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''Totems'' brings together ten texts by architect, historian, and critic Irénée Scalbert. Written between 2001 and 2025, they reflect nearly three decades of critical engagement with architecture and its cultural contexts. Ranging in length and register—from concise meditations to extended analytical essays—the collection captures the evolution of Scalbert’s thinking as a(...)
Totems: Selected essays on architecture
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''Totems'' brings together ten texts by architect, historian, and critic Irénée Scalbert. Written between 2001 and 2025, they reflect nearly three decades of critical engagement with architecture and its cultural contexts. Ranging in length and register—from concise meditations to extended analytical essays—the collection captures the evolution of Scalbert’s thinking as a critic, teacher, and participant in architectural discourse. Organized thematically into sections on buildings, cities, and the environment, ''Totems'' traces a loosely autobiographical arc. Earlier pieces echo Scalbert’s formative years in London during a period of architectural ferment are marked by the work of James Stirling and Norman Foster, influential figures from Europe such as Aldo Rossi, as well as his close association with a generation of contemporaries including Peter St John (Caruso St John Architects), and Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald (6a architects). Later texts expand outward, both geographically and conceptually, as Scalbert brings a speculative and at times personal lens to questions of urbanism, nature, and meaning in contemporary architecture.
Architectural Theory
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With its 100 questions and answers from major practitioners of the art world and beyond, this book helps to examine the various parameters for a new institutional model. 3 selected questions: 1. Sabine Breitwieser: Is a private art institution more independent than a municipal one? 2. Barbara Steiner: Is the idea of internationality in / of art a myth? 3. Jan(...)
Architectural Theory
January 2007, Berlin / New York
Die frage des tages / the question of the day
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With its 100 questions and answers from major practitioners of the art world and beyond, this book helps to examine the various parameters for a new institutional model. 3 selected questions: 1. Sabine Breitwieser: Is a private art institution more independent than a municipal one? 2. Barbara Steiner: Is the idea of internationality in / of art a myth? 3. Jan Verwoert: Can a Kunsthalle establish a critical counter-discourse questioning the art system?
Architectural Theory
Staging disorder
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The publication develops a thesis on contemporary photography at a point when we are currently witnessing a shift away from a critical discourse that has been preoccupied by theoretical concerns related to artifice and illusion. Staging Disorder sits alongside an exhibition and symposium curated by Christopher Stewart (Associate Professor in Photography, Faculty of(...)
Staging disorder
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The publication develops a thesis on contemporary photography at a point when we are currently witnessing a shift away from a critical discourse that has been preoccupied by theoretical concerns related to artifice and illusion. Staging Disorder sits alongside an exhibition and symposium curated by Christopher Stewart (Associate Professor in Photography, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Built Environment, University of Technology Sydney) and Dr Esther Teichmann (Senior Lecturer in Photography, LCC, UAL).
Architectural Theory
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Since 1992, Dia has presented the Robert Lehman lectures on contemporary art. The lectures series, an example of Dia's longstanding commitment to critical and intellectual discourse, was founded with a generous grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation Inc., and has showcased a distinguished array of scholars, critics, art and cultural historians, and artists.
March 2004, New York
Robert Lehman lectures on contemporary art #2
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Since 1992, Dia has presented the Robert Lehman lectures on contemporary art. The lectures series, an example of Dia's longstanding commitment to critical and intellectual discourse, was founded with a generous grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation Inc., and has showcased a distinguished array of scholars, critics, art and cultural historians, and artists.
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In "The NAi effect", Sergio Figueiredo elegantly elucidates the social and cultural aims of architecture museums – arguably the most significant institutions in creating architecture culture as well as directing architectural discourse and practice. By providing a critical survey of the history and the legacy of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), Figueiredo(...)
The NAi effect: creating architecture culture
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In "The NAi effect", Sergio Figueiredo elegantly elucidates the social and cultural aims of architecture museums – arguably the most significant institutions in creating architecture culture as well as directing architectural discourse and practice. By providing a critical survey of the history and the legacy of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi), Figueiredo provides insights to how cultural policy works in practice and how specific national cultural institutions relate to a fast changing global context. This book is a probing study of one of the most important architectural institutions in the world as well as a critical analysis of a fundamental instrument for architecture’s advancement and dissemination since their inception in the early nineteenth century.
Contemporary Architecture
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This publication offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. 'Critique of(...)
Critique of architecture: essays on theory, autonomy, and political economy
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This publication offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. 'Critique of Architecture' also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.
Architectural Theory
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How do we challenge the prevailing visual discourse of contemporary architecture? Is there a more harmonious architectural production path? Can we inhabit Earth without annihilating the very conditions sustaining us and others? "Dominio" confronts architecture’s grand narrative by illuminating its production processes. These images strive to trigger a critical(...)
Dominio: This is a book on architecture
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How do we challenge the prevailing visual discourse of contemporary architecture? Is there a more harmonious architectural production path? Can we inhabit Earth without annihilating the very conditions sustaining us and others? "Dominio" confronts architecture’s grand narrative by illuminating its production processes. These images strive to trigger a critical introspection about architectural production and its socio-ecological footprint, while contesting the dominant visual narrative that perpetuates its existence. This publication, then, is a mosaic of queries, contradictions, and internal conflict. It serves as my introspective critique of how my role as an architectural photographer might have inadvertently contributed to architecture’s fetishization.
Photography monographs
Nature of enclosure
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Overlapped by cultural consumption and politics, planetary imagination stimulates a useful framework for interrogating the human impact on environmental limitations over a technological foreground. The blurry lines between the engineered logic and cultural imagination are continually embedded and influenced by intuition in the cultural practices of capital enclosure.(...)
Nature of enclosure
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Overlapped by cultural consumption and politics, planetary imagination stimulates a useful framework for interrogating the human impact on environmental limitations over a technological foreground. The blurry lines between the engineered logic and cultural imagination are continually embedded and influenced by intuition in the cultural practices of capital enclosure. Theories, design practices, and the forms of imagination, including science fiction, open up critical questions on the status of our environment here on Earth. This book comprises a series of conversations to gather experts from a range of disciplines at the intersection of architecture and the environment. It continues the conversation with a collection of essays as both reflections from the provocative discussions and expanding the discourse of enclosed environments in architecture and design fields.
Architectural Theory
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This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. These five texts move between history, theory, and criticism to explore a discourse of critical spatial practice engaged in the constant reshaping of the African Diaspora. African American cultural(...)
Dark space: architecture, representation, black identity
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This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. These five texts move between history, theory, and criticism to explore a discourse of critical spatial practice engaged in the constant reshaping of the African Diaspora. African American cultural institutions designed and constructed in recent years often rely on cultural stereotypes, metaphors, and clichés to communicate significance, demonstrating "Africanisms" through form and symbolism?but there is a far richer and more complex heritage to be explored. Presented here is a series of questions that interrogate and illuminate other narratives of "African American architecture," and reveal compelling ways of translating the philosophical idea of the African Diaspora's experience into space.
Architectural Theory
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Material Matters brings together texts and work by theorists and practitioners who are making material central to their work and reflects the diverse areas of inquiry which are expanding current material discourse. Focusing on the cultural, political, economic, technological and intellectual forces which shape material practices in architecture, the contributors draw on(...)
Materials and Lighting
January 2006, London, New York
Material matters: architecture and material practice
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Material Matters brings together texts and work by theorists and practitioners who are making material central to their work and reflects the diverse areas of inquiry which are expanding current material discourse. Focusing on the cultural, political, economic, technological and intellectual forces which shape material practices in architecture, the contributors draw on disciplines ranging from philosophy, history and pedagogy to art practice and digital and low-tech fabrication. By paying critical attention to material, a wide range of issues emerge in Material Matters which are otherwise excluded from architectural discourse, issues that shape and determine the buildings we make, the processes we use and the ways we understand them. Beautifully illustrated and designed, this book is a unique collection which will be of great interest to architectural practitioners and theorists who want to consider the wider implications of material practice, and to students who are developing their own approach to making buildings.
Materials and Lighting