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Building Construction: Around Materials, Labor, and the Environment book cover

1st Edition

Building Construction Around Materials, Labor, and the Environment

By David Costanza Copyright 2026
306 Pages 595 Color Illustrations
by Routledge

306 Pages 595 Color Illustrations
by Routledge

This book advocates for a fundamental shift in how we design and build architecture, placing construction knowledge at the core of the design process. It explores how a deeper understanding of materials, labor, and the environment can yield architecture better attuned to its environmental, social, and cultural impacts. Through an examination of thirty case studies spanning eighteen countries,... Read more

Introduction.  1. Materials.  2. Labor.  3. Environment.  4. Visual Essay.  

Biography

David Costanza is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the director of the Building Construction Lab (BCL) at Cornell University, as well as the principal of David Costanza Studio (DCS), a design-build practice based in Ithaca, New York. His work foregrounds Construction Methods, Material Culture, and Labor Practices through the lens of Decarbonization. Across practice, research, and teaching, Costanza investigates the nonlinearity of design processes, opening new terrains for architectural intervention while cultivating an expanded dialogue among representation, computational design, digital fabrication, building science, materials, construction, labor, and the environment.

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