Architecture

How has erasure formed the space around us? How do we come to know it, so that we can design differently? Erasure by Design tracks the methods, terms, and racial protocols that continue to do the work of displacement, demolition, and extraction into the present day.

This book travels back and forth in time through scenes of erasure at three primary locations—Southwest, Washington DC (displacement); North St Louis (demolition), and South Los Angeles (extraction). Erasure by Design shares first person narratives of growing up in the wake of slum clearance—that is, “urban renewal”—in Southwest, Washington DC, while assembling archival references that narrate racialized erasure and its legal and spatial precedents. It traces a military complex under construction, where St Louis’s cleared grounds and blacked out sites are also defined by satellites, body experiments, explosions, and emptiness. It moves through specific grounds in Los Angeles—dirt walls, hills, oil fields, gas lines, and houses in the forest—to trace how those grounds matter and how their holding intersects with maps that plan erasure, inhabitation, and extraction.

Between these three scenes, Erasure by Design takes on the aesthetics of bad design and good design, as innovated within the intellectual domain of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Through a curated cockroach at MoMA—and even the humor, rumors, and gossip of this roach—Erasure by Design reads the role that the museum invents for exhibiting, curating, and re-shaping policy, worldview, and the built environment, as well as how protocols of erasure, demolition, and design conscript the modern built environment into the policing of human and subhuman. In this nuanced reading, the Glass House and its twin, the Brick House, stage a haunting allegory of total violence.

Just as information and media are products of design, they themselves leave indelible marks on the environments in which they circulate and help structure. Architecture has irrevocably been altered by the proliferation and advancement of new media technologies and forms of communication, but architecture, too, is capable of mediating these forms of mediation—their materiality, their transmission, and the motivations they carry. From 2006–2016, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery under the directorship of Mark Wasiuta at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation was the center of a sustained research practice experimenting with these intersections. As the title suggests, The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 both records the possibilities of the archival exhibition as a mode, method, and problem of architecture, and is itself a record of a decade-long curatorial project that sought to reframe the documents, authors, environments produced by and producing architecture.

This book thus collects thirteen exhibitions that read architecture as a field coordinated by documents with distinct historical, mediatic, and disciplinary registers. The book, and the exhibitions it presents, recognize that architectural documents take shape according to different discursive and institutional exigencies. Yet, in these exhibitions the architectural archive is hardly stable or uniform. Rather, the archive appears as a term, process, mode of organization, underwriting architecture’s media, histories, and effects.

With contributions from Martin Beck, Caitlin Blanchfield, Craig Buckley, Glen Cummings, Keller Easterling, Noam M. Elcott, James Graham, Branden W. Joseph, Adrian Lahoud, Leah Meisterlin, Felicity D. Scott, Anthony Vidler, Mark Wasiuta, Ines Weizman, and Mark Wigley.

How can we live without plastics? But, also, how can we live without plastics? These two questions, which index a different set of urgent concerns, haunt Everlasting Plastics. Exploring the infinite ways in which plastics permeate our bodies and our world, the book offers intimate and political accounts of our fraught yet enmeshed kinship with these materials. Rather than making a case for or against the material, the writings and artworks collected in this volume attempt to register our ongoing toxic dependencies on plastic, its impact on other material cultures and behaviors, and the harm and possibilities it entangles for our collective futures.Everlasting Plastics records and expands upon the exhibition of the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which excavated the ways synthetics both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment. Refusing to see the exhibition as a static event and instead imagining it as an invitation to evolve the stakes of a shared conversation, the book gathers the work of the exhibition alongside research, reflections, sketches, and newly commissioned critical essays. More than a catalog, Everlasting Plastics is itself an exercise in plasticity—staging interactions between institutions and disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. Through its range of formats, the book unfolds, broadens, revises, and expands the histories, relations, preoccupations, and discourses on and around our relationship to plastic matter and thought.

With artwork by Xavi L. Aguirre, Simon Anton, Ang Li, Norman Teague, and Lauren Yeager; essays from madison moore, Laura Raicovich, Shannon Rae Stratton, Marisa Solomon, Jessica Varner, and Michele Washington; sketches by Kristen Bos, K. Jake Chakasim, Sky Cubacub, Heather Davis, Jennifer Gabrys, Rania Ghosn, Stephanie Ginese, Aurelia Guo, Adam Hanieh, Ilana Harris-Babou, Theodossis Issaias, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Carolyn L. Kane, Laleh Khalili, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Esther Leslie, Ani Liu, Adie Mitchell, Timothy Mitchell, Gabrielle Printz, Kyla Schuller, Terry Schwarz, Pallavi Sen, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Ala Tannir, and RA Washington.

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water—and the history of controlling it—is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry—past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

“For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought—his home of homes, where his heart was, and where his people are.” Nearly sixty years since the martyrdom of Malcolm X, these words from Ossie Davis’s eulogy remind us that Malcolm’s political and religious beliefs and conceptions of culture have profoundly shaped and been shaped by Harlem. Mapping Malcolm continues the project of reinscribing Malcolm X’s memory and legacy in the present by exploring his commitment to community building and his articulation of a global power analysis as it continues to manifest across New York City today. More specifically, the book explores the limits and possibilities of the archive, the political, material, and philosophical legacy of the Black radical tradition, the Black diaspora, and the state. Oriented toward sovereignty and liberation, Mapping Malcolm brings together artists, community organizers, and scholars to consider the politics of Black space-making in Harlem through a range of historical, cultural, and anti-imperialist worldviews designed to offer new, reparatory pedagogical possibilities. Together, they reconfigure how we understand, employ, and carry forward Malcolm X’s sociopolitical, cross-cultural analyses of justice and power as an everyday praxis in the built environment and beyond.

With contributions from Maytha Alhassen, Joshua Bennett, Christopher Joshua Benton, Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra, Stephen Burks, Guy Davis, Ossie Davis, Ibrahem Hasan, Albert Hicks IV, Marc Lamont Hill, Ladi’Sasha Jones, Jerrell Gibbs, Nsenga Knight, Akemi Kochiyama, Denise Lim, Jaimee A. Swift, James A. Tyner, Marcus Washington Jr., and Darien Alexander Williams.

How do we get to know air? Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds offers a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient common understandings of air and air pollution as matter “out there.” Aeropolis contests regimes of managing air which ultimately operate toward upholding dominant modes of world-making that are dependent on forms of exclusion and inequity. Instead, Aeropolis proposes that air is thought of as a city, to center its social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements. Drawing upon feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, Aeropolis moves away from solutions toward a methodology of “designing-thinking-making” that redirects and connects our understandings of air—as designers, as citizens—with ongoing struggles for just futures.

Moving through a series of design interventions, histories of air, and theoretical coordinates, Aeropolis thinks with air across its many forms—through smog and dust, bodies and breath, pollen and weeds, and from urban design to geopolitics, polluted environments to open data, parks to aerial infrastructures. It insists that we acknowledge the diversity of air and its relation to humans, non-humans, and environments, both physically and affectively. That we become sensible to air by following its unruliness—by living, breathing, seeing, holding, touching, queering airs.

With contributions from María Puig de la Bellacasa and Timothy K. Choy.

Colonial and imperial powers have often portrayed arid lands as “empty” spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted. Despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the “regime of emptiness” has inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries. Deserts Are Not Empty challenges this colonial tendency, questions its roots and ramifications, and remaps the representations, theories, histories, and stories of arid lands—which comprise approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface. The volume brings together poems in original languages, conversations with collectives, and essays by scholars and professionals from the fields of architecture, architectural history and theory, curatorial studies, comparative literature, film studies, landscape architecture, and photography. These different approaches and diverse voices draw on a framework of decoloniality to unsettle and unlearn the desert, opening up possibilities to see, think, imagine it otherwise.


With contributions from Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Menna Agha, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Yousef Awaad Hussein, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Danika Cooper, Brahim El Guabli, Timothy Hyde, Jill Jarvis, Bongani Kona, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Observatoire des armements, Francisco E. Robles, Paulo Tavares, Alla Vronskaya, and XqSu.

Heritage occupies a privileged position within the built environment. Most municipalities in the United States, and nearly all countries around the world, have laws and policies to preserve heritage in situ, seeking to protect places from physical loss and the forces of change. That privilege, however, is increasingly being unsettled by the legacies of racial, economic, and social injustice in both the built environment and historic preservation policy, and by the compounding climate crisis. Though many heritage projects and practitioners are confronting injustice and climate in innovative ways, systemic change requires looking beyond the formal and material dimensions of place and to the processes and outcomes of preservation policy—operationalized through laws and guidelines, regulatory processes, and institutions—across time and socio-geographic scales, and in relation to the publics they are intended to serve.

This third volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series examines historic preservation as an enterprise of ideas, methods, institutions, and practices that must reorient toward a new horizon, one in which equity and sustainability become critical guideposts for policy evolution.

With contributions from Lisa T. Alexander, Louise Bedsworth, Ken Bernstein, Robin Bronen, Sara C. Bronin, Shreya Ghoshal, Scott Goodwin, Claudia Guerra, Victoria Herrmann, James B. Lindberg, Randall Mason, Jennifer Minner, David Moore, Marcy Rockman, Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, A.R. Siders, Amanda L. Webb, and Vicki Weiner.

Art after Liberalism is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging social crises. It is also an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.

The apparent failures of liberal thinking mark its starting point. No longer can the framework of the nation-state, the figure of the enterprising individual, and the premise of limitless development be counted on to produce a world worth living in. No longer can talk of inclusion, representation, or a neutral public sphere pass for something like equality.

It is increasingly clear that these commonplace liberal conceptions have failed to improve life in any lasting way. In fact, they conceal fundamental connections to enslavement, conscription, colonization, moral debt, and ecological devastation. Now we must decide what comes after.

The essays in this book attempt to register these connections by following itinerant artists, artworks, and art publics as they move across comparative political environments. The book thus provides a range of speculations about art and social experience after liberal modernity.

Featuring a conversation with Amin Husain and Nitasha Dhillon of MTL Collective.

Architecture is a constant presence in the study of human interaction—acting as both the ground on which human social behavior is performed and a means of shaping subjectivity itself. Proxemics was an attempt to visualize and instrumentalize these dynamics, appealing to both the social sciences and the emerging field of environmental design. Founded by anthropologist Edward T. Hall and taking shape between the departments of architecture and anthropology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, proxemics developed amidst cold war political tensions and intense social and civil unrest.

Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction presents selections from Hall’s extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science. Together these materials illuminate a moment in American history when new spatial practices arose to challenge the environmental conditions of cultural, political, and racial identity.

As Angela Y. Davis has proposed, the “path to prison,” which so disproportionately affects communities of color, is most acutely guided by the conditions of daily life. Architecture, then, as fundamental to shaping these conditions of civil existence, must be interrogated for its involvement along this diffuse and mobile path. Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality aims to expand the ways the built environment’s relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays in this book implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the United States—and follow the premise that to understand how the prison enacts its violence in the present one must shift the epistemological frame elsewhere: to places, discourses, and narratives assumed to be outside of the sphere of incarceration.

Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality offers not a fixed or inexorable account of how things are but rather a set of starting points and methodologies for reevaluating the architecture of carceral society and for undoing it altogether.

With contributions by Adrienne Brown, Stephen Dillon, Jarrett M. Drake, Sable Elyse Smith, James Graham, Leslie Lodwick, Dylan Rodríguez, Anne Spice, Brett Story, Jasmine Syedullah, Mabel O. Wilson, and Wendy L. Wright.

Riots are extraordinary events that have been recurring with increasing frequency and occupy a highly controversial space in the political imagination. Despite their often negative portrayals, it is undeniable that riots have played a pivotal role in the confrontation between authority and dissent. Recently, with the deepening crises of capitalism, racial violence, and communal tension, an “age of riots” has powerfully begun. As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.

With contributions from Asef Bayat, Joshua Clover, Vaginal Davis, Keller Easterling, Zena Edwards, Nadine El-Enany, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Gauri Gill, Natasha Ginwala, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Louis Henderson, Satch Hoyt, Hamid Khan, Gal Kirn, Josh Kun, Léopold Lambert, Margit Mayer, Vivek Narayanan, Ai Ogawa, Oana Pârvan, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, SAHMAT, Thomas Seibert, Niloufar Tajeri, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Dariouche Tehrani, and Ala Younis.

The preservation enterprise helps fashion the physical contours of memory in public space, and thus has the power to curate a multidimensional and inclusive representation of societal values and narratives. Increasingly, the field of preservation is being challenged to consider questions of social inclusion, of how multiple publics are—or are not—represented in heritage decision-making, geographies, and governance structures. Community engagement is increasingly being integrated into project-based preservation practice, but the policy toolbox has been slower to evolve. Recognizing how preservation and other land use decisions can both empower and marginalize publics compels greater reflection on preservation’s past and future and collective action beyond the project level. This requires professionals and institutions to consider systemic policy change with integrity, sensitivity, and intentionality.

Bringing together a broad range of academics, historians, and practitioners, this second volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series documents historic preservation’s progress toward inclusivity and explores further steps to be taken.

Technology mediates how we know and experience cities, and the nature of this mediation has always been deeply political. Today, the production and deployment of data is at the forefront of projects to grasp and reshape urban life. Ways of Knowing Cities considers the role of technology in generating, materializing, and contesting urban epistemologies—tracing an arc from ubiquitous sites of “smart” urbanism, to discrete struggles over infrastructural governance, to forgotten histories of segregation now naturalized in urban algorithms, to exceptional territories of border policing. Bringing together architects, urbanists, artists, and scholars of critical migration studies, media theory, geography, anthropology, and literature, the essays stage a deeply interdisciplinary conversation, interrogating the ways in which certain ways of knowing are predicated on the erasure of others. In this opening, the book engages the information systems that structure urban space and social life in it, historically and in the present moment, to imagine alternative practices and generate new critical perspectives on spatial research.

Ways of Knowing Cities includes texts by Eve Blau, Simone Browne, Maribel Casas-Cortes, Wendy Chun, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Beth Coleman, V. Mitch McEwen, Orit Halpern, Charles Heller, Shannon Mattern, Leah Meisterlin, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Dietmar Offenhuber, Lorenzo Pezzani, Anita Say Chan, and Matthew W. Wilson.

What constitutes the social context of architecture? What kind of stories can be told about how lived experiences across global communities, cities, territories, and ecologies resonate with architectural and space-making practices? The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial explores the implications of architecture and the built environment as they relate to land, memory, rights, and civic participation—drawing buildings, planning, art, policy making, education, and activism into new conversations at global and civic scales.

Published in conjunction with the third iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, …and other such stories extends the exhibition’s core questions through a range of essays, interviews, and visual dossiers, along with a section introducing the Biennial’s contributors. It is structured by a series of curatorial frames: (1) No Land Beyond reflects on landscapes of belonging and sovereignty that challenge narrow definitions of land as property and commodity; (2) Appearances and Erasures explores both shared and contested memories in consideration of monuments, memorials, and social histories; (3) Rights and Reclamations foregrounds aspects of rights, advocacy, and civic purpose in architectural and spatial practices; and (4) Common Ground addresses practices invested in producing and intervening in public space within and beyond the field of architecture.

The objects of architecture are not simply inert assemblies of material—they are complex entities that unfold their potential agencies (whether political, social, or environmental) in equally complex ways. Exploring these forms of architectural agency has in recent years been a central aspect of the work of Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, who, in addition to their built works, pursue a research practice through the many other media of architectural production. Their projects are reactive, intervening on what already exists to demonstrate how design, politics, and criticality operate across different scales and at the intersection of multiple realities. Jaque’s performances, videos, and installations—and this book, which collects a range of recent research projects—bring new subjects into the fold of architecture, focusing on alternative actors, distributions of power and representation, and the sociocultural effects of architecture. These episodes address ideas like genetic manipulation, the necessary requeering of dequeered spaces of online interaction, and the selling of modern architectural comforts in order to subvert the field from within and to contest capitalism's flattening-out of public life.

Rather than propose alternative-from-scratch futuristic or idealized realities, Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation claim that reality is produced at the intersection of things like porn, interior design, maintenance, and the territorial distribution of toxicity. Documenting a series of performances, research projects, installations, films, characters, and exhibitions, Superpowers of Scale demonstrates the breadth of architectural knowledge and its possible representations.

Over the past fifty years, preservation policy has evolved very little, despite escalating accusations that landmarking and historic districting can inhibit affordable housing, economic development, and socioeconomic diversity. The potential to understand these dynamics and effect positive change is hindered by a lack of data and evidence-based research to better understand these impacts. One of the biggest barriers to preservation research has been the lack of data sets that can be used for geospatial, evidence-based, and longitudinal analyses.

This first book in the series Issues in Preservation Policy explores the ways that enhancing the collection, accuracy, and management of data can serve a critical role in identifying vulnerable neighborhoods, understanding the role of older buildings in economic vitality and community resilience, planning sustainable growth, and more. For preservation to play a dynamic role in sustainable development and social inclusion, policy must evolve beyond designation and design regulation and use evidence-based research to confront new realities in the management of urban environments and their communities.

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 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.