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Since 1995, Dhaka-based architecture firm Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA has produced an astonishing collection of works of divergent scales, typologies, and contexts located in one of the most meteorologically challenging regions in the world. A hospital introduced into an economy decimated by rising oceans, a shelter against cyclones in Bangladesh’s southern coastal region,(...)
Architecture Monographs
January 2026
Meditations in entropy: The work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA in Bangladesh
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Since 1995, Dhaka-based architecture firm Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA has produced an astonishing collection of works of divergent scales, typologies, and contexts located in one of the most meteorologically challenging regions in the world. A hospital introduced into an economy decimated by rising oceans, a shelter against cyclones in Bangladesh’s southern coastal region, and architectural interventions in one of the world’s densest metropolitan areas: Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA’s designs are incisive, critical responses to varied issues and urgencies rooted in the belief that architecture must be a reflection of, and sympathetic to, increasingly fragile ecological conditions. ''Meditations in Entropy'' is the first full monograph on the work of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA. It features 18 of the firm’s realized designs in detail through photographs by acclaimed architectural photographer Hélène Binet as well as numerous plans, drawings, sketches, and other images. Perceptive essays are contributed by the distinguished critics and historians Kenneth Frampton, Robert McCarter, William J. R. Curtis, and Philip Ursprung, and by Ainun Nishat, a renowned water resource and climate change specialist. An illustrated catalogue of Kashef Chowdhury / URBANA’s projects and realized buildings rounds off this beautifully designed volume.
Architecture Monographs
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The sequel to the authors’ “Are We Human?”, this provocative book is an urgent manifesto for an alternative architectural philosophy. It treats bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built(...)
We the bacteria: Notes towards biotic architecture
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The sequel to the authors’ “Are We Human?”, this provocative book is an urgent manifesto for an alternative architectural philosophy. It treats bacteria as the real architects, construction workers, maintenance crews and inhabitants of buildings. Colomina and Wigley draw on the latest research into microbes to rethink the past and possible futures of the built environment. The book explores the intimate entanglements of the microbes within bodies and buildings over the last 10,000 years, culminating in the antibiotic philosophy of contemporary architecture. The diseases of our time are diseases of the built environment. The deadly combination of rapidly declining microbial diversity and rising antibiotic-resistant bacteria is as great a threat as climate change. Hostility to bacteria has to give way to new forms of hospitality from a more symbiotic architecture that learns from bacteria, embracing them and reconnecting with soil, plants and other species. Buildings based on fear of bacteria, which is to say fear of life itself, must give way to buildings learning from models of coexistence based on bacteria themselves. The main goal of the book is to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than prophylactic forms of exclusion.
Architecture ecologies
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The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new(...)
The monadic age: Notes on the coming social order
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The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters. Today, two major post-liberal dispositions are unfolding. On the one side, people envision a harmonious community of all human and nonhuman beings (multi-species kinship, a rainbow of identities). On the other side, people isolate themselves within their own identities and belongings (filter bubbles, safe spaces, gated communities, charter cities, prepping). Monadism recognizes that these two seemingly contradictory dispositions stem from a similar understanding of the world: one is more optimistic, the other more pessimistic, but ultimately they’re interdependent. Before seeking harmony, we humans, a highly dominant species, must first of all restrain ourselves from coercive interactions with our environment. And to protect ourselves sufficiently from our environment, we must minimize its abuse.
Critical Theory
Don't build, rebuild
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As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to(...)
Don't build, rebuild
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As climate change has escalated into a crisis, the reuse of existing structures is the only way to even begin to preserve our wood, sand, silicon, and iron, let alone stop belching carbon monoxide into the air. Our housing crisis means that we need usable buildings now more than ever, but architect and critic Aaron Betsky shows that new construction—often seeking to maximize profits rather than resources, often soulless in its feel—is not the answer. Whenever possible, it is better to repair, recycle, renovate, and reuse—not only from an environmental perspective, but culturally and artistically as well. Architectural reuse is as old as civilization itself. In the streets of Europe, you can find fragments from the Roman Empire. More recently, marginalized communities from New York to Detroit—queer people looking for places to gather or cruise, punks looking to make loud music, artists and displaced people looking for space to work and live—have taken over industrial spaces created then abandoned by capitalism, forging a unique style in the process. Their methods—from urban mining to dumpster diving—now inform architects transforming old structures today.
Architectural Theory
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As the world adapts to the consequences of a global pandemic, museums continue to experience unprecedented disruption and change. At the same time, there is a growing debate and dissent over what museums are for, who they speak to, and what the histories, objects, and ideas they are tasked with holding reflect—all taking place within a public sphere that feels(...)
Gathering of strangers: Why museums matter
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As the world adapts to the consequences of a global pandemic, museums continue to experience unprecedented disruption and change. At the same time, there is a growing debate and dissent over what museums are for, who they speak to, and what the histories, objects, and ideas they are tasked with holding reflect—all taking place within a public sphere that feels increasingly dynamic and volatile. Taking a wide-ranging and thought-provoking look at the roles and responsibilities of some of our most well-known and best-loved public institutions, ''Gathering of Strangers'' explores the critical challenges and opportunities for the museum at this point in the twenty-first century. Moving from the historical origins of the gallery to important current debates taking place around art and public engagement, the climate emergency, race equality and decolonization, and the value of the arts in education—this book sets out the role of art and artists in imagining and shaping our collective future. It is also a love letter to the museum, from a sector leader who is at the forefront of the cultural conversation today.
Museology
The well-tempered city
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Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations,(...)
The well-tempered city
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Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others. In The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—the man who “repairs the fabric of cities”—distills a lifetime of interdisciplinary research and firsthand experience into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention.
Urban Theory
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“A terrible mechanism [is] on the march, its gears multiplying.” So begins the 48th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, guest edited by Mark Lee, chair of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of -Ness Magazine. The issue takes as its theme the slippery and ambiguous figure of “America,” seen(...)
Harvard Design Magazine 48 : America
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“A terrible mechanism [is] on the march, its gears multiplying.” So begins the 48th issue of Harvard Design Magazine, guest edited by Mark Lee, chair of the department of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of -Ness Magazine. The issue takes as its theme the slippery and ambiguous figure of “America,” seen through the lens of the built and unbuilt environment. Americanization—once the “terrible mechanism” bent on pressing capitalist values on emerging economies everywhere—is now in retreat, eclipsed by the more urgent domestic concerns of pandemic and climate change, racial injustice and domestic radicalization. The very notion of what constitutes America is ripe for redefinition. The America Issue of Harvard Design Magazine, featuring a new design and art direction by Alexis Mark, invites historians, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, theorists, curators, artists, and planners to reflect on the country’s past and present, and to imagine sustainable futures. Projects, taxonomies, dialogues, essays, and spatial interpretations explore possible Americas. They allow us to delve into issues relevant to small cities, towns, and rural areas—as well as major urban centers—and to study barriers and opportunities facing communities across the country.
Magazines
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Forming a comprehensive picture of the multiple processes, regulations, institutions, technologies, networks, and operations that we have come to understand as the distributed infrastructural arena in which we act, yield, and plot is a perennial challenge. Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from(...)
Between the material and the possible: Infrastructural re-examination and speculation in art
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Forming a comprehensive picture of the multiple processes, regulations, institutions, technologies, networks, and operations that we have come to understand as the distributed infrastructural arena in which we act, yield, and plot is a perennial challenge. Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from ''institutional critique'' to ''infrastructural critique,'' or toward ''infrastructural speculation,'' in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of ''the cancelled future,'' art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change. From questions around space settlements to the possibility of repurposing blockchain infrastructures and financial instruments for redistributive purposes, and from the diagrammatic potential of infrastructural thinking in artistic practices to scenario planning and economic strategizing, this collection of new essays brings together critical analysis from a broad group of contributors engaged in the revisioning of our infrastructural futures. Their interrogations span local and global relationalities, historical and political legacies, as well as future-oriented infrastructural hypotheses.
Art Theory
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Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects – houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass(...)
The culture of stopping: obituary to myself
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Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We’re converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects – houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on – now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We’re on a treadmill to disaster. To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need to learn how to stop: as individuals and as societies, we need to stop doing what we’re doing and say ‘enough’. We find it hard to do this because our culture has trained us to regard endless escalation as desirable, and we’re reluctant to surrender the material benefits of growth. But as long as the expansive cultural model continues to prevail, there will be no change of course in favour of sustainable and climate-friendly practices and lifestyles. We need a cultural model in which the beauty of stopping is given the recognition needed for the project of civilization to continue. Optimizing processes that are heading in the wrong direction only makes matters worse.
Social
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In "The effluent eye," Rosemary J. Jolly argues for the decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to state and institutional malfeasance but to the very concept of human rights as anthropocentric-and, therefore, fatally shortsighted. In an engaging mix of literary and cultural criticism, Indigenous and Black critique, and substantive forays into(...)
The effluent eye: Narratives for decolonial right-making
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In "The effluent eye," Rosemary J. Jolly argues for the decolonization of human rights, attributing their failure not simply to state and institutional malfeasance but to the very concept of human rights as anthropocentric-and, therefore, fatally shortsighted. In an engaging mix of literary and cultural criticism, Indigenous and Black critique, and substantive forays into the medical humanities, Jolly proposes right-making in the demise of human rights. Using what she calls an "effluent eye," Jolly draws on "Fifth Wave" structural public health to confront the concept of human rights-one of the most powerful and widely entrenched liberal ideas. She builds on Indigenous sovereignty work from authors such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Mark Rifkin as well as the littoral development in Black studies from Christine Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Tiffany Lethabo King to engage decolonial thinking on a range of urgent topics such as pandemic history and grief; gender-based violence and sexual assault; and the connections between colonial capitalism and substance abuse, the Anthropocene, and climate change. Combining witnessed experience with an array of decolonial texts, Jolly argues for an effluent form of reading that begins with the understanding that the granting of "rights" to individuals is meaningless in a world compromised by pollution, poverty, and successive pandemics.
Critical Theory