Albena Yaneva - Böcker

Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories ‘flourished’ in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture.Latour for Architects is the first introduction to the key concepts and ideas of Bruno Latour that are relevant to architects. First, the book discusses critically how specific methods and insights from his philosophy can inspire new thinking in architecture and design pedagogy. Second, it explores examples from architectural practice and urban design, and reviews recent attempts to extend the methods of ANT into the fields of architectural and urban studies. Third, the book advocates an ANT-inspired approach to architecture, and examines how its methodological insights can trace new research avenues in the field, reflecting meticulously on its epistemological offerings.Drawing on many lively examples from the world of architectural practice, the book makes a compelling argument about the agency of architectural design and the role architects can play in re-ordering the world we live in. Following Latour’s philosophy offers a new way to handle all the objects of human and nonhuman collective life, to re-examine the role of matter in design practice, and to redefine the forms of social, political and ethical associations that bind us together in cities.

Bruno Latour is one of the leading figures in Social Sciences today, but his contributions are also widely recognised in the arts. His theories ‘flourished’ in the 1980s in the aftermath of the structuralism wave and generated new concepts and methodologies for the understanding of the social. In the past decade, Latour and his Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have gained popularity among researchers in the field of architecture.Latour for Architects is the first introduction to the key concepts and ideas of Bruno Latour that are relevant to architects. First, the book discusses critically how specific methods and insights from his philosophy can inspire new thinking in architecture and design pedagogy. Second, it explores examples from architectural practice and urban design, and reviews recent attempts to extend the methods of ANT into the fields of architectural and urban studies. Third, the book advocates an ANT-inspired approach to architecture, and examines how its methodological insights can trace new research avenues in the field, reflecting meticulously on its epistemological offerings.Drawing on many lively examples from the world of architectural practice, the book makes a compelling argument about the agency of architectural design and the role architects can play in re-ordering the world we live in. Following Latour’s philosophy offers a new way to handle all the objects of human and nonhuman collective life, to re-examine the role of matter in design practice, and to redefine the forms of social, political and ethical associations that bind us together in cities.

The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors' trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ’from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ’cosmopolitically correct design’.

Five Ways to Make Architecture Political presents an innovative pragmatist agenda that will inspire new thinking about the politics of design and architectural practice. Moving beyond conventional conversations about design and politics, the book shows how recent developments in political philosophy can transform our understanding of the role of the architect. It asks: how, when, and under what circumstances can design practice generate political relations? How can architectural design become more ‘political’? Five central chapters, which can be read alone or in sequence, explore the answers to these questions. Powerfully pragmatic in approach, each presents one of the ‘five ways to make architecture political’, and each is illustrated by case studies from a range of contemporary situations around the world. We see how politics happens in architectural practice, learn how different design technologies have political effects, and follow how architects reach different publics, trigger reactions and affect different communities worldwide.Combining an accessible introduction to contemporary political concepts with a practical approach for a more political kind of practice, this book will stimulate debate among students and theorists alike, and inspire action in established and start-up practices.

In 2020, the COVID pandemic unfolded and transformed the lives of billions across the world. As the invisible killer marched across continents, causing unprecedented disruption worldwide, architects and designers began rethinking how to design cities and adapt their practice so that we might continue to live together in the future.Architecture after COVID is the first book to explore the pandemic’s transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice – questions which had lain latent in the profession for years, but which the COVID pandemic brought to the fore. The book explores how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, and looks in detail at how it has transformed building typologies. It also shows how the continuing risk of pandemics leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice – making a compelling argument about the changing agency of architectural design and the importance of designers in re-ordering the post-pandemic world. Packed with interviews and case-studies from a wide range of contemporary design practices, Architecture after COVID will inspire debates among architectural practitioners and theorists alike. The broad view of the approach and the depth of the professional issues at stake mean that this book will offer key insights for the discipline long beyond the scope of the COVID pandemic – as it explores the long-lasting bond between city, science and society as the ‘new normal’ begins to emerge.

The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors' trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ’from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ’cosmopolitically correct design’.

Five Ways to Make Architecture Political presents an innovative pragmatist agenda that will inspire new thinking about the politics of design and architectural practice. Moving beyond conventional conversations about design and politics, the book shows how recent developments in political philosophy can transform our understanding of the role of the architect. It asks: how, when, and under what circumstances can design practice generate political relations? How can architectural design become more ‘political’? Five central chapters, which can be read alone or in sequence, explore the answers to these questions. Powerfully pragmatic in approach, each presents one of the ‘five ways to make architecture political’, and each is illustrated by case studies from a range of contemporary situations around the world. We see how politics happens in architectural practice, learn how different design technologies have political effects, and follow how architects reach different publics, trigger reactions and affect different communities worldwide.Combining an accessible introduction to contemporary political concepts with a practical approach for a more political kind of practice, this book will stimulate debate among students and theorists alike, and inspire action in established and start-up practices.

What constitutes an archive in architecture? What forms does it take? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving? Crafting History provides answers and offers insights on the ontological granularity of the archive and its relationship with architecture as a complex enterprise that starts and ends much beyond the act of building or the life of a creator. In this book we learn how objects are processed and catalogued, how a classification scheme is produced, how models and drawings are preserved, and how born-digital material battles time and technology obsolescence. We follow the work of conservators, librarians, cataloguers, digital archivists, museum technicians, curators, and architects, and we capture archiving in its mundane and practical course. Based on ethnographic observation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and interviews with a range of practitioners, including Álvaro Siza and Peter Eisenman, Albena Yaneva traces archiving through the daily work and care of all its participants, scrutinizing their variable ontology, scale, and politics. Yaneva addresses the strategies practicing architects employ to envisage an archive-based future and tells a story about how architectural collections are crafted so as to form the epistemological basis of architectural history.

What constitutes an archive in architecture? What forms does it take? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving? Crafting History provides answers and offers insights on the ontological granularity of the archive and its relationship with architecture as a complex enterprise that starts and ends much beyond the act of building or the life of a creator. In this book we learn how objects are processed and catalogued, how a classification scheme is produced, how models and drawings are preserved, and how born-digital material battles time and technology obsolescence. We follow the work of conservators, librarians, cataloguers, digital archivists, museum technicians, curators, and architects, and we capture archiving in its mundane and practical course. Based on ethnographic observation at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and interviews with a range of practitioners, including Álvaro Siza and Peter Eisenman, Albena Yaneva traces archiving through the daily work and care of all its participants, scrutinizing their variable ontology, scale, and politics. Yaneva addresses the strategies practicing architects employ to envisage an archive-based future and tells a story about how architectural collections are crafted so as to form the epistemological basis of architectural history.