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Titre:
Histories of ecological design: an unfinished encyclopedia

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Résumé:
This book presents conflicting definitions and concepts of architects and designers and the parallel histories of their intellectual positions toward environmental thought from the 19th century to today. It showcases that ecological design starts with the reconceptualization of the world as a complex system of flows rather than a discrete compilation of objects, which visual artist and theorist György Kepes has described as one of the fundamental reorientations of the 20th century. To survey the formation of this field, the history of ecological design will not be exclusively examined chronologically, but also in connected worldviews, each rendering evolving perceptions of nature, its relation to culture, and the occupation of the natural world by human and non-human subjects.

Titre:
Unearthing traces: dismantling imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes, and the built environment

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$60.00
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Archival power, silences, and absences profoundly shape and structure postcolonial landscapes, spaces, and urban environments by controlling bodies, histories, and interactions. This book explores pathways to dismantle these imperial entanglements by developing methodologies and plural epistemologies through an interdisciplinary dialog between history, memory politics, critical theory, and archival practice together with the fields of the built environment, landscape, urban studies, architecture, and the arts. Unearthing traces catalyzes critical discussions that not only challenge the objectivity and dismantle the neutrality surrounding current archival practices and archival institutions, but also question what constitutes the archive itself. The book unearths potential histories and minor narratives buried by the imperial production of pasts and silences. The diverse range of contributions in the book offers original research, discussions, positions, and tools and provides a critical resource for scholars, architects, artists, activists, and archivists who want to engage with landscapes and built environments in a critical and postcolonial perspective in relation to archival materials and practices.

Titre:
Conscious community

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Résumé:
"Conscious community" focuses on three Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors’ architecture studios at Yale including that of Chirs Cornelius of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin in "De-Colonizing Indigenous Housing," New York-based architect Rodney Leon in "National Slavery Memorial" and Jordanian-Palestinian architect and designer Abeer Seikaly in "Conscious skins." The student projects exemplify a commitment to redefining the role of architecture in addressing societal and cultural complexities while redefining the architectural subject. These projects go beyond their proposed physical constructs; they are manifestations of a conversation about space, identity, and memory. This conversation challenges architectural norms, advocating for designs that view environmental, historical, and social aspects as interwoven elements of the architectural brief.

Titre:
Decolonising the built environment: Process, product, and pedagogy

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$81.50
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"Decolonising the built environment: process, product, and pedagogy" provides an important and much-needed comprehensive overview of how decolonisation is shaping the built environment in theory, in practice, and as a process/project today. The contributors provide an inclusive and trans-national conversation between a diverse set of academics, design practitioners and thinkers, and activists. This book is structured around three thematic and practical categories: Part 1 studies decolonisation conceptually; Part 2 studies decolonisation as a process; and Part 3 studies the products of decolonisation as materialised in the form of buildings, urban design, planning, policy, and social practices.

Titre:
Living Together: More-Than-Human Ecologies for Architectural Thinking

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$69.95
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Résumé:
What does it mean for architecture to be a truly collaborative venture where plants and other species also exercise their agency? This would mean to make architecture receptive—physically, premised on creating spaces for accommodating multispecies; and intellectually, premised on becoming aware of the needs of more-than-humans. Design-based approaches whether technocratic or demonstrating a theoretical standpoint are fragmented today and demand a holistic approach. ''Living Together'' positions itself in that fragmentation. The book is an inquiry into an architecture which allows multispecies alliances to take place. It brings materialist and ecological inquiries to architectural design, practice, and thinking; acknowledging a necessity to go beyond established architectural ideals of progress, monumentality, longevity, and permanence.

Titre:
Fragments of repair

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$44.00
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Résumé:
'Fragments of Repair' is the fourth publication in BAK’s publishing series BASICS which revisits fundamental questions and urgencies of our time—the “basics”—and seeks to develop afresh the building blocks of lexicons, tactics, scenarios, and relations that enable action in contemporary conditions. Today’s entwined crises reveal deep-seated wounds that issue from historical colonialisms and present-day authoritarianisms, economic disparity and growing racial violence, and the abuses inflicted on vulnerable populations and the planet. To address this disquieting chaos, this book, co-conceptualized by artist Kader Attia with curators Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas, offers a collection of long- and short-form essays, visual essays, and conversations on decolonial repair as both a tool and a tactic of engagement with the current state of the world.

Titre:
Thinking through soil: Wastewater agriculture in the Mezquital Valley

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$54.00
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To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague. In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future. Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, ''Thinking Through Soil'' imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet.

Titre:
Plant life: the entangled politics of afforestation

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$41.99
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Résumé:
In "Plant life", Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies-scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa's Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory-Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social.

Titre:
New tools, Vol. 1: Architectural discourses on the Anthropocene

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$42.00
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Résumé:
This first volume in a series examining intersections between architectural theory and practice addresses environmental crisis and spatial justice through four essays. Marc Angélil and Cary Siress trace the evolution from Technocene, Thermocene, Plantationocene, to Entropocene, Capitalocene, and Urbicene. Elke Krasny reflects on scales of care within social justice and decolonization. Contributors explore the "Curated Diner" as a planning intervention. Finally, Space Caviar advocates for a non-extractive approach to architecture as part of a broader economic transformation. These interdisciplinary contributions aim to reshape the discourse and discuss equitable, inclusive, and intergenerational practices.

Titre:
We the bacteria: Notes towards biotic architecture

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$36.00
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Résumé:
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.