Mapping Controversies in Architecture - Book Launch
Friday 18 May 2012, 5.30pm
RIBA Hub, CUBE, 113 - 115, Portland Street, Manchester, M1 6DW
methods@manchester and the Manchester Architecture Research Center (MARC) are pleased to host this book launch by Albena Yaneva, University of Manchester. The launch will include a slide show of Mapping Controversies projects by MSA students, followed by a drinks reception. Please register for this event by sending an email to Susan Stubbs: S.Stubbs@manchester.ac.uk |
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This book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture?
It places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to
be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.
Reviews
'By crossing the tools of science studies with the digital techniques of mapping controversies, this book renews the critique of architecture. It offers a new way to place architecture and design as one of the most exciting ways to explore the common world because it takes controversies as the normal state of affair. With many lively examples it is a masterpiece of theory made empirical.’
– Bruno Latour, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, France
’Yaneva brilliantly proposes a new and robust ethnographic approach to built form: mapping the controversies in which they emerge and seeing them as “connectors” with unique properties – neither just reflections of society or constructors of it, nor as cold materials – but as dynamically tying together different media, materials, peoples and things in a distinctly architectural way. This represents a profound shift in the way we can think anthropologically about the analysis of buildings and what buildings “do” and how they emerge socially and materially in the widest possible sense.’
– Victor Buchli, University College London, UK
’Mapping Controversies in Architecture is a fresh and highly productive challenge to the tendency of architectural theory to represent architecture as a static object. In Yaneva’s richly documented analysis, buildings become animated ecosystems, “in the making” long after the completion of their final design. Yaneva’s innovative methodology, hybridizing parametric animation and ‘post-parametric’ computation, unfolds buildings as multi-dimensional controversies. Political tides, technological shifts, financial crises and aesthetic experimentation are but a few of the actors Yaneva follows in demonstrating architecture’s fundamentally connective role. In doing so, she extends a powerful platform for discourse well beyond the architectural community.’
– Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale School of Architecture, USA
Contents: Prologue; Introduction; Part I Rethinking Bifurcations: The impasse of representation; On the boundary between architecture/ society; Architecture/society reshuffled. Part II Mapping Processes: Controversies in architecture; Visualizing controversies, mapping networks; Mapping controversies; Conclusion: the architectural as a type of connector; References; Index.
Sample pages for published titles are available to view online. To order, please visit the Ashgate website.
All online orders receive a discount of 50 % with promotion code S12GJC50.
Alternatively, contact the distributor: Bookpoint Ltd, Ashgate Publishing Direct Sales, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4SB, UK Tel: +44 (0)1235 827730, Email: ashgate@bookpoint.co.uk