Best Practices: A companion to architecture and its messy relationship with building materials, signage systems, communication equipment, plant life, and people

by Erin Besler, Ian Besler, Sylvia Lavin (Contribution by), Jonathan Jae-an Crisman (Contribution by), Fiona Connor (Contribution by)

Overview

A thought-provoking guide to the endearing and enigmatic ways in which the built environment takes shape, Best Practices proposes a new way of thinking about neighborhoods, housing developments, streetscapes, and storefronts, not so much as places defined by building codes, dimensions, or geographic features, but as assemblages of ad hoc interventions and incidental ephemera. Best Practices is an invitation to thoroughly reconsider issues of expertise, professionalism, power, ubiquity, defaults, communication environments, construction practices, and how these things confront architecture. The book proposes a broader and more all-encompassing set of interests and references for contemporary architecture and design discourse. Pairing photographic documentation with extensive captions and citations, Best Practices defines a territory within the margins between the sanctioned and unsanctioned, the regulated and unregulated, the tasteful and tacky, the novel and the nonsense. While not necessarily in opposition of those mechanisms, Best Practices asserts that interest, knowledge, and meaning are more often generated on the lines that divide such categories. The book advocates for a more thorough consideration of the unauthorized remodels, slap-dash handiwork, haphazard paint jobs, half-hearted do-it-yourself projects, cracked facades, contradictions, compromises, and coincidences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951541118
Publisher:	ORO Editions
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.75(h) x (d)

About the Author

Erin Besler is a designer whose work focuses on construction technologies and building practices that are less about mastery and exclusivity, and more about ubiquity and access. Erin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Princeton Universityand co-founder of Besler & Sons, a design studio located in central New Jersey.

Ian Besler is a designer whose work is situated at the edges between interfaces, software, and cities. Ian's work is especially interested in the defaults, incidentals, and workarounds of visual communication and digital interactions. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and a co-founder of Besler & Sons.

Sylvia Lavin is a critic, curator and historian whose work explores the limits of architecture across a wide spectrum of historical periods.  Her books include Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture; Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles and Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects.  She is Professor of Architecture at Princeton Universityand is currently working on a book about trees.

Jonathan Jae-an Crisman is an artist and urban scholar whose work focuses on the intersections between culture, place, and politics. He is currently an assistant professor of public & applied humanities at the University of Arizona.

Fiona Connor (born in New Zealand) is an artist based in Los Angeles. She has made solo exhibitions at Secession, Vienna; SculptureCenter, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth; Monash UniversityMuseum of Art, Melbourne; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles among others. Connor received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.

Wendy Gilmartin is a licensed architect and writer based in Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. She holds a Master of Architecture from Rice Universityand is an educator at California Polytechnic State University, Pomona. Prior to becoming an architect, Wendy was a music critic at LAWeekly for ten years.

Courtney Coffman, editor, is manager of lectures and publications at Princeton University's School of Architecture. She has served as a content and copy editor for various architectural publications and monographs. Her own writings explore the visual culture of contemporary architecture and design.

Christina Moushoul, associate editor, obtained her undergraduate degree from UCLA and is currently a Master of Architecture candidate at the Princeton UniversitySchool of Architecture, where she is an editor of the journal Pidgin.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Looking Around Sylvia Lavin 7

Introduction: See and Say 17

§1 Austerities 23

§2 Coincidences 49

§3 Compromises 75

§4 Conflicts 97

§5 Coverings 115

§6 Edges 139

§7 Edits 157

§8 Fittings 181

§9 Ostentations 193

Comments Section

The Edgy Bit Jonathan Jae-an Crisman 206

Builder Conversations Fiona Connor 210

Trace Contaminants Wendy Gilmartin 216

Acknowledgments 222