Architecture and Design Versus Consumerism

Architecture and Design Versus Consumerism

Author: Ann Thorpe

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1849713561

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Informed by recent research into the viability of a 'steady state' economy, this book sets an agenda for addressing the designer's paradox of sustainable consumption.


The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability

The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability

Author: Ann Thorpe

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2007-06-20

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1610910605

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Designing for sustainability is an innovation shaping both the design industry and design education today.Yet architects, product designers, and other key professionals in this new field have so far lacked a resource that addresses their sensibilities and concerns. The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability now explores the basic principles, concepts, and practice of sustainable design in a visually sophisticated and engaging style. The book tackles not only the ecological aspects of sustainable design-designers' choice of materials and manufacturing processes have a tremendous impact on the natural world-but also the economic and cultural elements involved. The Atlas is neither a how-to manual nor collection of recipes for sustainable design, but a compendium of fresh approaches to sustainability that designers can incorporate into daily thinking and practice. Illuminating many facets of this exciting field, the book offers ideas on how to harmonize human and natural systems, and then explores practical options for making the business of design more supportive of long-term sustainability. An examination of the ethical dimensions of sustainable development in our public and private lives is the theme present throughout. Like other kinds of atlases, The Designer's Atlas of Sustainability illustrates its subject, but it goes far beyond its visual appeal, stimulating design solutions for "development that cultivates environmental and social conditions that will support human well-being indefinitely."


Design Activism

Design Activism

Author: Alastair Fuad-Luke

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-06-17

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1136568476

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Design academics and practitioners are facing a multiplicity of challenges in a dynamic, complex, world moving faster than the current design paradigm which is largely tied to the values and imperatives of commercial enterprise. Current education and practice need to evolve to ensure that the discipline of design meets sustainability drivers and equips students, teachers and professionals for the near-future. New approaches, methods and tools are urgently required as sustainability expands the context for design and what it means to be a 'designer'. Design activists, who comprise a diverse range of designers, teachers and other actors, are setting new ambitions for design. They seek to fundamentally challenge how, where and when design can catalyse positive impacts to address sustainability. They are also challenging who can utilise the power of the design process. To date, examination of contemporary and emergent design activism is poorly represented in the literature. This book will provide a rigorous exploration of design activism that will re-vitalise the design debate and provide a solid platform for students, teachers, design professionals and other disciplines interested in transformative (design) activism. Design Activism provides a comprehensive study of contemporary and emergent design activism. This activism has a dual aim - to make positive impacts towards more sustainable ways of living and working; and to challenge and reinvigorate design praxis,. It will collate, synthesise and analyse design activist approaches, processes, methods, tools and inspirational examples/outcomes from disparate sources and, in doing so, will create a specific canon of work to illuminate contemporary design discourse. Design Activism reveals the power of design for positive social and environmental change, design with a central activist role in the sustainability challenge. Inspired by past design activists and set against the context of global-local tensions, expressions of design activism are mapped. The nature of contemporary design activism is explored, from individual/collective action to the infrastructure that supports it generating powerful participatory design approaches, a diverse toolbox and inspirational outcomes. This is design as a political and social act, design to enable adaptive societal capacity for co-futuring.


Architecture and the Urban Environment

Architecture and the Urban Environment

Author: Derek Thomas

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-06-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1136428674

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This well illustrated text forms a critical appraisal of the place and direction of architecture and urban design in a new world order at the start of the 21st century. The book defines architectural and environmental goals for the New Age by analysing recent contemporary work for its responsiveness to important social and environmental issues and comparing it to successful precedents in architecture. It argues that this new sustainable approach to architecture should be recognised as a new development of mainstream architectural history. This practical guide illustrates current social and natural resource issues to aid architects in their approach to future design. Environmental economics is presented as a potential bridge over the divide between the expectations of the business sector and the concerns of environmental lobbies. Through examples and case studies, an accessible analysis of carefully researched data, drawn from primary sources over four continents, allows the author to outline the current urgency for architects and urban designers to respond with real commitment to current and future changing contexts. This book expresses a holistic vision and proposes a value system in response to the diagnosis. It includes: sound architectural and environmental ethics; end user involvement in the design process and technological advances aimed at sustainable resource use. Includes international case studies from Europe, North America, the Developing world including South Africa, South America and Central Asia.


Expanding Architecture

Expanding Architecture

Author: Bryan Bell

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781933045788

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Questioning how design can improve daily lives, more than thirty essays by practicing architects and designers, urban and community planners, historians, landscape architects and environmental designers illuminate an emerging geography of architectural activism and suggest the many ways that design can address issues of social justice.


The Icon Project

The Icon Project

Author: Leslie Sklair

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190464194

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In the last quarter century, a new form of iconic architecture has appeared throughout the world's major cities. Typically designed by globe-trotting "starchitects" or by a few large transnational architectural firms, these projects are almost always funded by the private sector in the service of private interests. Whereas in the past monumental architecture often had a strong public component, the urban ziggurats of today are emblems and conduits of capitalist globalization. In The Icon Project, Leslie Sklair focuses on ways in which capitalist globalization is produced and represented all over the world, especially in globalizing cities. Sklair traces how the iconic buildings of our era-elaborate shopping malls, spectacular museums, and vast urban megaprojects--constitute the triumphal "Icon Project" of contemporary global capitalism, promoting increasing inequality and hyperconsumerism. Two of the most significant strains of iconic architecture--unique icons recognized as works of art, designed by the likes of Gehry, Foster, Koolhaas, and Hadid, as well as successful, derivative icons that copy elements of the starchitects' work--speak to the centrality of hyperconsumerism within contemporary capitalism. Along with explaining how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures, he also shows how corporations increasingly dominate the built environment and promote the trend towards globalizing, consumerist cities. The Icon Project, Sklair argues, is a weapon in the struggle to solidify capitalist hegemony as well as reinforce transnational capitalist control of where we live, what we consume, and how we think.


Architecture Depends

Architecture Depends

Author: Jeremy Till

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 0262012537

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Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.


Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century

Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Jeanne E. Arnold

Publisher: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press

Published: 2012-12-31

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1938770900

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Winner of the 2014 John Collier Jr. Award Winner of the Jo Anne Stolaroff Cotsen Prize Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture, the meaning of material culture, domestic architecture, and household ethnoarchaeology. It is a distant cousin of Material World and Hungry Planet in content and style, but represents a blend of rigorous science and photography that these books can claim. Using archaeological approaches to human material culture, this volume offers unprecedented access to the middle-class American home through the kaleidoscopic lens of no-limits photography and many kinds of never-before acquired data about how people actually live their lives at home. Based on a rigorous, nine-year project at UCLA, this book has appeal not only to scientists but also to all people who share intense curiosity about what goes on at home in their neighborhoods. Many who read the book will see their own lives mirrored in these pages and can reflect on how other people cope with their mountains of possessions and other daily challenges. Readers abroad will be equally fascinated by the contrasts between their own kinds of materialism and the typical American experience. The book will interest a range of designers, builders, and architects as well as scholars and students who research various facets of U.S. and global consumerism, cultural history, and economic history.


The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture

The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture

Author: Ruth Baumeister

Publisher: 010 Publishers

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9064505667

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For centuries, across nations, dialogue between the domestic and the foreign has affected and transformed architecture. Today these dialogues have become highly intensified. The Domestic and the Foreign in Architecture examines how these exchanges manifest themselves in contemporary architecture, in terms of its aesthetic potential and its practice, which, in turn, are impacted by broad economic, cultural and political issues. This book traces how diverse cultural encounters inevitably modify conventional categories, standards and codes of architecture, such as domestic identity, its political and economic representations and the negotiations with what is deemed foreign. Theoretical reflections by distinguished scholars are accompanied by interviews with some of the most influential architects practicing today, as well as stunning visual presentations by professional photographers.


The Interior Architecture Theory Reader

The Interior Architecture Theory Reader

Author: Gregory Marinic

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-17

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 1317434994

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The Interior Architecture Theory Reader presents a global compilation that collectively and specifically defines interior architecture. Diverse views and comparative resources for interior architecture students, educators, scholars, and practitioners are needed to develop a proper canon for this young discipline. As a theoretical survey of interior architecture, the book examines theory, history, and production to embrace a full range of interior identities in architecture, interior design, digital fabrication, and spatial installation. Authored by leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, fifty chapters refine and expand the discourse surrounding interior architecture.