Theory of architecture Books

In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the...

Building Practice features interviews with architects, designers, educators, curators, fabricators, strategists, critics, and activists who are advancing speculative design through the culture and politics of building, capturing critical and formative...

RMIT Architecture is interested in ideas-led venturous design exploration that aspires to contribute to the future of our discipline and an increasingly complex world.This publication contains a selection of RMIT Master of Architecture independent...

A new edition of this extensive visual analysis of horror tropes and their architectural analoguesHorror in Architecture presents an unflinching look at how horror genre tropes manifest in the built environment. Spanning the realms of art, design,...

PostDomestiCity is an inquiry and speculative exercise into the conditions of obsolescence in the post-industrial city, from a contemporary perspective.Working with three paradigmatic cases that were conceived from industrial logics - the Packard plant...

Sharing Tokyo is a collection of essays and drawings on the theme of sharing the urban space of Tokyo.The book questions how 'artifice' and the 'social world' can be mutually and constructively integrated so that the...

This book 'deconstructs' a single recently constructed house located in Seattle, WA, in an attempt to recover its backstory. The information is presented along four vectors atoms, labors, sources and ingredients.Though remarkably detailed, the A House...

This book invites us to rethink architectural and urban models, prioritizing not so much the technical, formal and abstract knowledge sought by urban planners, as the public and civic dimension of citizens' experience when they try to care for...

Urban Mix explores the devices and attitudes observable in urban crossroads of 8 major world cities. The diversity and complexity of crossings allow variable freedom of movement and define urban life, according to their cultural particularities.Mobility...

Geospaces is an extended visual essay of ideas, images, drawings and projects that follows the work of Alper Derinboaz over the past decade, framing an approach to architecture based on empathy with earth.Architectural history is a fragment of the long...

This book's central argument is that plug-ins, situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities, are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking how design can be a key agent in city...

In a world of change we cling to constants that comfort us while catastrophes lure behind cut corners.We compartmentalize and channel our focus into cones of concentration when confronted with choices. Many might decide to do so with intention while...

The ancient city of Asmara is the capital of Eritrea and its largest settlement. Its beautiful architecture was rediscovered by outsiders in the early 1990s. In this book, the authors offer an original analysis of the colonial city, providing a history...

AA Files is the Architectural Association's (AA) journal of record. Currently under the editorship of Maria Shhrazade Giudici, AA Files looks to promote original and engaging writing on architecture. It does this by drawing both on the AA's own academic...

The book promotes a landscape approach as a method for understanding and addressing the complex interdependent issues of environmental and climatic change, ecological degradation, and socio-cultural inequalities. The twenty-three book essays are...

Neither derivatives of Western cities nor isolated from them, Chinese cities in the past four decades are perhaps best captured in their characteristic complexity through a concept in biological evolution: drift. Unlike mutation, adaptation, and...

This book calls attention to the public space of cities and proposes that the environmental performance of public space is underdeveloped, and is primed to play a more integrated role in combatting the urgency of climate change, while also creating a...

With Lunch 14, the editors of Lunch Journal wondered if they could use the frontier story itself to decenter its power. The journal is divided into 4 sections. Edges explores the form and possibilities of the edge itself, and unravels...

Dynamic Geographies seeks to addresses the changing public perception of the term landscape. Landscapes are forged by many forces and are dynamic, not static. Yet most landscape designs are designed as static; that is, they are designed...

Design Practice Research at RMIT University is a longstanding program of research into what venturous designers actually do when they design. It is the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing...

Focused on post-labor, psychopathology, and plasticity of human mind and body, this book introduces insight, critiques, and propositions in the area of "self-design," ranging from design and architecture to science, media, history, philosophy, and...

A homage to the 1973 publication of Architecture and Utopia by Manfredo Tafuri, this book is devoted to the radical experiences of the 1960s and to their consequences for the most recent developments in contemporary architecture.As a response to the...

Mute Icons dwells in the paradox between silence and sign and aims to debunk a false dichotomy within critical discourse about the cultural need and socio-political relevance of the architectural image. Mute Icons challenges fixed...

Enric Miralles (1955-2000) remains one of the most prominent architects of his generation. The significance of his architectural design lies in his seamless integration of site and building and his use of space to serve the everyday conditions of life...

At its root, modernism is that fundamental. It is a question of having something to represent that is of the moment. In the most radical interpretation, modernism always comes too late. The modern is that which is always new, which is to say, always...

Risk is many things. It can invoke fun, temptation, or danger; it can be laced with uncertainty, fear, or hope. But most importantly for the design professions, risk is the engine of art and innovation. Complicating the risks inherent in every act of...

This book emphasises the value of design in the urban regeneration of Shanghai. It approaches the conundrum of urban transformation flexibly and productively, through five representative case-studies. Examining different urban paridigms, it guides the...

Share: Conversations about Contemporary Architecture The Nordic Countriesis the first book in a new global series of investigative interviews about the modern architectural process. Initiated and undertaken by the Norway-based Canadian architect Todd...

AA Files 75 features essays by Freya Wigzell, Kristina Jaspers, Claire Zimmerman, Laila Seewang, Roberta Marcaccio, Rebecca Siefert, Shantel Blakely, Francesco Zuddas, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Francisco Gonzalez de Canales, Ross...

AA Files 73 features contributions on Patrick Hodgkinson and essays and conversations by Matthew Mullane, Mariana Siracusa, Eva Branscome, Nicholas Olsberg, Mike Dempsey, Helen Thomas, Thomas Weaver, Jonathan Sergison, Alberto Ponis, Timothy...

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and...

Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon...

A re-edition of Robin Evans' classic essay anthology Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, originally published by the Architectural Association (AA) in 1997. Featuring a new introduction, the book is the first in a new series of essay...

For long, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people and for people only. And today, even though some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative researches still struggle to...

As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture's stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form,...

The dissemination of architectural discourse is a fundamental component in the constitution of the discipline as a cultural practice. This dissemination is not, as in other fields, an activity exclusively linked to the effort of making its contents...

Each of the contributors has responded to a set of 20 questions on the multiple conditions under which particular ideas and words enter architectural discourse through publication. The resulting critical positions and observations are as diverse as the...

These essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, from journals to anthologies - including such noted books...

Authorship critically examines emergent themes in contemporary architecture by revisiting the seemingly defunct notion of design authorship. As we revel in the death of the master architect, how do we come to terms with the shifting role of creativity in...

Spatial Infrastructure is a collection of essays crafting a self-consistent project that recasts architectural thinking as a form of knowledge by addressing a number of fundamental questions relevant to the reading of works across styles, time-periods,...

First published in 2008, (as Contro l'architettura), Against Architecture has been translated into French and Greek, with editions forthcoming in Polish and Portuguese. The book is a passionate and erudite charge against the celebrities of the current...

Examines how images of accumulation help open up the climate to political mobilizationThe current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital but also of raw, often unruly material, from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people,...

Thinking through object-oriented ontology-and the work of architects such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid-to explore new concepts of the relationship between form and functionObject-oriented ontology has become increasingly popular among architectural...

Leading scholars historicise and theorise technology's role in architectural design.Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap,...

Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of "design" byengaging with and departing from the concept of the "self." This volume bringstogether more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects,designers,...

In his wide-ranging study of architecture and cultural evolution, Chris Abel argues that, despite progress in sustainable development and design, resistance to changing personal and social identities shaped by a technology-based and energy-hungry culture...

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgmentWhen buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment-and its concern...

Architecture is distinguished from other art forms by its sense of function, its localized quality, its technique, its public and nonpersonal character, and its continuity with the decorative arts. In this important book, Roger Scruton calls for a return...