ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture convenes a wide array of critical voices from architecture, art history, urbanism, geography, anthropology, media and performance studies, computer science, bio-engineering, environmental studies, and sociology that help us understand the meaning and significance of global architecture of the twenty-first century. New chapters by 36 contributors illustrated with over 140 black-and-white images are assembled in six parts concerning both real and virtual spaces: design, materiality, alterity, technologies, cityscapes, and practice.

chapter 1|8 pages

Introduction

Contemporary Architecture, Crisis, and Critique

part I|2 pages

Design

chapter 3|11 pages

Designs on Disaster

Humanitarianism and Contemporary Architecture

chapter 4|10 pages

Architectures of Risk and Resiliency

“Embedded Security” in the Redesign of Sandy Hook Elementary School

chapter 5|11 pages

When the Megaproject Meets the Village

Formal and Informal Urbanization in Southern China

chapter 6|12 pages

After the Counter-monument

Commemoration in the Expanded Field

part II|2 pages

Materiality

chapter 8|11 pages

Life and Death in the Anthropocene

chapter 9|11 pages

The Space of Relation

Body, Emotion, and Empathy in Architectural Experience

chapter 10|15 pages

Edges

Body, Space, and Design

chapter 11|21 pages

Habit’s Remainder

chapter 12|23 pages

Ephemeral Architecture

Toward Radical Contingency

part III|2 pages

Alterity

chapter 13|12 pages

Inhabiting Ruins

The Ministry of Defense and the Limits of Occupation in Monrovia, Liberia

chapter 14|12 pages

Border Architecture

Territories, Commons, and Breathing-Spaces

chapter 15|13 pages

Camps

Contemporary Environments of Autonomy, Necessity, and Control

chapter 17|14 pages

Recasting the Ethnic Retail Street

Analyzing Contemporary Immigrant Architecture in the United States

part IV|2 pages

Technologies

chapter 18|13 pages

Obsolescence and Its Futures

chapter 20|14 pages

Future Architecture

Biohybrid Structures and Intelligent Materials

chapter 21|17 pages

Networked Urbanism

Definition, Scholarship, Directions

chapter 22|14 pages

The Architecture of Water

part V|2 pages

Cityscapes

chapter 23|8 pages

What Might Be

Re-describing Urbanscapes of the Global South

chapter 24|12 pages

Watching the City

A Genealogy of Media Urbanism

chapter 25|14 pages

The Singapore Flyer

View, Movement, Time, and Contemporaneity

chapter 26|14 pages

Bi-Space

The Original Social Networking Site

chapter 27|12 pages

Urchins in the Infrastructure

Building with Hedgehogs in the Multispecies City

chapter 28|10 pages

Unsettling Formal Power Systems

part VI|2 pages

Practice

chapter 29|12 pages

Is It Really that Bad?

The Status of Women in Architecture and the Gender Equity Movement

chapter 30|6 pages

Where is the Social Project? 1

chapter 31|12 pages

Collaboration

Unresolved Forms of Working Together in Contemporary Architectural Practice

chapter 32|19 pages

Starchitecture

Starchitect

chapter 33|15 pages

A Eulogy for the Present

The Death of Architecture, c.2000 Exhibition

chapter 34|15 pages

Architects “Getting Real”

On Present-Day Professional Fictions