Akari Nakai Kidd – författare

Diversity in Architecture: Intersectionality, Affective Politics, and Creating Change explores diversity in architecture through an intersectional lens. It examines how overlapping individual identities, cultural ideologies, and institutional practices shape the profession.

Divided in two parts, the book first explores how values, norms, and ideologies are constructed, circulated, and reinforced through media representations – both from without and from within. The second leans into voices from academics and architects within spaces of education and practice, who share their lived experiences navigating power structures and affective politics that marginalize diverse voices. Considering praxis and actions to create change where care is central, it asks: what happens if we bring intersectionality to the picture of diversity in architecture – through media, education, practice? How can affective solidarity and relationality foster change? What role does intersectional care play in dismantling systemic barriers and reimagining a more inclusive future?

Written in dialogue with, and for architectural academics, practitioners, students, as well as wider audiences invested in diversity, the book opens its readers to the importance of mobilising diversity in architecture through intersectionality and affect, towards lasting change.

Diversity in Architecture: Intersectionality, Affective Politics, and Creating Change explores diversity in architecture through an intersectional lens. It examines how overlapping individual identities, cultural ideologies, and institutional practices shape the profession.

Divided in two parts, the book first explores how values, norms, and ideologies are constructed, circulated, and reinforced through media representations – both from without and from within. The second leans into voices from academics and architects within spaces of education and practice, who share their lived experiences navigating power structures and affective politics that marginalize diverse voices. Considering praxis and actions to create change where care is central, it asks: what happens if we bring intersectionality to the picture of diversity in architecture – through media, education, practice? How can affective solidarity and relationality foster change? What role does intersectional care play in dismantling systemic barriers and reimagining a more inclusive future?

Written in dialogue with, and for architectural academics, practitioners, students, as well as wider audiences invested in diversity, the book opens its readers to the importance of mobilising diversity in architecture through intersectionality and affect, towards lasting change.

Affect, Architecture, and Practice builds on and contributes to work in theories of affect that have risen within diverse disciplines, including geography, cultural studies, and media studies, challenging the nature of textual and representational-based research. Although numerous studies have examined how affect emerges in architectural spaces, little attention has been paid to the creative process of architectural design and the role that affect plays in the many contingencies and uncertainties that arise in the process.

The book traces the critical, philosophic, and architectural theories to examine how affect, architecture, and practice are interlinked. Through a series of conversations and reflections, it examines three key contemporary architects, their practices and projects, all within a single coherent theme. Reiser + Umemoto (RUR Architecture DPC), USA, Kerstin Thompson Architects, Australia, and Shigeru Ban Architects, Japan, are critically studied through the lens of different aspects of practice, namely image-making, the design process, and the making of an everyday object/material.

Through this investigation, author Akari Nakai Kidd demonstrates how affect theory allows a critical interrogation of the in-betweens of practice, its liminality and limits. It questions the stability of objects, the smooth temporality of practice, and its often under-conceptualised non-human dimensions. More significantly, the book demonstrates architectural practice’s contribution to the reconceptualisation of theories of affect.