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 twenty-first 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

• List of Figures Contributors Introduction1 Contemporary Architecture, Crisis and Critique Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy WhitePart I Designs 2 Public Face and Private Space in the Design of Contemporary Houses Alice T. Friedman3 Designs on Disaster: Architecture and Humanitarianism Andrew Herscher4 Architectures of Risk and Resiliency: "Embedded Security" in the Redesign of Sandy Hook Elementary School Rachel Hall5 When the Megaproject Meets the Village: Formal and Informal Urbanization in Southern ChinaMax Hirsh and Dorthy Tang6 After the Countermonument: Commemoration in the Expanded Field Mechtild WidrichPart II Materiality 7 Architecture of Memory, Past and Future Abby Smith Rumsey8 Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic Heather Davis9 The Space of Relations: Body, Emotion and Empathy in Architectural Experience Sarah Robinson10 Edges: Body, Space, and Design Jeremy White11 Habit’s Remainder Aron Vinegar12 Ephemeral Architecture: Toward Radical Contingency Swati ChattopadhyayPart III Alterity 13 Inhabiting Ruins: Architecture and the Limits of Occupation in Liberia Danny Hoffman14 Borderlands Architecture: Territories, Commons and Breathing Spaces George F. Flaherty15 Camps: Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity, and Control Charlie Hailey16 Defensive Alterity in Contemporary SriLankan Architecture Anoma Pieris17 Recasting the Ethnic Retail Street: Contemporary Immigrant Architecture in the United StatesArijit Sen Part IV Technologies18 Obsolescence and its Futures Daniel M. Abramson19 Intelligent Architectural Settings Christopher Beorkrem and Eric Sauda20 Biohybrid Structures and Intelligent Materials Ljilana Fruk and Veljko Armano Linta21 Networked Urbanism: Definition, Scholarship, Directions T.F. Tierney22 The Architecture of Water Karen PiperPart V Cityscapes23 What Might Be: Re-describing Urbanscapes of the Global South AbdouMaliq Simone24 Watching the City: A Genealogy of Media Urbanism Joshua Neves25 View, Movement, Time and Contemporaneity: The Singapore Flyer Iain Borden26 Bi-Space: The Original Social Networking Site Craig Wilkins27 Urchins in the Infrastructure: Building with Hedgehogs in the Multispecies City Laura McLauchlan28 Unsettling Formal Power Systems Saskia SassenPart VI Practice29 Is it Really that Bad?: The Status of Women in Architecture and the Gender Equity Movement Despina Stratigakos30 Where is the Social Project? Kenny Cupers31 Collaboration: Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary Architectural Practice Sony Devabhaktuni and Min Kyung Lee32 Starchitecture :: Starchitect Jeremy White33 A Eulogy for the Present: The Death of Architecture, c 2000 Rohan Shivkumar34 Architects "Getting Real": On the Territorial Staging of a Professional Fiction Arindam DuttaAcknowledgements Index