Architecture In The Space Of Flows

Presenting a collection of exploratory ideas, this book offers an understanding of buildings, people and settlements through concepts of flow. The metaphorical term 'the space of flows' was coined by the sociologist Manuel Castells. This book addresses this topic and the interest in processes that flow across traditional boundaries from the person to the building, from the sense of self to the settlement, from economics to identity.

Traditionally, architecture has been preoccupied with the resolution of form. That concern helps to make photogenic buildings, which have received a great deal of attention. This book looks instead at the idea of the flows, which connects things together and moves between things. It is more difficult to discuss, but more necessary, because it is what makes things work. Architects have to think about flow – the flow of people through buildings, the flow of energy into buildings, and waste out of them – but usually the effects of flow do not find expression. The essays gathered here present a collection of exploratory ideas and offer an understanding of buildings, people and settlements through concepts of flow.

"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.

What have cultural anthropologists, historical geographers, landscape ecologists and environmental artists got in common? Along with eight other disciplines, from domains as diverse as planning and design, the arts and humanities as well as the social and natural sciences, they are all fields of importance to the theory and practice of landscape architecture. In the context of the EU funded LE:NOTRE Project, carried out under the auspices of ECLAS, the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools, international experts from a wide range of related fields were asked to reflect, each from their own perspective, on the interface between their discipline and landscape architecture. The resulting insights presented in this book represent an important contribution to the development the discipline of landscape architecture, as well as suggesting new ways in which future collaboration can help to create a greater interdisciplinary richness at a time when the awareness of the importance of the landscape is growing across a wide range of disciplines. Exploring the Boundaries of Landscape Architecture is the first systematic attempt to explore the territory at the boundaries of landscape architecture. It addresses academics, professionals and students, not just from landscape architecture but also from its neighbouring discipline, all of whom will benefit from a better understanding their areas of shared interest and the chance to develop a common language with which to converse.

Constructed around the work of Manuel Castells on the space of places, the space of flows and the networked city, nine contributors focus on the transformation of the fabric of the networked city in terms of policies and social practices.

Travel, Space, Architecture defines a new theoretical territory in architectural and urban scholarship that frames the processes of spatial production through the notion of travel. By aligning architectural thinking with current critical theory debates, this book explores whether dissociating culture from place and identity, and detaching the idea of architecture from both, can reframe our understanding of spatial and architectural practices. The book presents seventeen key case studies from a diverse range of perspectives including historical, theoretical, and praxis-based, and range from interrogations of architectural travel and notions of belonging and nationhood to challenging established geopolitical hierarchies.

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew.Breaking from the traditional dualism within architecture - which presents the body as subject and space as object - it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. Extending philosopher Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection - the confrontation of one's own corporeality as something is excreted - Kovar finds parallels in the concept of the 'scaffold.' Much like living bodies and their products can impact on the buildings that house them - old skin cells create dust, menstrual blood stains, our breath heats and cools surfaces - scaffolding is similarly ephemeral and yet not entirely separable from the architecture it supports. Kovar shifts the conversation about abjection towards a more nuanced idea of architecture - where living organisms, building matter, space, decay and waste are all considered as part of a continual process - drawing on the key informing works of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to do this. Including a number of experimental projects conducted in the spaces inhabited by the author herself to illuminate the theory at its core, the book forms a distinguished and pioneering study designed for practitioners and scholars of architecture, philosophy and visual culture alike.