vernaculars.




Designing Landscape Architectural Education


Book Description

No single project or endeavour is immune to the issues that the climate crisis brings. The climate crisis encompasses a broad register of "symptoms" – increased global temperatures and sea-level rise, droughts and extreme bushfire events, salinification and desertification of fertile land, and the list goes on. It reveals and amplifies complex causal relationships that are inherently present and traverse scales, sectors and communities divulging a range of impacts and inequalities. This publication asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching. Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures, the Landscape Architecture Design Studio Companion, serves as a resource for academic practitioners in the preparation and delivery of "design-research studios" and students seeking guidance for design methodologies as a part of their landscape architectural education. It draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine the utilisation of a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline. The landscape architecture discipline is evolving rapidly to respond to both a broadening and intensification of changes in the environmental, social and political conditions. These changing conditions require innovation that extend the core competencies of landscape architects. This book addresses two fundamental questions – what are the design competencies required of landscape architects to equip them to deal with the complexities brought forth by contemporary society, and as a result, how could we design the future design studio?




Making the Arctic City


Book Description

Making the Arctic City explores the unwritten history of city-building in the Arctic over the last 100 years. Spanning northern regions of North America, through Greenland, Svalbard to Russia, this is the first book to provide a truly circumpolar account of historical and contemporary architecture and urbanism in the Arctic – and it shows how the Arctic city offers valuable lessons for the post-colonial study of architectural and urban planning history elsewhere. Examining architects' and planners' designs for Arctic urban futures, it considers the impact of 20th-century models of urban design and planning in Arctic cities, and reveals how contemporary architectural approaches continue to this day to essentialize 'extreme' climate conditions and disregard the agency of Arctic city-dwellers – a critical perspective that is vital to the formulation of future design and planning practices in the region.