Caitlin Blanchfield - Böcker

In 2003, Columbia University began planning an expansion into neighboring Manhattanville, the site of the soon-to-open campus designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The story of the project is a complex one-a university bursting at the seams, the changing imperatives of research facilities, large-scale investment in underground infrastructures, a controversial use of eminent domain, the commissioning of celebrated architects, and a remarkable campaign of community engagement all combining to reshape the public face of a venerable institution. Bringing together conversations with the architects and planners designing the Manhattanville campus, the educators who will inhabit its buildings, and essays from urban and architectural historians, this book both documents the making of Manhattanville and engages the contested history of public planning and the private university. Featuring contributions from Amale Andraos, Carol Becker, Elizabeth Diller, Steven Gregory, Maxine Griffith, Tom Jessell, Robert Kasdin, Laura Kurgan, Reinhold Martin, Lois Mazzitelli, Philip Palmgren, Charles Renfro, Marilyn Taylor, and Anthony Vaccione.

The election and inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States of America have provoked an unprecedented intensity of reflection in virtually all academic disciplines. The professions of architecture and planning, faced with the phenomenon of a self-proclaimed "builder-in-chief," have found themselves facing a series of fundamental questions, both old and new. How should we think, teach, and practice under a developer presidency? What sort of walls will we and won't we choose to build? What are our commitments of critical thought, and what obligations should we turn our energies toward? The essays gathered in And Now explore the nature of architecture's many long-standing complicities. Architecture coordinates colossal expenditures (of material, of energy); it scripts forms of labor (in its construction, in its operation, and in the programs it houses); and it is both a repository and generator of capital. Architecture participates, centrally, in defining modes of life, whether for the privileged or the dispossessed-designing and building the boundaries between the "haves" and the "have-nots."This fundamental reality of architectural practice need not inspire either nihilism or defensiveness but should rather be understood, quite simply, as the terrain we navigate. Naming these complicities and the injustices they perpetuate is a first step toward addressing them.