Agency: Working With Uncertain Architectures

by Florian Kossak (Editor), Doina Petrescu (Editor), Tatjana Schneider (Editor), Renata Tyszczuk (Editor), Stephen Walker (Editor)

Overview

While the potential of agency is most frequently taken to be the power and freedom to act for oneself, for the architectural community this also involves the power and responsibility to act as intermediaries on behalf of others.

Presenting current thinking from practitioners and scholars from around the world, this book asks for a more active relationship between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. Considering issues of architectural research as an agency of transformation, this book explores how humanities research can better contribute towards understanding current architectural needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415566018
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/18/2009
Series:	Critiques
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk and Stephen Walker all teach and research at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. They are members of the Research Centre Agency, which conducts transformative research into architectural practice and education, suggesting research activity that both creates and responds to shifting conditions. Instead of remaining passively (and safely) within academic environments, Agency sees itself as a collective of agents acting both within and between the fields of research, practice, education, and civic life.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures Part 1: Intervene 1. Activism In Appalachia: Yale Architecture Students In Kentucky, 1966-1969 2. Environmental and Social Action in the Studio: Three Live Projects Along the Elizabeth River 3. Secondary Agency. Learning from Boris Groys 4. On Consensus, Equality, Experts and Good Design: Public Interview with Roberta Feldman and Henry Sanoff Part 2: Sustain 5. Acting Up: Architectural Practice as Ecological Performance 6. Ethics And Aesthetics: Deleuze, Diagrams and Sustainability 7. The Radical Potential of Architecture 8. Assemblage, Agency, and Ecologies of the Contemporary City Part 3: Mediate 9. Against Determination, Beyond Mediation 10. Agency and Automatism: Some Strategies of Irresponsibility in Architecture 11. Interior Exile and Paper Architecture: A Spectrum for Architectural Dissidence 12. Air Rights