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.
This new book by Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni, seeks to understand how cities and buildings—scarred by conflict, blight, and pandemic—can be healed through design and urban mindfulness. When Marwa al-Sabouni published Battle for Home in 2016, she was a little-known architect, living in battle-ravaged Homs, Syria, unable to practice her profession. She turned her fierce intelligence to chronicling how her city and country were undone through decades of architectural mismanagement and mistakes. Once published, Marwa al-Sabouni’s book and story attracted the attention of international media—CNN, The New York Times—and received critical acclaim worldwide. The United Nations called on her for insights and expertise. She became a TED fellow, was invited to speak to audiences around the world, and some suggested she be nominated for architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize. Al-Sabouni’s deep understanding of Middle Eastern heritage and architecture gives her insight into a wide range of cities, informing her views on how cities work best, how they might fail, and what can be done to harmonize the lives of all their inhabitants. In this compelling new book, al-Sabouni draws together several narratives: her personal and professional observations of some of the world’s most fascinating cities, from Detroit to Helsinki; the lessons that Western societies might learn from Islamic culture and design; and philosophical reflections on how our personal and communal spaces can provide the basic foundations for happiness. Through this tapestry of personal experience, unblinking perspective, and insight, al-Sabouni offers real-world solutions—and hope—for how peace might be created through mindful urban planning.
Anne Fairfax and Richard Sammons are at the forefront of a movement among architects today who draw inspiration from the wellspring of the classical traditions in architecture. They have developed a body of work that reflects and adheres to the long-held theories of proportion and order passed down through many past generations of scholarship and practice. The firm's office also served as the headquarters for Henry Hope Reid's Classical America, the only organization offering an alternative to modernist aesthetics until the establishment of the Institute of Classical Architecture in 1992. The twenty-four projects in this volume show the firm's consistent focus on classical architectural beauty, whether the chosen style be Palladian, Tuscan, Mediterranean, Georgian, Adamesque, Neo-classical, British or Dutch Colonial, Colonial Revival, or even East Coast Shingle Style, in all of which Fairfax & Sammons are eminently proficient. The projects selected out of the firm's large body of work include country houses located in Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Florida, including the renovation of town houses and apartments in New York City—all presented in new color photography.
Architect and educator Douglas MacLeod offers a stark and immediately compelling glimpse into the future,15 years hence, in which we can live and work together to build better communities for tomorrow. This insightful and intriguing book imagines the idea of cooperative communities where people can produce more energy than they use; purify more water than they pollute; grow more food than they consume; and recycle more waste than they produce, with technologies that already exist or that will be within our grasp in a few years. Most important of all, the people of the community own and profit from these resources. The Architecture of Hope depicts a way of living that is decentralized, re-localized, and regenerative. And possible. “Our communities are overpriced, poisonous, overcrowded, unhealthy, wasteful energy pigs – not because they have to be but because it suits the vested interests that build, operate, and control them ...” Strong words spoken by a character in The Architecture of Hope, Douglas MacLeod’s striking glimpse into the near future. And yet this is not, at its core, a work of fiction. So often the future we imagine is bleak. The environment, the quality of social engagement and cross-cultural relations, food security, education, work ... so much seems in decline. And, in fact, the future will be bleak, if we don’t change our ways of thinking. As one of the characters notes, “The big idea is that we could restore rather than destroy; we could produce rather than consume; and we could purify rather than pollute – not just the Earth but our bodies and minds as well.” While this scenario describes how we can use new technologies to achieve these goals, it emphasizes that, most of all, we need to change our thinking. It’s not that our communities can give us hope directly, but they can provide a scaffolding so that we can create full, meaningful and hopeful lives for ourselves, our families, and our neighbours.
Cutting-edge analysis on how to improve life inside the Gaza Strip through architecture and design, illustrated in full-color The Gaza Strip is one of the most beleaguered environments on earth. Crammed into a space of 139 square miles (360 square kilometers), 1.8 million people live under an Israeli siege, enforcing conditions that continue to plummet to ever more unimaginable depths of degradation and despair. Gaza, however, is more than an endless encyclopedia of depressing statistics. It is also a place of fortitude, resistance, and imagination; a context in which inhabitants go to remarkable lengths to create the ordinary conditions of the everyday and to reject their exceptional status. Inspired by Gaza’s inhabitants, this book builds on the positive capabilities of Gazans. It brings together environmentalists, planners, activists, and scholars from Palestine and Israel, the US, the UK, India, and elsewhere to create hopeful interventions that imagine a better place for Gazans and Palestinians. Open Gaza engages the Gaza Strip within and beyond the logics of siege and warfare, it considers how life can be improved inside the limitations imposed by the Israeli blockade, and outside the idiocy of violence and warfare. Contributors Affiliations Salem Al Qudwa, Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, USA Hadeel Assali, Columbia University, USA Tareq Baconi, International Crisis Group, Brussels, Belgium Teddy Cruz, University of California-San Diego, USA Fonna Forman, University of California-San Diego, USA M. Christine Boyer, Princeton University, Princeton, USA Alberto Foyo, architect, New York, USA Nasser Golzari , Westminster University, London, UK Yara Sharif, Westminster University, London, UK Denise Hoffman Brandt, City College of New York, USA Romi Khosla, architect, New Delhi, India Craig Konyk, Kean University, Union, NJ, USA Rafi Segal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA Chris Mackey, Payette Architects, Boston, USA Vyjayanthi V. Rao, Terreform, New York, USA Sara Roy, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Mahdi Sabbagh, architect, New York, USA Meghan McAllister, architect, San Francisco Bay Area, USA Deen Sharp, London School of Economics, UK Malkit Shoshan, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Pietro Stefanini, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Michael Sorkin (1948–2020) , City University of New York, USA Helga Tawil-Souri, New York University, USA Omar Yousef, Al-Quds University, Jerusalem Fadi Shayya, The University of Manchester, UK
Discusses the philosophical problem of how that which is different is to be understood. Thinking the "incomplete" outside the oscillation between the complete and its opposite demands the introduction of another conceptual apparatus. Differing conceptual moments can be clarified by allowing them to be conceptually present; what becomes essential is tracing the effect of their work. Relating to the Shoah, contends that while there is an imperative to know it, it can never really be known. Ch. 3 (pp. 56-74), "Shoah, Remembrance and the Abeyance of Fate: Walter Benjamin's 'Fate and Character'", discusses how the themes in Benjamin's work (e.g. hope, remembrance), written in 1919, can be applied to the Shoah. Ch. 5 (pp. 103-118), "The Architecture of Hope: Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum" (part of the Berlin Museum), relates to the question of how Christian Europe has inscribed its Jews in art and architecture, giving two examples: the medieval sculpture of the Synagogue on the Strasbourg Cathedral and Libeskind's museum. Discusses how these two works raise the question of the distinction between the identity of Jewish being and of being a Jew.
Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.
This is the first major book to study English architecture between 1945 and 1975 in its entirety. Challenging previous scholarship on the subject and uncovering vast amounts of new material at the boundaries between architectural and social history, Elain Harwood structures the book around building types to reveal why the architecture takes the form it does. Buildings of all budgets and styles are examined, from major universities to the modest café. The book is illustrated with stunning new photography that reveals the logic, aspirations, and beauty of hundreds of buildings throughout England, at the point where many are disappearing or are being mutilated. Space, Hope, and Brutalism offers a convincing and lively overview of a subject and period that fascinates younger scholars and appeals to those who were witnesses to this history. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
