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
John Lehr: The last things
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"The last things" explores the artifacts of an American archeological present. The work in this series depicts vernacular forms of architecture, signage, images, and objects that were hastily made in a rush for attention, or abandoned in place after their usefulness had expired. Lehr posits them as symptomatic symbols of the repetitive cycles of decline, rehabilitation,(...)
John Lehr: The last things
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"The last things" explores the artifacts of an American archeological present. The work in this series depicts vernacular forms of architecture, signage, images, and objects that were hastily made in a rush for attention, or abandoned in place after their usefulness had expired. Lehr posits them as symptomatic symbols of the repetitive cycles of decline, rehabilitation, violence, and mourning that are woven into the fabric of contemporary American life. These light-drenched photographs vividly describe a nation speaking through the language of capitalism. Words and images repeat and contradict throughout the work, reflecting emphatic pleas and shifting priorities. At other times, language breaks down completely, giving way to pictographic forms that are both primitive and utterly contemporary. Flaking paint morphs into JPEG vinyl printouts and LED displays, blurring the line between commercial speech and individual expression. Embedded in the work is a belief in the power and absurdity of objects that—like a body—bear the traces of collective experience. In its distilled and emphatic sequencing "The last things" reads as a prose poem and a cryptic cipher about a country at the brink of a tipping point.
Photography monographs
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"The Unknown City" takes its place in the emerging architectural literature that looks beyond design process and buildings to discover new ways of looking at the urban experience. A multistranded contemplation of the notion of "knowing a place," it is about both the existence and the possibilities of architecture and the city. An important inspiration for the book is(...)
Urban Theory
October 2002, Cambridge, Massachusetts
The unknown city : contesting architecture and social space
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"The Unknown City" takes its place in the emerging architectural literature that looks beyond design process and buildings to discover new ways of looking at the urban experience. A multistranded contemplation of the notion of "knowing a place," it is about both the existence and the possibilities of architecture and the city. An important inspiration for the book is the work of Henri Lefebvre, in particular his ideas on space as a historical production. Many of the essays also draw on the social critique and tactics of the Situationist movement. The international gathering of contributors includes art, architectural, and urban historians and theorists; urban geographers; architects, artists, and filmmakers; and literary and cultural theorists. The essays range from abstract considerations of spatial production and representation to such concrete examples of urban domination as video surveillance and Regency London as the site of male pleasure. Although many of the essays are driven by social, cultural, and urban theory, they also tell real stories about real places. Each piece is in some way a critique of capitalism and a thought experiment about how designers and city dwellers working together can shape the cities of tomorrow.
Urban Theory
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In response to the contentious process surrounding the selection of a design for the World Trade Center site, the use of spectacular buildings to brand cities and institutions, and the dizzying transformations of the skylines of Shanghai and Dubai, public awareness of architecture and design has perhaps never been higher. At the same time, architecture itself is(...)
The new architectural pragmatism
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In response to the contentious process surrounding the selection of a design for the World Trade Center site, the use of spectacular buildings to brand cities and institutions, and the dizzying transformations of the skylines of Shanghai and Dubai, public awareness of architecture and design has perhaps never been higher. At the same time, architecture itself is undergoing an identity crisis as it confronts fundamental issues: the effect of digital technology on design, the pervasive impact of global capitalism, and whether to embrace or resist popular media and taste. The New Architectural Pragmatism collects the most provocative, penetrating, and influential attempts by leading theorists and practitioners in the field to define what architectural practice should be at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Written in the aftermath of modernism’s utopian impulse and postmodernism’s detached playfulness, the essays gathered here express and critique a new spirit of cultural and political engagement with contemporary society. Interrogating the architect’s social responsibility, the contributors deliberate about how much we should ask of architecture and suggest that in the coming century, architecture must be at once flexible and robust, responsive and self-directed.
Architectural Theory
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From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support(...)
Slow disturbance: infrastructural mediation on the settler colonial resource frontier
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From the late nineteenth through most of the twentieth century, the evangelical Protestant Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, created a network of hospitals, schools, orphanages, stores, and industries with the goal of bringing health and organized society to settler fisherfolk and Indigenous populations. This infrastructure also served to support resource extraction of fisheries off Labrador's coast. In 'Slow Disturbance' Rafico Ruiz engages with the Grenfell Mission to theorize how settler colonialism establishes itself through what he calls infrastructural mediation—the ways in which colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the creation and maintenance of infrastructures. Drawing on archival documents, maps, interviews with municipal officials, teachers, and residents, as well as his field photography, Ruiz shows how the mission's infrastructural mediation—from its attempts to restructure the local economy to the aerial surveying and mapping of the coastline—responded to the colony's environmental conditions in ways that expanded the bounds of the settler frontier. By tracing the mission's history and the mechanisms that enabled its functioning, Ruiz complicates understandings of mediation and infrastructure while expanding current debates surrounding settler colonialism and extractive capitalism.
Architecture ecologies
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In ''Ruderal city'' Bettina Stoetzer traces relationships among people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin as they make their lives in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. She develops the notion of the ruderal—originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and(...)
Ruderal city: ecologies of migration, race, and urban nature in Berlin
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In ''Ruderal city'' Bettina Stoetzer traces relationships among people, plants, and animals in contemporary Berlin as they make their lives in the ruins of European nationalism and capitalism. She develops the notion of the ruderal—originally an ecological designation for the unruly life that inhabits inhospitable environments such as rubble, roadsides, train tracks, and sidewalk cracks—to theorize Berlin as a “ruderal city.” Stoetzer explores sites in and around Berlin that have figured in German national imaginaries—gardens, forests, parks, and rubble fields—to show how racial, class, and gender inequalities shape contestations over today’s uses and knowledges of urban nature. Drawing on fieldwork with gardeners, botanists, migrant workers, refugees, public officials, and nature enthusiasts while charting human and more-than-human worlds, Stoetzer offers a wide-ranging ethnographic portrait of Berlin’s postwar ecologies that reveals emergent futures in the margins of European cities. Brimming with stories that break down divides between environmental perspectives and the study of migration and racial politics, Berlin’s ruderal worlds help us rethink the space of nature and culture and the categories through which we make sense of urban life in inhospitable times.
Urban Theory
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Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. "#Accelerate" presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK(...)
#Accelerate: the accelerationist reader
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Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. "#Accelerate" presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike. On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own ‘Prometheanism’, and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, "#Accelerate" activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of ‘reasonable’ contemporary political alternatives.
Critical Theory
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from(...)
Architecture and abstraction
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In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, Architecture and Abstraction presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
Architectural Theory
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''Collective Intelligence'' is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s interdisciplinary practice. It includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics. Kurant’s experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman(...)
Contemporary Art Monographs
December 2025
Agnieszka Kurant: Collective intelligence
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''Collective Intelligence'' is an innovative monograph that documents the last ten years of Polish-born conceptual artist Agnieszka Kurant’s interdisciplinary practice. It includes newly commissioned texts by renowned thinkers in science, philosophy, art, technology, anthropology, and economics. Kurant’s experimental work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences and their impact on transformations of the human, the future of labor and creativity, and the exploitations within digital capitalism. Questioning the ideology of individualism, Kurant proposes that we rethink human and more-than-human worlds from a perspective of plural subjectivity, and, through this fundamental shift in perspective, posits the possibility of alternative political imaginaries. Her work probes the replacement of individual authorship with collective intelligence—a phenomenon observed in slime molds, termite colonies, social movements, cities, the internet, and inside our brains. In her collaborative practice, the artist investigates artificial intelligence, emergence, cybernetics, automation, artificial life, mining industries, and energy circuits to explore our collective evolution and the shifting status of objects in relation to agency, value, circulation, and redistribution. Through crowdsourcing the production of her artworks to thousands of humans and nonhumans, Kurant creates unstable, hybrid forms that constantly evolve. Her works, oscillating between biological, digital, and geological, embody the crumbling distinctions between what is natural and artificial, real and synthetic, and life and nonlife.
Contemporary Art Monographs
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Dating from the early 1970s, ‘'Design and the Building Site'’ is Sérgio Ferro’s most influential theoretical work. Written just after Ferro had arrived in France after fleeing the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964 and arrested him in 1970 for his involvement in active resistance, the essay reflects much of what he had left behind: encounters with(...)
The building site and the design
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Dating from the early 1970s, ‘'Design and the Building Site'’ is Sérgio Ferro’s most influential theoretical work. Written just after Ferro had arrived in France after fleeing the military dictatorship that took power in Brazil in 1964 and arrested him in 1970 for his involvement in active resistance, the essay reflects much of what he had left behind: encounters with Brasilia’s harsh construction sites; experiences with the collective ''Arquitetura Nova''; work on the editorial committee of the journal ''Teoria e Prática''; and the year Ferro spent in prison, befriending construction workers and reading Freud. The text constitutes a critique of architectural production under capitalism, surveying the political economy of architectural production and its influence on the contemporary practice of architecture. Half a century after its first publication, and in the face of capitalism’s greatest crisis, it has never offered such a pressingly relevant call for action. This edition contextualises and expands on Ferro’s essay with earlier and later texts, clarifying both the contextual and theoretical elements at play in its argument. A preface written by Ferro especially for this first English-language edition recounts his journey from Brasilia’s building sites to the experiments of ''Arquitetura Nova'', as well as a topic he has rarely touched on before: postmodernism.
Architectural Theory