The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

List of Figures. Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgments.

1. Introduction: Contemporary Architecture, Crisis, and Critique. Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White

Part I: Design
2. Public Face and Private Space in the Design of Contemporary Houses. Alice T. Friedman 3. Designs on Disaster: Humanitarianism and Contemporary Architecture. Andrew Herscher 4. Architectures of Risk and Resiliency: “Embedded Security” in the Redesign of Sandy Hook Elementary School. Rachel Hall 5. When the Megaproject Meets the Village: Formal and Informal Urbanization in Southern China. Max Hirsh and Dorthy Tang 6 After the Counter-monument: Commemoration in the Expanded Field. Mechtild Widrich

Part II: Materiality
7. Architecture of Memory, Past and Future. Abby Smith Rumsey 8. Life and Death in the Anthropocene. Heather Davis 9. The Space of Relations: Body, Emotion, and Empathy in Architectural Experience. Sarah Robinson 10. Edges: Body, Space, and Design. Jeremy White 11. Habit’s Remainder. Aron Vinegar 12. Ephemeral Architecture: Toward Radical Contingency. Swati Chattopadhyay

Part III: Alterity
13. Inhabiting Ruins: The Ministry of Defense and the Limits of Occupation in Monrovia, Liberia. Danny Hoffman 14. Borderlands Architecture: Territories, Commons, and Breathing-Spaces. George F. Flaherty 15. Camps: Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity, and Control. Charlie Hailey 16. Defensive Alterity in Contemporary Sri Lankan Architecture. Anoma Pieris 17. Recasting the Ethnic Retail Street: Analyzing Contemporary Immigrant Architecture in the United States. Arijit Sen¿

Part IV: Technologies
18. Obsolescence and its Futures. Daniel M. Abramson 19. Intelligent Architectural Settings. Christopher Beorkrem and Eric Sauda 20. Future Architecture: Biohybrid Structures and Intelligent Materials. Ljilana Fruk and Veljko Armano Linta 21. Networked Urbanism: Definition, Scholarship, Directions. T. F. Tierney 22. The Architecture of Water. Karen Piper

Part V: Cityscapes
23. What Might Be: Re-describing Urbanscapes of the Global South. AbdouMaliq Simone 24. Watching the City: A Genealogy of Media Urbanism. Joshua Neves 25. The Singapore Flyer: View, Movement, Time, and Contemporaneity. Iain Borden 26. Bi-Space: The Original Social Networking Site. Craig Wilkins 27. Urchins in the Infrastructure: Building with Hedgehogs in the Multispecies City. Laura McLauchlan 28. Unsettling Formal Power Systems. Saskia Sassen

Part VI: Practice
29. Is It Really that Bad?: The Status of Women in Architecture and the Gender Equity Movement. Despina Stratigakos 30.Where is the Social Project? Kenny Cupers 31. Collaboration: Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary Architectural Practice. Sony Devabhaktuni and Min Kyung Lee 32. Starchitecture: Starchitect. Jeremy White 33. A Eulogy for the Present: The Death of Architecture, c.2000 Exhibition. Rohan Shivkumar 34. Architects “Getting Real”: On the Present-Day Professional Fictions. Arindam Dutta

Index

Biography

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge 2005); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota 2012); and co-editor of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge 2014).

Jeremy White is an architect and a game designer, and a lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge 2014).

Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White have done a superb job in delineating a critical field for understanding contemporary architecture. With the contributors, they weave together a set of narratives that offers a strong sense of place and time in crisis that is at once global and local. The result is an excellent assemblage of recent thoughts and concerns about the place of contemporary architecture in society. Wide-ranging, incisive and yet accessible, the essays in this book lead us to firmly believe that architecture matters, for its ways of impacting the ethico-political problems of our time, and how it may now be engaged to deal with the crisis of the twenty-first century.

Abidin Kusno, Professor, Environmental Studies, York University, Canada

At the core of this important volume is an essential questioning of structural violence and its emergent spatial and material embodiments at all scales in contemporary architecture. Disassembling binaries, unsettling systems of power, and countering formal narratives, this collection of deft authors signals how architectural discourse today is an essential mode for confronting the now … and never again.

Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, USA