Read and Download eBook Full
Author: Nadir Z. Lahiji
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2016-03-25
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13: 178279736X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCan architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?
Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 9780367425470
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBy linking building theory to the emancipatory project of critique advanced by radical thinkers in our time, this work investigates the key conceptual and historical elements that culminate in an emancipatory theory of building entitled: 'Toward A Philosophy of Shelter'. Taking Marx as its only resource, this work proceeds with the conviction that our era is contemporaneous to Marx's historical era. This means 'not judging the validity of Marx from the perspective of the historical situation', but rather, 'demonstrating the validity of a Marxian perspective for a singular historical situation', as ours. This work will therefore translate this perspective into seeing the situation of architecture through the eyes of Marx. All those concerned with the predicament in our current condition in which architecture must play a major social role in upholding the universal value of what Alain Badiou calls 'generic humanity' will take an interest in this work. In particular, architects, critics, scholars and students inside the field of architecture who would be seeking the application of this universal value to a new theory of building will be a welcoming audience for this work.
Author: Paul Dobraszczyk
Publisher:
Published: 2021-08-05
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9781913645175
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA groundbreaking look at sixty works of anarchist architecture. This book documents and illustrates sixty projects, past and present, that key into a libertarian ethos and desire for diverse self-organized ways of building. They are what this book calls "anarchist" architecture, that is, forms of design and building that embrace the core values of traditional anarchist political theory since its divergence from the mainstream of socialist politics in the nineteenth century. As Architecture and Anarchism shows, a vast range of architectural projects reflect some or all of these values, whether they are acknowledged as specifically anarchist or not. From junk playgrounds to Freetown Christiania, Slab City to the Calais Jungle, isolated cabins to intentional communities--all are motivated by core values of autonomy, voluntary association, mutual aid, and self-organization. Taken as a whole, they are meant as an inspiration to build less uniformly, more inclusively, and more freely. This book broadens existing ideas about what constitutes anarchism in architecture and argues for its nurturing in the built environment. Understood in this way, anarchism offers a powerful way of reconceptualizing architecture as an emancipatory, inclusive, ecological, and egalitarian practice.
Author: Camillo Boano
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-25
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1134883358
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben’s political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben’s politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben’s oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical ‘encounter’ with architecture’s aesthetic-political function.
Author: Helena Mattsson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-01-26
Total Pages: 273
ISBN-13: 1350148245
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScholars in architectural and urban history have, over the last decade, been trying to come to terms with architecture's 'neoliberal turn' and its various impacts - from municipal policy to the artistic imagination. However most scholarship has focussed on generalizations, with very little work to date focussing on specific cases. Architecture and Retrenchment brings one such case to the fore – investigating the relation between architecture and the Swedish Model of the welfare state. It tracks the response of architecture to the gradual retrenchment and ultimate dismantling of the Swedish welfare state – which was, in its heyday, world-famous for its integration of architecture and the built environment into the welfare system. Ultimately, neoliberal economics prevailed, yet this book reveals how new architectural strategies and techniques were developed in order to protect the agency of architecture in the newly reorganised society of the 1980s and 1990s. Through eight in-depth case-studies, the book situates the often abstract, generalised discourse of neoliberalism and privatisation in specific architectural sites, and provides an original interpretation of how architecture, space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the twentieth century.
Author: Douglas Spencer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2016-10-20
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 1472581539
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, and Greg Lynn shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought. Analysing architectural projects in the fields of education, consumption and labour, The Architecture of Neoliberalism examines the part played by contemporary architecture in refashioning human subjects into the compliant figures - student-entrepreneurs, citizen-consumers and team-workers - requisite to the universal implementation of a form of existence devoted to market imperatives.
Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-05-23
Total Pages: 253
ISBN-13: 131770231X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWritten by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America. This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.
Author: Chris Brisbin
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-03
Total Pages: 465
ISBN-13: 1317225945
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design presents an in-depth exploration of criticism and criticality in theory and practice across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design. Professional criticism is a vital part of understanding the cultural significance of designed objects and environments that we engage with on a daily basis, yet there is evidence to show that this practice is changing. This edited volume investigates how practitioners, researchers, educators, and professionals engage with, think about, and value the practice of critique. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries - the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark - this companion provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances. Illustrated with over 60 black and white images and structured into five sections, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design is a comprehensive volume for researchers, educators, and students exploring the changing role of criticism through interdisciplinary perspectives.
Author: Teresa Stoppani
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-10
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1315406241
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.
Author: Douglas Spencer
Publisher: Birkhäuser
Published: 2021-01-18
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 3035621640
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.
