Architecture Of Fear

Essays explain how fear shapes the contemporary landscape, giving us security systems, gated communities, and semi-public mall and atrium spaces.

In 1993, when some scholars from the University of Ibadan made a proposal to the Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique (IFRA) — French Institute for Research in Africa, to study the increasing spate of urban violence in Africa, it was not anticipated that the scope of the study would increase at such a fast pace in the following years. The Institute agreed to fund the project and an international symposium was organized in Nigeria in 1994, with the aim of focusing attention on the issue of urban violence and determining its impact on the different segments of the society. Since 1994, however, urban violence in Nigeria took on a renewed ferocity with a dramatic increase in the loss of life and property. In Nigeria today, there is little security of life and property; urban residents live in perpetual fear of the morrow. They are wary in the day and terrified at night. One of Nigeria’s foremost scholars of the urban milieu has observed that, despite the existence of the Nigerian Police Force, armed robbers and burglars have the run of our cities. Hired assassins move across the urban domain with impunity. In addition to this pervasive insecurity of life and property is the constant struggle against poverty and deprivation. How have Nigerians reacted to this situation? This research, which is a follow-up to the 1994 Urban Violence Symposium addresses this question.

Why the rise of redundant precision in architecture and the accompanying fear of error are key to understanding the discipline's needs, anxieties and desires. When architects draw even brick walls to six decimal places with software designed to cut lenses, it is clear that the logic that once organized relations between precision and material error in construction has unraveled. Precision, already a promiscuous term, seems now to have been uncoupled from its contract with truthfulness. Meanwhile error, and the always-political space of its dissent, has reconfigured itself. In The Architecture of Error Francesca Hughes argues that behind the architect's acute fetishization of redundant precision lies a special fear of physical error. What if we were to consider the pivotal cultural and technological transformations of modernism to have been driven not so much by the causes its narratives declare, she asks, as by an unspoken horror of loss of control over error, material life, and everything that matter stands for? Hughes traces the rising intolerance of material vagaries—from the removal of ornament to digitalized fabrication—that produced the blind rejection of organic materials, the proliferation of material testing, and the rhetorical obstacles that blighted cybernetics. Why is it, she asks, that the more we cornered physical error, the more we feared it? Hughes's analysis of redundant precision exposes an architecture of fear whose politics must be called into question. Proposing error as a new category for architectural thought, Hughes draws on other disciplines and practices that have interrogated precision and failure, citing the work of scientists Nancy Cartwright and Evelyn Fox Keller and visual artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Barbara Hepworth, Rachel Whiteread, and others. These non-architect practitioners, she argues, show that error need not be excluded and precision can be made accountable.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429352775 has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. No city environment reflects the meaning of urban life better than a public place. A public place, whatever its nature—a park, a mall, a train platform or a street corner—is where people pass by, meet each other and at times become a victim of crime. With this book, we submit that crime and safety in public places are not issues that can be easily dealt with within the boundaries of a single discipline. The book aims to illustrate the complexity of patterns of crime and fear in public places with examples of studies on these topics contextualized in different cities and countries around the world. This is achieved by tackling five cross-cutting themes: the nature of the city’s environment as a backdrop for crime and fear; the dynamics of individuals’ daily routines and their transit safety; the safety perceptions experienced by those who are most in fear in public places; the metrics of crime and fear; and, finally, examples of current practices in promoting safety. All these original chapters contribute to our quest for safer, more inclusive, resilient, equitable and sustainable cities and human settlements aligned to the Global 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

In recent years, architectural animation has offered a whole new field of conceptual and technical possibilities to you as an architect.Whereas some designers are intent on exploring the creative potential that high-end computer software offers, others are experimenting with its production and technical possibilities. Architecture and Animation features the most innovative proponents of the media, and features work from Mark Burry,Greg Lynn,Ben Nicholson,Oosterhuis.nl,Ali Rahim,Chris Romero and Bernard Tschumi.