Search

Title:
Minnette de Silva: Intersections

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$35.00
(available in store)

Summary:
When Minnette De Silva founded the Studio of Modern Architecture in Kandy, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), in 1947, she was one of the first women in the world to establish a professional architectural practice as sole principal. Today, she is known for her designs and constructions of private residences and public institutions, settlement planning, experiments in building and handicraft, research, curation, and writing. Her practice treated architecture as a lived experience and a contemporary expression of heterogeneous pasts. ''Minnette De Silva: Intersections'' offers a richly illustrated critical introduction to De Silva’s practice, exploring a range of projects through the intersecting intellectual concerns that shaped her work. Archival materials, drawings, photographs, and extracts from De Silva’s memoir, ''The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect'', describe her diverse work in a career situated in Sri Lanka and informed by substantial engagements with India, England, Greece, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Drawing on modernist architectural techniques and material heritage practices, De Silva forged a distinctive, critically engaged aesthetic program and set of values. This book by architectural historian Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, researched with Methmini Kariyakarawana and others, offers a primer to the thought and production of one of the twentieth century’s most significant architects and cultural figures.

Title:
Architecture of migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$44.00
(available in store)

Summary:
Environments associated with migration are often seen as provisional, lacking history or architecture. As Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi demonstrates in "Architecture of migration," a refugee camp's aesthetic and material landscapes-even if born out of emergency-reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics. She identifies forces of colonial and humanitarian settlement, tracing spatial and racial politics in the Dadaab refugee camps established in 1991 on the Kenya-Somalia border-at once a dense setting that manifests decades of architectural, planning, and design initiatives and a much older constructed environment that reflects its own ways of knowing. She moves beyond ahistorical representations of camps and their inhabitants by constructing a material and visual archive of Dadaab, finding long migratory traditions in the architecture, spatial practices, landscapes, and iconography of refugees and humanitarians. Countering conceptualizations of refugee camps as sites of border transgression, criminality, and placelessness, Siddiqi instead theorizes them as complex settlements, ecologies, and material archives created through histories of partitions, sedentarizations, domesticities, and migrations.

Title:
The l!brary

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$35.00
(available to order)

Summary:
The L!brary Book takes readers behind the scenes of fifty groundbreaking library projects to show how widely varied fields and communities—corporate underwriters, children's book publishers, architects, graphic designers, product manufacturers, library associations, teachers, and students—can join forces to make a difference in the lives of children.