Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin
Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra-Thin

Author: Matthew Soules

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1648960294

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"Soules's excellent book makes sense of the capitalist forces we all feel but cannot always name... Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin arms architects and the general public with an essential understanding of how capitalism makes property. Required reading for those who think tomorrow can be different from today."— Jack Self, coeditor of Real Estates: Life Without Debt In Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, Matthew Soules issues an indictment of how finance capitalism dramatically alters not only architectural forms but also the very nature of our cities and societies. We rarely consider architecture to be an important factor in contemporary economic and political debates, yet sparsely occupied ultra-thin "pencil towers" develop in our cities, functioning as speculative wealth storage for the superrich, and cavernous "iceberg" homes extend architectural assets many stories below street level. Meanwhile, communities around the globe are blighted by zombie and ghost urbanism, marked by unoccupied neighborhoods and abandoned housing developments. Learn how the use of architecture as an investment tool has accelerated in recent years, heightening inequality and contributing to worldwide financial instability: • See how investment imperatives shape what and how we build, changing the very structure of our communities • Delve into high-profile projects, like the luxury apartments of architect Rafael Viñoly's 432 Park Avenue • Understand the convergence of technology, finance, and spirituality, which together are configuring the financialized walls within which we eat, sleep, and work Includes dozens of photos and drawings of architectural phenomena that have changed the way we live. Essential reading for anyone interested in architecture, design, economics, and understanding the way our world is formed.

Sick City
Sick City

Author: Patrick Condon

Publisher: James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Liveable Environments

Published: 2021-01-30

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 9781777456009

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Sick City is a call to action prompted by the crisis that crippled our cities, the pandemic. But the pandemic has brought the issues of race, inequality and unaffordability to the forefront as well, illustrating how all of these ills can be traced to unequal access to urban land. Patrick Condon walks the reader through that history, proving that most of these problems are rooted in the inflation of urban land value - land that is no longer priced for its value for housing but as an asset class in a global market hungry for assets of all kinds. The American wage earner who is most affected by COVID is also the worst hit by the surging price of urban land which has made the essential commodity of housing increasingly inaccessible. Not only does Condon dive deep into myriad and credible references to prove these points, but he also wraps up the conversation with some eminently practical and widely precedented policy actions that municipalities can enact - policy tools to establish housing justice at the same time slow the flow of land value increases into the pockets of land speculators.

Practiceopolis: Stories from the Architectural Profession
Practiceopolis: Stories from the Architectural Profession

Author: Yasser Megahed

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-07-30

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1000168484

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This is a graphic novel about the contemporary architectural profession, in which it acts as the protagonist in the form of an imaginary city called Practiceopolis. The novel narrates quasi-realistic stories that exaggerate the architectural everyday and the tacit, in order to make them prominent and tangible. They depict and dramatise the value conflicts between the different cultures of practising architecture and between the architectural profession and other members of the building industry as political conflicts around the future of Practiceopolis. The book uses the metaphorical world of Practiceopolis to provoke big questions about everyday routines in the profession that practitioners may take for granted and to examine different ideologies at work among architects and other members of the construction industry. The novel ends in the tradition of dystopian worlds common in a certain strand of graphic novels. By vividly illustrating and narrating the critical issues he interrogates, the author has created a world which any architect, student or professional, will both instantly recognise and simultaneously reject, provoking the reader to challenge themselves and the profession at large.

The City That Never Was
The City That Never Was

Author: Christopher Marcinkoski

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 2016-01-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781616893903

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One of the most troubling consequences of the 2008 global financial collapse was the midstream abandonment of several large-scale speculative urban and suburban projects. The resulting scars on the landscape, large subdivisions with only marked-out plots and half-finished roads, are the subject of The City That Never Was, an eye-opening look at what happens when development, particularly what the author calls "speculative urbanization" is out of sync with financial reality. Presenting historical and recent examples from around the world—from the sprawl of the US Sun Belt and the unoccupied towns of western China, to the "ghost estates" of Ireland—and focusing on case studies in Spain, Marcinkoski proposes an ecologically based model in place of the capricious economic and political factors that typically drive development today.

Explore Everything
Explore Everything

Author: Bradley Garrett

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2014-09-09

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1781685576

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It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity. Explore Everything is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

Tactical Urbanism
Tactical Urbanism

Author: Mike Lydon

Publisher: Island Press

Published: 2015-03-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1610915267

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Begins with an in-depth history of the Tactical Urbanism movement and its place among other social, political, and urban planning trends. With a detailed set of case studies that demonstrate the breadth and scalability of tactical urbanism interventions, this book provides a detailed toolkit for conceiving, planning, and carrying out projects.

Superuse
Superuse

Author: Ed van Hinte

Publisher: 010 Publishers

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 9064505926

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Constructing new buildings with retrieved surplus materials is a practical and inspiring book about recycling superfluous stuff in architecture.

The Icon Project
The Icon Project

Author: Leslie Sklair

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190464186

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"A pioneering look at the ways in which contemporary architecture serves the interests of the capitalist class, from global North to South and through to the petro-cities of the Gulf States 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 driven by private interests. In The Icon Project, sociologist 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. He sets out to explain how the architecture industry organizes the social production and marketing of iconic structures and 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
Architecture

Author: Barnabas Calder

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2021-07-01

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 014197821X

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A groundbreaking history of architecture told through the relationship between buildings and energy The story of architecture is the story of humanity. The buildings we live in, from the humblest pre-historic huts to today's skyscrapers, reveal our priorities and ambitions, our family structures and power structures. And to an extent that hasn't been explored until now, architecture has been shaped in every era by our access to energy, from fire to farming to fossil fuels. In this ground-breaking history of world architecture, Barnabas Calder takes us on a dazzling tour of some of the most astonishing buildings of the past fifteen thousand years, from Uruk, via Ancient Rome and Victorian Liverpool, to China's booming megacities. He reveals how every building - from the Parthenon to the Great Mosque of Damascus to a typical Georgian house - was influenced by the energy available to its architects, and why this matters. Today architecture consumes so much energy that 40% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions come from the construction and running of buildings. If we are to avoid catastrophic climate change then now, more than ever, we need beautiful but also intelligent buildings, and to retrofit - not demolish - those that remain. Both a celebration of human ingenuity and a passionate call for greater sustainability, this is a history of architecture for our times.