Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

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 21st century.Abidin Kusno, Professor, Environmental Studies, York University, CanadaAt 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

• Introduction 1 Contemporary Architecture, Crisis and Critique Part I Designs 2 Public Face and Private Space in the Design of Contemporary Houses 3 Designs on Disaster: Architecture and Humanitarianism 4 Architectures of Risk and Resiliency: ""Embedded Security"" in the Redesign of Sandy Hook Elementary School 5 When the Megaproject Meets the Village: Formal and Informal Urbanization in Southern China6 After the Countermonument: Commemoration in the Expanded Field Part II Materiality 7 Architecture of Memory, Past and Future 8 Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic 9 The Space of Relations: Body, Emotion and Empathy in Architectural Experience 10 Edges: Body, Space, and Design 11 Habit’s Remainder 12 Ephemeral Architecture: Toward Radical Contingency Part III Alterity 13 Inhabiting Ruins: Architecture and the Limits of Occupation in Liberia 14 Borderlands Architecture: Territories, Commons and Breathing Spaces 15 Camps: Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity, and Control 16 Defensive Alterity in Contemporary SriLankan Architecture 17 Recasting