Tabula Plena

Edited by Bryony Roberts, a collaboration of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation In contrast to tabula rasa urbanism, this book considers strategies for tabula plena -- urban sites that are full of existing buildings of multiple time periods. Such dense sites prompt designers to work between the fields of architecture, historic preservation, and urban planning, developing methods for collaborative authorship and interlocking architectural forms. The book grew from a collaboration between the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation on the planning of the government quarter in Oslo. Emerging from this process, the book asks larger questions about how we practice, teach, and theorise engagement with existing architecture on an urban scale. It contains a compilation of short essays addressing theoretical questions, a sampling of design projects offering different July formal strategies for architectural design, and a series of discussions about pedagogical strategies. 149 images

The study of the architectural discipline suffers from an increasing disconnect between its teaching and its professional practice. In this edited collection, 18 architectural voices address this disconnect by reflecting on the ways in which they exercise the architectural discipline in three ways: research, teaching, and practice. This book argues that the totality of activities encompassed by the architectural profession can be best fulfilled when reconsidering the critical interactions between these three fields in the everyday exercise of the profession. Split into three parts, "Architecture as Research," Architecture as Pedagogy," and "Architecture as Practice," each section focuses on one of these three dimensions while establishing continuity with the other two. In doing so, the book not only favors a more fulfilling interaction between academia and the profession but also reinforces the implementation of design theory and research in everyday teaching and practice. The contributions come from 18 teams of architects operating from geographically diverse locations, including Pezo von Ellrichshausen in Chile, Kengo Kuma & Associates in Japan, Barclay & Crousse in Peru, Shift in Iran, Heinrich Wolff in South Africa, and People’s Architecture Office in China, opening the design conversation to larger contexts and framing continuity and inclusion in time. Written for students, instructors, and practitioners alike, the inspiring reflections in this volume encourage readers to grow as architects and play an instrumental role in transforming the built environment.

This book is a highly illustrated “map,” using photos, infographics and statistics, showing designers how they can successfully navigate the emerging field of resource management and the circular economy. Using the Brighton Waste House Project as a basis for this, the book will look at key moments and landmark decisions made during its design and construction, as well as the people and projects from around the world that inspired them.

This book is the first scientific study to focus on awards in architecture and the built environment investigating their exponential growth since the 1980s. The celebration of excellence in architecture and related fields remains a phenomenon on which there is strangely little scientific scrutiny. What is to be understood from the plethora of award-winning projects, award-winning buildings and awarded professional practices in the built environment, year after year? Glossy images partake in an intense ballet at every local, regional, national or international award ceremony and they are meant to embody proofs of architectural excellence. However, it is necessary to take a critical distance to question what awards are meant to embody, symbolize, and perhaps measure. Each of the 10 chapters in this volume is centered on one question related to themes as varied as the comparison of Pritzker and Nobel Prizes, the Prix de Rome, the redefinition of quality through awards, green awards and sustainability, the multiplication of sustainable awards, heritage awards, architecture book awards, the awarding of school architecture, awards as mediations and awards as pedagogical devices. Many fields, once consolidated, have featured a sharp increase in related prizes. The original data, compiled and summarized in 4 appendices cover more than 150 award-granting organizations in some 30 countries. Our inventory includes upwards of 24,000 prizes awarded at more than 3,100 events, the earliest of which is the first instance of Western architecture’s seminal Grand Prix de Rome in France in 1720. A history of contemporary architecture is thus written through press releases that praise the merits of the heroes as much as their works and achievements. And while awards can be vehicles that propel architecture forward, they can also be Trojan horses in an era that is constantly on the lookout for event-driven products, small and big news, and brand imaging.

In the last few decades, many European and American cities and towns experienced economic, social and spatial structural change. Strategies for urban regeneration include investments in infrastructures for production, consumption and communication, as well as marketing and branding measures, and urban design schemes. Bringing together leading academics from across a range of disciplines, including Douglas Kelbaugh, Ali Madanipour, Saskia Sassen, Gregory Ashworth, Nan Elin, Emily Talen, and many others, Emergent Urbanism identifies the specific issues dominating today’s urban planning and urban design discourse, arguing that urban planning and design not only results from deliberate planning and design measures, but how these combine with infrastructure planning, and derive from economic, social and spatial processes of structural change. Combining explorations from urban planning, urban theory, human geography, sociology, urban design and architecture, the volume provides a comprehensive and state-of-the-art overview, highlighting the complexities of these interactions in space and place, process and design.

While methodological individualism is a fundamental approach within the social sciences, it is often misunderstood. This highlights the need for a discursive and up-to-date reference work analyzing this approach’s classic arguments and assumptions in the light of contemporary issues in sociology, economics and philosophy. This two-volume handbook presents the first comprehensive overview of methodological individualism. Chapters discuss historical and contemporary debates surrounding this central approach within the social sciences, as well as cutting edge developments related to the individualist tradition with philosophical and scientific implications. Bringing together multiple contributions from the world’s leading experts on this important tradition of theorizing, this collective endeavor provides teachers, researchers and students in sociology, economics, and philosophy with a reliable and critical understanding of the founding principles, key thinkers and intellectual development of MI since the late 19th century. ​

Questions of genres as well as their possible definitions, taxonomies, and functions have been discussed since antiquity. Even though categories of genre today are far from being fixed, they have for decades been upheld without question. The goal of this volume is to problematize traditional definitions of poetic genres and to situate them in a broader socio-cultural, historical, and theoretical context. The contributions encompass numerous methodological approaches (including hermeneutics, poststructuralism, reception theory, cultural studies, gender studies), periods (Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism), genres (elegy, sonnet, visual poetry, performance poetry, hip hop) as well as languages and national literatures. From this interdisciplinary and multi-methodological perspective, genres, periods, languages, and literatures are put into fruitful dialogue, new perspectives are discovered, and suggestions for further research are provided.

Focusing on the non-Western context and case studies, this book explores theories of interdisciplinary architectural thinking and the construction of urban memory in Chinese cities, with an emphasis on contemporary architecture and the diversity of agencies. China has undergone one of the fastest urbanisation and urban renewal processes in human history, but discussions of urban memory in China have tended to be practice-oriented and lack theoretical reflection. This book brings together interdisciplinary architectural scholarship to interrogate the production of urban memory and examine experiences in China. The 14 chapters explore different processes, projects, materials, architecture and urban spaces in different Chinese cities by analysing cityscapes such as temples, bridges, conservation projects, architectural design, historical architecture, memorial hall, market street, city images, custom bike, food market and so on. The book deals with different agencies and methods, tangible and intangible, in the construction of memories aimed at promoting hybridised multiple identities, and explores the interplay of different versions of memory, i.e. state, public, regional, local, individual and collective memory. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of architecture and urbanism, cultural studies and China studies, as well as architects, urban planners and historians interested in these fields.