The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

List of Figures

Contributors

Introduction

1 Contemporary Architecture, Crisis and Critique

Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White

Part I Designs

2 Public Face and Private Space in the Design of Contemporary Houses

Alice T. Friedman

3 Designs on Disaster: Architecture and Humanitarianism

Andrew Herscher

4 Architectures of Risk and Resiliency: "Embedded Security" in the Redesign of

Sandy Hook Elementary School

Rachel Hall

5 When the Megaproject Meets the Village: Formal and Informal Urbanization in

Southern China

Max Hirsh and Dorthy Tang

6 After the Countermonument: Commemoration in the Expanded Field

Mechtild Widrich

Part II Materiality

7Architecture of Memory, Past and Future

Abby Smith Rumsey

8 Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic

Heather Davis

9 The Space of Relations: Body, Emotion and Empathy in Architectural

Experience

Sarah Robinson

10 Edges: Body, Space, and Design

Jeremy White

11 Habit’s Remainder

Aron Vinegar

12 Ephemeral Architecture: Toward Radical Contingency

Swati Chattopadhyay

Part III Alterity

13 Inhabiting Ruins: Architecture and the Limits of Occupation in Liberia

Danny Hoffman

14 Borderlands Architecture: Territories, Commons and Breathing Spaces

George F. Flaherty

15 Camps: Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity, and Control

Charlie Hailey

16 Defensive Alterity in Contemporary SriLankan Architecture

Anoma Pieris

17 Recasting the Ethnic Retail Street: Contemporary Immigrant Architecture in the

United States

Arijit Sen

Part IV Technologies

18 Obsolescence and its Futures

Daniel M. Abramson

19 Intelligent Architectural Settings

Christopher Beorkrem and Eric Sauda

20 Biohybrid Structures and Intelligent Materials

Ljilana Fruk and Veljko Armano Linta

21 Networked Urbanism: Definition, Scholarship, Directions

T.F. Tierney

22 The Architecture of Water

Karen Piper

Part V Cityscapes

23What Might Be: Re-describing Urbanscapes of the Global South

AbdouMaliq Simone

24 Watching the City: A Genealogy of Media Urbanism

Joshua Neves

25 View, Movement, Time and Contemporaneity: The Singapore Flyer

Iain Borden

26 Bi-Space: The Original Social Networking Site

Craig Wilkins

27 Urchins in the Infrastructure: Building with Hedgehogs in the Multispecies City

Laura McLauchlan

28 Unsettling Formal Power Systems

Saskia Sassen

Part VI Practice

29 Is it Really that Bad?: The Status of Women in Architecture and the Gender

Equity Movement

Despina Stratigakos

30 Where is the Social Project? Kenny Cupers

31 Collaboration: Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary

Architectural Practice

Sony Devabhaktuni and Min Kyung Lee

32 Starchitecture :: Starchitect

Jeremy White

33 A Eulogy for the Present: The Death of Architecture, c 2000

Rohan Shivkumar

34 Architects "Getting Real": On the Territorial Staging of a Professional Fiction

Arindam Dutta

Acknowledgements

Index

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge 2005); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota 2012); and co-editor of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge 2014).

Jeremy White is an architect and a game designer, and a lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the co-editor of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge 2014).