Weaponized Architecture

Research informs the development of a project which, rather than defusing these characteristics, attempts to integrate them within the scene of a political struggle. The proposed project dramatizes, through its architecture, a Palestinian disobedience to the colonial legislation imposed on its legal territory. In fact, the State of Israel masters the elaboration of territorial and architectural colonial apparatuses that act directly on Palestinian daily lives. In this regard, it is crucial to observe that 63% of the West Bank is under total control of the Israeli Defense Forces in regards to security, movement, planning and construction. Weaponized Architecture is thus manifested as a Palestinian shelter, with an associated agricultural platform, which expresses its illegality through its architectural vocabulary.

"This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011. The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert's own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, buildings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environment's conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book's first chapter, "the process of attending to the body - unhooded, unveiled, unclothed - cannot be the solution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence." Although the readers won't find indications about the disciplinary background of the contributors - the "witty" self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés - the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout this volume. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohackers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of this volume through difference rather than similarity.The Funambulist Papers are published by the CTM Documents Initiative imprint, Center for Transformative Media, Parsons School of Design, The New School. CTM is a transdisciplinary media research initiative bridging design and the social sciences, and dedicated to the exploration of the transformative potential of emerging technologies upon the foundational practices of everyday life across a range of settings."

This Companion breaks new ground in our knowledge and understanding of the diverse relationships between literature, architecture, and the city, which together form a field of interdisciplinary research that is one of the most innovative and exciting to have emerged in recent years. Bringing together a wide variety of contributors, not only writers, architectural and literary scholars, and social scientists, but graphic novelists and artists, the book offers contemporary essays on everything from science fiction and the crime novel, to poetry, comics and oral history. It is structured into two sections: History, Narrative and Genre, and Strategy, Language and Form. Including over ninety illustrations, the book is a must read for academics and students.

This book is the first part of a three-volume field guide to the future of architecture. The collection maps contemporary architectural practice and urban planning, presented through the words and ideas of some of its key players and change-makers. From institutions, activists, thinkers, curators and architects to urban bloggers, polemicists, critics and publishers, Archifutures presents the people shaping tomorrow’s architecture and cities – and thereby helping to shape our societies of the future as well. This first volume of Archifutures, The Museum includes thought pieces, essays, interviews, and discussions – in both words and pictures – between members of Future Architecture platform. Steering the dialogue on the contemporary role of these institutional bodies are current practitioners and thinkersin the architecture and design field. Designed by Diana Portela with Janar Siniloo and Lena Giovanazzi.

The influence of food has grown rapidly as it has become more and more intertwined with popular culture in recent decades. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture offers an authoritative, comprehensive overview of and introduction to this growing field of research. Bringing together over 20 original essays from leading experts, including Amy Bentley, Deborah Lupton, Fabio Parasecoli, and Isabelle de Solier, its impressive breadth and depth serves to define the field of food and popular culture. Divided into four parts, the book covers: - Media and Communication; including film, television, print media, the Internet, and emerging media - Material Cultures of Eating; including eating across the lifespan, home cooking, food retail, restaurants, and street food - Aesthetics of Food; including urban landscapes, museums, visual and performance arts - Socio-Political Considerations; including popular discourses around food science, waste, nutrition, ethical eating, and food advocacy Each chapter outlines key theories and existing areas of research whilst providing historical context and considering possible future developments. The Editors' Introduction by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, ensures cohesion and accessibility throughout. A truly interdisciplinary, ground-breaking resource, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the study of food and popular culture. It will be an essential reference work for students, researchers and scholars in food studies, film and media studies, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.

For architecture and urban space to have relevance in the 21st Century, we cannot merely reignite the approaches of thought and design that were operative in the last century. This is despite, or because of, the nexus between politics and space often being theorized as a representation or by-product of politics. As a symbol or an effect, the spatial dimension is depoliticized. Consequently, architecture and the urban are halted from fostering any systematic change as they are secondary to the event and therefore incapable of performing any political role. This handbook explores how architecture and urban space can unsettle the unquestioned construct of the spatial politics of governing. Considering both ongoing and unprecedented global problems – from violence and urban warfare, the refugee crisis, borderization, detention camps, terrorist attacks to capitalist urbanization, inequity, social unrest and climate change – this handbook provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research focused on the complex nexus of politics, architecture and urban space. Volume I starts by pointing out the need to explore the politics of spatialization to make sense of the operational nature of spatial oppression in contemporary times. The operative and active political reading of space is disseminated through five thematics: Violence and War Machines; Security and Borders; Race, Identity and Ideology; Spectacle and the Screen; and Mapping Landscapes and Big Data. This first volume of the handbook frames cutting-edge contemporary debates and presents studies of actual theories and projects that address spatial politics. This Handbook will be of interest to anyone seeking to meaningfully disrupt the reduction of space to an oppressive or neutral backdrop of political realities.

The 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.

A globe-spanning, wrong man thriller co-written by the screenwriter of the #1 film Safe House. Kyle West is a wanted man. Having fled the country to escape the false charges filed against himself and his former boss, billionaire government contractor Christopher Chandler, Kyle's hiding in Cambodia, living on borrowed time and finding more and more reasons to be paranoid. When a mysterious stranger named Julian Robinson walks into Kyle's favorite cafè and offers to swap passports with Kyle, Kyle can't believe his luck. Robinson looks so much like Kyle it's almost unreal, and seems in every way the yin to Kyle's yang: self-assured, charismatic and wealthy beyond measure. Traveling on business, Robinson needs Kyle's passport to get to Africa, where a lucrative deal awaits. Kyle needs Robinson's passport to safely flee Cambodia. The swap seems almost too good to be true. Unfortunately for Kyle, it is. This one decision plunges Kyle into a Pandora's Box of intrigue that threatens to swallow him whole. Suddenly he finds himself being pursued by Russian oligarchs, Chinese operatives, the CIA, and a beautiful woman trained to kill -- all because Robinson certainly isn't who he seemed. And time is running out for Kyle to discover who he is.