Architecture

Cass Gilbert's pioneering buildings injected vitality into skyscraper design, and his "Gothic skyscraper," epitomized by the Woolworth Building, profoundly influenced architects during the first decades of the twentieth century. Now, as the New-York Historical Society mounts a major exhibit documenting his architectural career, the full breadth of Gilbert's achievements is visible in one lavishly illustrated volume.

Architect of the Broadway Chambers Building, the US Custom House, the Minnesota State Capitol, the St. Louis Art Museum, and large-scale projects like the city plan for New Haven, Connecticut, Gilbert is most famous for his skyscrapers—"symbols of our national genius and unrestraint"—monuments of the Beaux Arts "City Beautiful" aesthetic he embraced throughout his career.

Containing essays by major Gilbert scholars, Inventing the Skyline documents fascinating details about the buildings: the color scheme of the main entrance of the Minnesota State Capitol, made to resemble the Byzantine tomb of Galla Placidia in Ravenna; the controversy that erupted over the use of female nudes on the relief of the Essex County Courthouse; and the ill-fated plans for the George Washington Bridge as a Beaux Arts monument with elaborate plazas, fountains, and sculptures.

At a moment when the world's population increasingly lives in urban settings, the public health of cities—or the intersection of stress and wellness with architecture and urbanism—is a matter of pressing concern for designers.

Questions Concerning Health reports on this critical terrain, focusing particularly on Johannesburg, South Africa (a notable test case in which the term "social equivalency," used by epidemiologists, also carries considerable historical and spatial resonance). Among the book's research findings is that health is an intensively local phenomenon that demands intensively local responses in the form of more sensitive architectural typologies as well as urban planning. Questions Concerning Health presents a number of essays by experts on urban health and Johannesburg in particular, including the design proposals of eight students who participated in the research studio.

Has architectural theory become a historical phenomenon to be anthologized and studied as another passing phase in the history of the discipline? Do the current commonplace watchwords of "practice" and "research" mark the end of theory's place in architectural discourse? This edited volume posits the contrary—that theory remains urgent and even unavoidable, so ingrained in architectural practice and pedagogy that it remains a vital if sometimes latent influence.

Architectural theory is not confined to its supposed heyday in the decades leading up to the year 2000; it has persisted and expanded as the stakes of theoretical discussions have transformed. 2000+: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory collects new essays from a range of the most compelling architectural historians and theorists of the moment, including Lucia Allais, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Cousins, Arindam Dutta, John Harwood, Catherine Ingraham, Mark Jarzombek, Mari Lending, Spyros Papapetros, Felicity Scott, Pelin Tan, Bernard Tschumi, Eyal Weizman, Mark Wigley, and Mabel Wilson. Brought together for a conference marking the end of Wigley's tenure as dean of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, these thinkers chart new directions and points of critical importance for theory in architecture.

Acetate film, an exhaust fan, lollipops, a bicycle, paper and pens—in Group Efforts: Changing Public Space, vital voices in art and design use everyday objects to transform surroundings in remarkable ways.

An illustrated chronicle of projects organized by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in collaboration with Elastic City, this volume contains interviews with Todd Shalom and Hayal Pozanti, who assemble new shapes from Manhattan's West Village streetscape; Greta Hansen, Kyung Jae Kim, and Adam Koogler, who host spontaneous political forums in a pavilion built with plastic and blown air; and Karen Finley, who détourns Columbus Circle into an urban-scale mandala of resistance, reparation, and discovery.

An incisive essay by designer and cultural historian Mabel O. Wilson positions these creative occupations alongside recent acts of protest.

In a positive departure from modernism, the work of the art critic and urbanist Ludwig Hilberseimer offers schemata towards the design for the city itself: its mereological composition.
The resonance of parts unfolds to an alternative of a purely contrasting equation of form and content. It reminds us, that when the ground (gr.: logos) of the city is defined by its parts (gr.: meros), its architecture, the city in turn always also is part of the architecture as its desire.
»The Mereological City« introduces a mereological methodology and contributes to an ongoing discussion about an ecological form of urban design.

Since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century as the nation's "metropolis," New York has faced the most challenging housing problems of any American city, but it has also led the nation in innovation and reform. The horrors of the tenement were perfected in New York at the same time that the very rich were building palaces along Fifth Avenue; public housing for the poor originated in New York, as did government subsidies for middle-class housing.

A standard in the field since its publication in 1992, A History of Housing in New York City traces New York's housing development from 1850 to the present in text and profuse illustrations. Richard Plunz explores the housing of all classes, with comparative discussion of the development of types ranging from the single-family house to the high-rise apartment tower. His analysis is placed within the context of the broader political and cultural development of New York City. This revised edition extends the scope of the book into the city's recent history, adding three decades to the study, covering the recent housing bubble crisis, the rebound and gentrification of the five boroughs, and the ecological issues facing the next generation of New Yorkers. More than 300 illustrations are integrated throughout the text, depicting housing plans, neighborhood changes, and city architecture over the past 130 years. This new edition also features a foreword by the distinguished urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.

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.

A House Is Not Just a House argues precisely that. The book traces Tatiana Bilbao’s diverse work on housing ranging from large-scale social projects to single-family luxury homes. These projects offer a way of thinking about the limits of housing: where it begins and where it ends. Regardless of type, her work advances an argument on housing that is simultaneously expansive and minimal, inseparable from the broader environment outside of it and predicated on the fundamental requirements of living. Working within the turbulent history of social housing in Mexico, Bilbao argues for participating even when circumstances are less than ideal—and from this participation she is able to propose specific strategies learned in Mexico for producing housing elsewhere.

A House Is Not Just a House includes a recent lecture by Bilbao at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, as well as reflections from fellow practitioners and scholars, including Amale Andraos, Gabriela Etchegaray, Hilary Sample, and Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco.

Architecture is immersed in an immense cultural experiment called imaging. ​Yet the technical status and nature of that imaging must be reevaluated. What happens to the architectural mind when it stops pretending that electronic images of drawings made by computers are drawings? When it finally admits that imaging is not drawing, but is instead something that has already obliterated drawing? These are questions that, in general, architecture has scarcely begun to pose​, ​imagining that somehow its ideas and practices can resist the culture of imaging in which ​the rest of life now either swims or drowns. To patiently describe the world to oneself is to prepare the ground for an as yet unavailable politics. New descriptions can, under the right circumstances, be made to serve as the raw substrate for political impulses that cannot yet be expressed or lived, because their preconditions have not been arranged and articulated.

Signal. Image. Architecture.​ aims to clarify the status of computational images in contemporary architectural thought and practice by showing what happens if the technical basis of architecture is examined very closely, if its technical terms and concepts are taken very seriously, at times even literally. It is not a theory of architectural images, but rather a brief philosophical description of architecture after imaging.

Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects.

The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books that derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts that document the city—Rem Koolhaas on Delirious New York, Denise Scott Brown on Learning from Las Vegas, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto on Made in Tokyo—this volume traces the history of these “books on cities” by examining the material they recorded, the findings they established, the arguments they advanced, and the projects they promoted. These conversations also question the assumptions underlying this practice and whether in its ubiquity it still remains a space of opportunity.

"Empire shops" were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they were intended to make previously unfamiliar produce and products—sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica—available in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today.

Based on a public installation in London in the fall of 2016, the book catalogues and develops the installation's critical program of discussions, performances, dinners, installations, and screenings hosted at 91–93 Baker Street. The pieces in this book use food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet. Structured as a franchise agreement, The Empire Remains Shop lays out some of the landscapes, imaginaries, economies, and aesthetics that future iterations of the shop would need to address in order to think through political counterstructures for a better distributed, hyper-globalized world.

Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling is the first book-length study of Theodor Adorno as a philosopher of housing. Treating his own experience of exile as emblematic of late modern life, Adorno observed that twentieth-century dwelling had been rendered “impossible” by nativism, by the decimations of war, and, in the postwar period, by housing’s increasingly thorough assimilation into private property. Adorno’s position on the meaning and prospects for adequate dwelling—a concept he never wrote about systematically but nevertheless returned to frequently—was not that some invulnerable state of home or dwelling should be revived. Rather, Adorno believed that the only responsible approach to housing was to cultivate an ethic of displacement, to learn “how not to be at home in one’s home.”

Unhoused tracks four figurations of troubled dwelling in Adorno’s texts—homelessness, no man’s lands, the nature theater, and the ironic property relation—and reads them as timely interventions and challenges for today’s architecture, housing, and senses of belonging. Entangled as we are in juridical and financial frameworks that adhere to a very different logic, these figurations ask what it means to organize, design, build, and cohabit in ways that enliven non-exclusive relations to ourselves, others, objects, and place.

Today, weather extremes brought about by anthropogenic climate change pose relentless cognitive and imaginative challenges. Beyond news media, what are the cultural registers of this phenomenon? How can artistic and literary engagements with destabilizing natural patterns summon new planetary imaginaries—reorienting perspectives on humanity’s position within the environment?

A Year Without a Winter brings together science fiction, history, visual art, and exploration. Inspired by the literary ‘dare’ that would give birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein amidst the aftermath of a massive volcanic eruption, and today, by the utopian architecture of Paolo Soleri and the Arizona desert, expeditions to Antarctica and Indonesia, this collection reframes the relationship among climate, crisis, and creation. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, enveloped the globe in a cloud of ash, causing a climate crisis. By 1816, remembered as the ‘year without a summer,’ the northern hemisphere was plunged into cold and darkness. Amidst unseasonal frosts, violent thunderstorms, and a general atmosphere of horror, Shelley began a work of science fiction that continues to shape attitudes to emerging science, technology, and environmental futures. Two hundred years later, in 2016, the hottest year on historical record, four renowned science fiction authors were invited to the experimental town of Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s prototype for arcology, to respond to our present crisis. A Year Without a Winter presents their stories alongside critical essays, extracts from Shelley’s masterpiece, and dispatches from expeditions to extreme geographies. Broad and ambitious in scope, this book is a collective thought experiment retracing an inverted path through narrative extremes.

A Year Without a Winter is edited by Dehlia Hannah in collaboration with science fiction editors Brenda Cooper, Joey Eschrich, and Cynthia Selin. The book includes a suite of commissioned stories by Tobias Buckell, Nancy Kress, Nnedi Okorafor, and Vandana Singh; essays by Dehlia Hannah, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, James Graham, Hilairy Hartnett, David Higgins, Nadim Samman, and Pablo Suarez; artwork by Julian Charrière and Karolina Sobecka; and literary excerpts by Mary Shelley and Lord Byron.

Architecture Is All Over investigates architecture's simultaneous diminishment and ubiquity in the early twenty-first century. As a diagnostic and tactical guide, this collection features original texts and design proposals from emerging and established scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture, art, the history of science, media studies, and philosophy. Together these pieces probe architecture's relationship to liminal zones and immaterial systems, reframing instability and mutability as enduring qualities that form architecture's motive core—a perspectival shift that carries with it new possibilities for architectural agency and resistance.

The pieces in this book range from contrarian investigations of the opportunities inherent in scarcity, bureaucracy, and banality to projections of architecture as a mediatic practice or automated process. Case studies that propose new architectural strategies are placed alongside provocative historical examples to tease out the implications of architecture's indeterminacy in agonistic ways. In each contribution, a particular facet of the discipline's apparent obsolescence or endurance becomes a way to critically evaluate the ethical and entrepreneurial dimensions of architectural practice and theory. Taken together, the pieces in this volume reinterpret architecture's "all-over-ness" as an untapped disciplinary property rather than a temporary or terminal condition.

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.

A major social and political phenomenon of how a community overcame overwhelming opposition and obstacles to build the Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Stretching along a waterfront that faces one of the world’s greatest harbors and storied skylines, Brooklyn Bridge Park is among the largest and most significant public projects to be built in New York in a generation. It has transformed a decrepit industrial waterfront into a new public use that is both a reflection and an engine of
Brooklyn’s resurgence in the twenty-first century. Brooklyn Bridge Park unravels the many obstacles faced during the development of the park and suggests solutions that can be applied to important economic and planning issues around the world.

Situated below the quiet precincts of Brooklyn Heights, a strip of moribund structures that formerly served bustling port activity became the site of a prolonged battle. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey eyed it as an ideal location for high-rise or commercial development. The idea to build Brooklyn Bridge Park came from local residents and neighborhood leaders looking for less intensive uses of the property. Together, elected officials joined with members of the communities to produce a practical plan, skillfully won a commitment of government funds in a time of fiscal austerity, then persevered through long periods of inaction, abrupt changes of government, two recessions, numerous controversies often accompanied by litigation, and a superstorm.

Brooklyn Bridge Park is the success story of a grassroots movement and community planning that united around a common vision. Drawing on the authors’ personal experiences—one as a reporter, the other as a park leader—Brooklyn Bridge Park weaves together contemporaneous reports of events that provide a record
of every twist and turn in the story. Interviews with more than sixty people reveal the human dynamics that unfolded in the course of building the park, including attitudes and opinions that arose about class, race, gentrification, commercialization, development, and government.

Despite the park’s broad and growing appeal, its creation was lengthy, messy, and often contentious. Brooklyn Bridge Park suggests ways other civic groups can address such hurdles within their own communities.

Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of the greater city of New York, broke ground for the first subway line by City Hall on March 24, 1900. It took four years, six months, and twenty-three days to build the line from City Hall to West 145th Street in Harlem. Things rarely went that quickly ever again. The Routes Not Taken explores the often dramatic stories behind the unbuilt or unfinished subway lines, shedding light on a significant part of New York City’s history that has been almost completely ignored until now.

Home to one of the world’s largest subway systems, New York City made constant efforts to expand its underground labyrinth, efforts that were often met with unexpected obstacles: financial shortfalls, clashing agendas of mayors and borough presidents, battles with local community groups, and much more. After discovering a copy of the 1929 subway expansion map, author Joseph Raskin began his own investigation into the city’s underbelly. Using research from libraries, historical societies, and transit agencies throughout the New York metropolitan area, Raskin provides a fascinating history of the Big Apple’s unfinished business that until now has been only tantalizing stories retold by public-transit experts.

The Routes Not Taken sheds light on the tunnels and stations that were completed for lines that were never fulfilled: the efforts to expand the Hudson tubes into a fullfledged subway; the Flushing line, and why it never made it past Flushing; a platform underneath Brooklyn’s Nevins Street station that has remained unused for more than a century; and the 2nd Avenue line—long the symbol of dashed dreams—deferred countless times since the original plans were presented in 1929. Raskin also reveals the figures and personalities involved, including why Fiorello LaGuardia could not grasp the importance of subway lines and why Robert Moses found them to be old and boring. By focusing on the unbuilt lines, Raskin illustrates how the existing subway system is actually a Herculean feat of countless political compromises.

Filled with illustrations of the extravagant expansion plans, The Routes Not Taken provides an enduring contribution to the transportation history of New York City.

In the midst of current debates about the accessibility of public spaces, resurfacing as a result of highly visible demonstrations and occupations, this book illuminates an overlooked domain of civic participation: the office, workshop, or building where activist groups meet to organize and plan acts of political dissent and collective participation. Author Nandini Bagchee examines three re-purposed buildings on the Lower East Side that have been used by activists to launch actions over the past forty years. The Peace Pentagon was the headquarters of the anti-war movement, El Bohio was a metaphoric “hut” that envisioned the Puerto Rican Community as a steward of the environment, and ABC No Rio, appropriated from a storefront sign with missing letters, was a catchy punk name that appealed to the anarchistic sensibility of the artists that ran a storefront gallery in a run-down tenement. In a captivating discussion of buildings and urban settings as important components of progressive struggles in New York City over more than a century, Bagchee reveals how these collectively organized spaces have provided a venue for political participation while existing as a vital part of the city’s civic infrastructure.

The “counter institution” explored in this book represents both a conceptual and a literal struggle to create a space for civic action in a city that is built upon real estate speculation. The author reveals the fascinating tension between the impermanence of the insurgent activist practices and the permanent but maintenance heavy aspects of architecture. The actors she vividly describes—the war resisters, the Puerto Rican organizers, the housing activists, the punks and artists—all seized the opportunity to create what are seen as “activist estates,” at a time and in a place where urban life itself was under attack. And now, when many such self-organized “activist” buildings are imperiled by the finance-driven real estate market that is New York City, this book takes stock and provides visibility to these under recognized citizens’ initiatives.

Counter Institution is an innovative work that intersects architecture, urban design practices, and geography (cartography) on the one hand, with history, politics, and sociology on the other. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of activism in New York City and how the city can inspire and encourage political engagement. Through its beautifully illustrated pages—where drawings, maps, timelines, and photographs underline the connections between people, politics, and space—readers will discover new ways to imagine buildings as a critical part of the civic infrastructure and a vital resource for the future.

Wittgenstein's House reads Wittgenstein's his two main philosophical texts, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, in relation to an experience that intervened between them: his design and construction of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house in Vienna. Arguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, but a conceptual position as well, the book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases.

The book advances the radical proposition that the field in which architecture and philosophy operate includes linguistic and spatial practices. It develops innovative forms of interdisciplinary analyses to demonstrate that the philosophical positions put forth by Wittgenstein's two main works are literally unthinkable outside of their respective conceptions of space: the view from above in the early work and the view from within constructed by the late work.

To examine the manner in which Wittgenstein's practice of architecture insinuated itself into his philosophy, the author interweaves in-depth analyses of the spatial constructs underpinning the early and late philosophies with conceptual, formal and operative discussions of the design of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house. Together these discussions reveal how Wittgenstein's practice of architecture engaged philosophical concepts, through which it influenced Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. At the heart of this approach is the finding that the philosophical concepts at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy are indeed spatial ones, including his concerns with the limits of language, the boundary between showing and saying, the intricate textual numbering systems he devises, the relationship between the interiority of the subject and the publicness of language, and the formative principle of family resemblance.

A deserted Paris house holds the mystery of a brilliant Viennese modernist who worked alongside Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos before vanishing.

Wyeth takes readers on a deeply personal and revelatory journey. This research process, which readers experience vicariously, makes Wyeth’s prose exhilarating as tiny details become breakthroughs of grand proportions. […] For late architect and painter Jean Welz, designs should reflect one’s aesthetic and political commitments. This narrative will resonate with anyone interested in the politics of architecture, or the pursuit of knowledge at large.
—Hyperallergic "BEST ART BOOKS OF 2022"

Welz’s having been “lost” is indeed a travesty of architectural history to which the book serves as a welcome antidote.
—Artforum

A leading painter still highly regarded in South Africa, Jean Welz's prior architectural career has been virtually unknown until a string of discoveries unfolded for author and filmmaker Peter Wyeth, allowing him to narrate this amazing true tale of genius. Trained in ultra-sophisticated, but conservative Vienna, Welz was sent to Paris for the 1925 Art Deco exhibition by his influential employer, renowned architect Josef Hoffmann. There he met preeminent modern architects Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos. The latter employed him to assist in building a house for the founder of Dada, Tristan Tzara. They all mixed in avant-garde circles at the Dôme Café in Montparnasse along with Welz’s classmate from Vienna, later Chicago-based architect Gabriel Guevrekian; Welz’s future employer Raymond Fischer, whose archive was mostly destroyed by Nazis; and photographer André Kertész.

Through Welz’s South African family archive, author Wyeth retrieves stories, letters, portfolios, and photographs generations after Welz’s death that unravel his heroic designs, his stunning built critique of Corbusier’s “Five Points of Architecture,” a gravestone for Marx’s daughter, and the many ways that Welz disappeared amongst his collaborators, intentionally and not. This account of why Jean Welz did not become a famous name in architecture takes us through his brother’s Nazi-art-dealings, illness, betrayal, emigration, and an uncompromising artist’s vision at the same time sifting through significant, literally-concrete evidence of Welz’s built projects and visionary designs.

Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’.

The book presents rural planning – rooted in imagination and reflecting key values – as being embedded in the life of particular places, dealing with critical challenges across housing, services, economy, natural systems, climate action and community wellbeing in ways that are integrated and recognise broader place-making needs. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.

Using a broad international comparative perspective spanning multiple countries across South America, Europe and Africa, contributors explore resident-led self-building for low- and middle-income groups in urban areas. Although social, economic and urban prosperity differs across these contexts, there exists a recurring, cross-continental, tension between formal governance and self-regulation.

Contributors examine the multifaceted regulation dilemmas of self-building under the conditions of modernisation and consider alternative methods of institutionalisation, place-making and urban design, reconceptualising the moral and managerial ownership of the city. Innovative in scope, this book provides an array of globalised solutions for navigating regulatory tensions in order to optimise sustainable development for the future.

Drawing on a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estate projects in the UK and using hundreds of resident voices, this book reveals the secrets of council housing’s failures and successes, and the reasons for them.

Bringing to light the complex variety of the lived experiences of residents, it shows how estate pathways were predetermined by factors such as location, design and date, as well as by their local and national social, economic and political contexts. The book highlights what can be learned from some of the successes of less successful housing projects and provides lessons for building sustainable communities in the twenty-first century.

Planning is a battleground of ideas and interests, perhaps more visibly and continuously than ever before in the UK. These battles play out nationally and at every level, from cities to the smallest neighbourhoods.

Marshall goes to the root of current planning models and exposes who is acting for what purposes across these battlegrounds. He examines the ideological structuring of planning and the interplay of political forces which act out conflicting interest positions.

This book discusses how structures of planning can be improved and explores how we can generate more effective political engagements in the future.

In this accessible and passionately argued book, Bob Colenutt goes to the roots of the long-term crisis in housing and planning in the UK.

Providing a much needed, in depth critique of the nexus of power of landowners, house builders, financial backers and politicians that makes up the property lobby, this radical book reveals how this complex, self-serving and intimidating network perpetuates a cycle of low supply, high prices and poor building which has resulted in one of the biggest social and economic challenges of our time. With radical ideas for solutions, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in housing, planning and social justice.

Food security and housing a nation with an expanding population should be key priorities for a small island like Britain. Yet both are being thwarted by record land prices. In the last 10 years, farm land has risen by almost 200% - with feeding the nation a secondary consideration to speculators buying up thousands of acres annually to avoid tax. If planning permission is given for new housing, prices can rise fifty-fold - making a vast profit for a few and home ownership a distant dream for many.

In this provocative book, journalist Peter Hetherington argues that Britain, particularly England, needs an active policy to address these areas and stronger action by the government. This important debate will attract interest among academics and postgraduates in planning, surveying, housing management, rural policy and social policy, political organisations, the Third Sector, social enterprises, national housing organisations, community and voluntary groups.

First published in 2008, (as Contro l’architettura), Against Architecture has been translated into French and Greek, with editions forthcoming in Polish and Portuguese. The book is a passionate and erudite charge against the celebrities of the current architectural world, the “archistars.” According to Franco La Cecla, architecture has lost its way and its true function, as the archistars use the cityscape to build their brand, putting their stamp on the built environment with no regard for the public good.

More than a diatribe against the trade for which he trained, Franco La Cecla issues a call to rethink urban space, to take our cities back from what he calls Casino Capitalism, which has left a string of failed urban projects, from the Sagrera of Barcelona to the expansion of Columbia University in New York City. He finds hope and some surprising answers in the 2006 uprisings in the Parisian suburbs and in wandering the streets of San Francisco. La Cecla recounts his peregrinations, whether as a consultant to urban planners or as an incorrigible flaneur, all the while giving insights into how we might find a way to resist the tyranny of the planners and find the spirit of place. As he comments throughout on the works of past and present masters of urban and landscape writing, including Robert Byron, Mike Davis, and Rebecca Solnit, Franco La Cecla has given us a book that will take an important place in our public discourse.