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This book chronicles experimental approaches to the design and production of architectural terra cotta facades and structures. Under the auspices of the Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop (ACAW), a research collaborative supported by Boston Valley Terra Cotta, the largest manufacturer of architectural terra cotta in the United State, architectural firms work with manufacturing to explore material and design innovation. Now in its fifth year, the workshop aims to educate architects about terra cotta through the production of unique prototypes of rain screen facade systems, modular assemblies, columns, and structural systems.

‘Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop V’ chronicles the work of architectural firms Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), LMN Architects, Smith + Gill Architecture, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Perkins and Will, PLP Architecture, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), Studio Gang, and academic teams Haptek Lab and Alfred University/University at Buffalo.

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A GUIDE TO ARCHITECTURAL COMPANIONSHIP

‘Creatures Are Stirring’ is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future. The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms. Addressing a broad audience, ‘Creatures Are Stirring’ uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors’ essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings’ points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

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From Local Communities to Territorial Systems

The book promotes a landscape approach as a method for understanding and addressing the complex interdependent issues of environmental and climatic change, ecological degradation, and socio-cultural inequalities. The twenty-three book essays are structured into five sections around concepts of urban landscape systems, ecology, politics, territory, and practice. By linking individual sites and local communities to territorial socio-ecological systems and processes, they discuss issues of urban growth and development, remote areas of extraction and production, environmental degradation and transformation, and social inequality and discrimination. While the book allows for parallel readings of such issues in multiple cultural and geographical contexts, a geographic focus is placed on Canada and other environmentally complex and sensitive northern regions. One key theme is the integration of Indigenous knowledge, experience, and storytelling throughout several of the chapters. The book draws lessons that are grounded in inclusive, contextual, and multi-scalar readings which suggest landscape-informed practices that are both socially and environmentally resilient, just, and sustainable.

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