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AN ARCHITECTURAL SURVEY OF SOCIALLY ENGAGING EXTRACANONICAL WORKS: VOLUME 1: SOCIALLY ENGAGING FORMS OF DOMESTICITY

‘Project Archive’ reforms the contemporary architectural discipline’s understanding of the built environment. The content encourages the audience to acknowledge the role of architecture as a political actant. Featured projects prioritize an attitude that goes beyond its formal elements of the current architectural canon. The projects give importance to both formal aesthetics and the ability to serve the urgent social needs of a community.

Included projects also forefront lower-tech solutions. They enforce culturally resilient models of domesticity as sustainable living and a longer-term response to ongoing environmental crises. Thus, showcasing extra-canonical works provides an opportunity to reflect on diverse solutions. 

The content endorses learnings from regionally specific and environmentally resilient models of architecture. This book provides diversity in knowledge systems, and varied responses to; reforming traditional modes of domesticity, response to environmental and social crises and diverse conditions of a landscape.  Developed through a decentralized research process, the book also creates space for interdisciplinary projects with contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, historians, architects, etc. Featured list of writers include members at varied levels within academic institutions, architecture enthusiasts and independent researchers.

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A CATALOGUE OF ARCHETYPES

For a long period of time, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people, and for people only. Today, as some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative research still struggles to emerge. This book collects, reconstructs, and discusses archetypal models of posthuman architecture, from the cabin of Henry David Thoreau to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This book aims to show how architectural, landscape, and industrial designers, be they professional practitioners or not, redefined their tools in order to meet the functional and symbolic needs of new and different kinds of subjects. All this in ten monographic architectural tales, thought to trace the evolution of an extended idea of coexistence between humans and other species or technologies.

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At a time when the world is being forced to rapidly adapt to climate change, landscape comes into focus as a subject and medium of more importance than ever. Nowhere is this better known than at the Weitzman School of Design at The University of Pennsylvania, where the landscape architecture department has been leading the field for almost a century. Edited by Richard Weller and Tatum Hands, ‘The Landscape Project’ is a collection of 18 essays by the landscape faculty at Weitzman. Each author takes on a single topic — animals, plants, water, energy, politics, urbanism, aesthetics, and more. If there is just one book you need to get up to speed on the state of art in landscape architecture, then this beautifully crafted little black book is it!

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THE TRAVEL OF ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

George Everard Kidder Smith (1913–1997) was a multidimensional figure within the wide-ranging field of North American architectural professionals in the second half of the twentieth century. Although he trained as an architect, he chose not to practice within the conventional strictures of an architecture office. Instead, Kidder Smith “designed,” researched, wrote, and photographed a remarkably diverse collection of books about architecture and the built environment. His work and life were deeply interwoven and punctuated by travel related to the research, writing, and promotion of books that sought to reveal the genius loci of the countries whose built environments he admired and wished to share with a broader audience. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s his interest in architecture led him to describe visually the architectural and historical identity of many European countries. After his far-flung travels over the decades, with his wife Dorothea, Kidder Smith focused on his own country and produced a series of ambitious books focused on the United States. Kidder Smith’s vision and narrative betray the gaze of the traveler, the scholar, and the architect.

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