Author: Ashley Bigham
Publisher: Applied Research & Design
ISBN: 9781951541644
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire--sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification--one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, "What does it mean to be fulfilled?" This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects--warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers--with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture's unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.
Fulfilled
Author: Ashley Bigham
Publisher: Applied Research & Design
ISBN: 9781951541644
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire--sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification--one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, "What does it mean to be fulfilled?" This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects--warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers--with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture's unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.
Publisher: Applied Research & Design
ISBN: 9781951541644
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Based on the eponymous symposium and exhibition, Fulfilled: Architecture, Excess, and Desire considers the role of architecture in a culture shaped by the excessive manufacturing and assuagement of desire. Until the term became synonymous with Amazon warehouses, the concept of fulfillment described the achievement of a desire--sometimes tangible, often psychological or spiritual. With the rapid growth of e-commerce, our understanding of fulfillment has evolved to reflect a seemingly endless cycle of desire and gratification--one whose continuity hinges on our willingness to overlook the cultural, economic, and environmental impacts of our ever-increasing expectation of quick and efficient fulfillment. A closer look at fulfillment reveals a social, typological, formal, aesthetic, and economic practice constructed collectively through both digital and physical interactions. It is a cultural practice which evolves like a language, both universally transferable and contextually specific. As a symposium, exhibition, and now publication, this project aims to draw out these new arrangements, sticky relationships, and material byproducts of cultural production and to ask again the age-old question, "What does it mean to be fulfilled?" This book examines the architecture of fulfillment through three lenses: logistical, material, and cultural fulfillment. Each reveals the new forms of architectural practice and research that are possible, typical, and even surreptitiously encouraged in the age of Amazon. Fulfillment networks are not invisible systems; they are tangible objects--warehouses, suburban houses, parking lots, cardboard boxes, shopping malls, mechanical systems, shipping containers--with which architects necessarily interact. From political mapping and questions of labor to digital and physical storage typologies, contemporary architects learn from and work critically within the architecture of fulfillment. Their interests and approaches include the material and environmental shortcomings of global logistics and the formal, representational, and cultural potentials of a culture of excess. This book highlights architecture's unique capacity to offer methodologies for confronting an increasingly ambiguous, alienating world and produce new knowledge and unexpected solutions that go beyond the dichotomies of rural and urban territories.
Terror and Wonder
Author: Blair Kamin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226423123
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226423123
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.
Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain
Author: Dr Paul Dobraszczyk
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472418980
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
In the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace (1851), some architects, engineers, manufacturers and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. This book studies the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation, and the contexts in which it flourished. As such, it offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture.
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472418980
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
In the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace (1851), some architects, engineers, manufacturers and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. This book studies the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation, and the contexts in which it flourished. As such, it offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture.
The Architecture of Luxury
Author: Annette Condello
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044762
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Over the past century, luxury has been increasingly celebrated in the sense that it is no longer a privilege (or attitude) of the European elite or America’s leisure class. It has become more ubiquitous and now, practically everyone can experience luxury, even luxury in architecture. Focusing on various contexts within Western Europe, Latin America and the United States, this book traces the myths and application of luxury within architecture, interiors and designed landscapes. Spanning from antiquity to the modern era, it sets out six historical categories of luxury - Sybaritic, Lucullan, architectural excess, rustic, neoEuropean and modern - and relates these to the built and unbuilt environment, taking different cultural contexts and historical periods into consideration. It studies some of the ethical questions raised by the nature of luxury in architecture and discusses whether architectural luxury is an unqualified benefit or something which should only be present within strict limits. The author argues how the ideas of permissible and impermissible luxury have informed architecture and how these notions of ethical approval have changed from one context to another. Providing voluptuous settings for the nobles and the leisure class, luxury took the form of not only grand palaces, but also follies, country and suburban houses, private or public entertainment venues and ornate skyscrapers with fast lifts. The Architecture of Luxury proposes that in Western societies the growth of the leisure classes and their desire for various settings for pleasure resulted in a constantly increasing level of ’luxury’ sought within everyday architecture.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044762
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 211
Book Description
Over the past century, luxury has been increasingly celebrated in the sense that it is no longer a privilege (or attitude) of the European elite or America’s leisure class. It has become more ubiquitous and now, practically everyone can experience luxury, even luxury in architecture. Focusing on various contexts within Western Europe, Latin America and the United States, this book traces the myths and application of luxury within architecture, interiors and designed landscapes. Spanning from antiquity to the modern era, it sets out six historical categories of luxury - Sybaritic, Lucullan, architectural excess, rustic, neoEuropean and modern - and relates these to the built and unbuilt environment, taking different cultural contexts and historical periods into consideration. It studies some of the ethical questions raised by the nature of luxury in architecture and discusses whether architectural luxury is an unqualified benefit or something which should only be present within strict limits. The author argues how the ideas of permissible and impermissible luxury have informed architecture and how these notions of ethical approval have changed from one context to another. Providing voluptuous settings for the nobles and the leisure class, luxury took the form of not only grand palaces, but also follies, country and suburban houses, private or public entertainment venues and ornate skyscrapers with fast lifts. The Architecture of Luxury proposes that in Western societies the growth of the leisure classes and their desire for various settings for pleasure resulted in a constantly increasing level of ’luxury’ sought within everyday architecture.
Architecture from the Outside
Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262265362
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262265362
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.
The New Carbon Architecture
Author: Bruce King
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550926616
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Book Description
Soak up carbon into beautiful, healthy buildings that heal the climate "Green buildings" that slash energy use and carbon emissions are all the rage, but they aren't enough. The hidden culprit is embodied carbon — the carbon emitted when materials are mined, manufactured, and transported — comprising some 10% of global emissions. With the built environment doubling by 2030, buildings are a carbon juggernaut threatening to overwhelm the climate. It doesn't have to be this way. Like never before in history, buildings can become part of the climate solution. With biomimicry and innovation, we can pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it up as walls, roofs, foundations, and insulation. We can literally make buildings out of the sky with a massive positive impact. The New Carbon Architecture is a paradigm-shifting tour of the innovations in architecture and construction that are making this happen. Office towers built from advanced wood products; affordable, low-carbon concrete alternatives; plastic cleaned from the oceans and turned into building blocks. We can even grow insulation from mycelium. A tour de force by the leaders in the field, The New Carbon Architecture will fire the imagination of architects, engineers, builders, policy makers, and everyone else captivated by the possibility of architecture to heal the climate and produce safer, healthier, and more beautiful buildings.
Publisher: New Society Publishers
ISBN: 1550926616
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 186
Book Description
Soak up carbon into beautiful, healthy buildings that heal the climate "Green buildings" that slash energy use and carbon emissions are all the rage, but they aren't enough. The hidden culprit is embodied carbon — the carbon emitted when materials are mined, manufactured, and transported — comprising some 10% of global emissions. With the built environment doubling by 2030, buildings are a carbon juggernaut threatening to overwhelm the climate. It doesn't have to be this way. Like never before in history, buildings can become part of the climate solution. With biomimicry and innovation, we can pull huge amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it up as walls, roofs, foundations, and insulation. We can literally make buildings out of the sky with a massive positive impact. The New Carbon Architecture is a paradigm-shifting tour of the innovations in architecture and construction that are making this happen. Office towers built from advanced wood products; affordable, low-carbon concrete alternatives; plastic cleaned from the oceans and turned into building blocks. We can even grow insulation from mycelium. A tour de force by the leaders in the field, The New Carbon Architecture will fire the imagination of architects, engineers, builders, policy makers, and everyone else captivated by the possibility of architecture to heal the climate and produce safer, healthier, and more beautiful buildings.
Writing Architecture
Author: Roger Connah
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262031646
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
In this tantalizing work, Roger Connah explores the peculiar odyssey of twentieth-century architecture through the buildings and writings of Finlands iconoclastic architect, Reima Pietila. Among architects, Pietila is a cult figure, a respected but often misunderstood outsider and "arctic shaman," only recently granted the international acclaim and appreciation that are his due. Pietila's complex, geomorphic structures have been compared to the work of Gaudi and Bruce Goff and variously labeled surrealistic, romantic, or expressionistic. Writing Architecture positions Pietila at the heart of contemporary architectural debates - the carnival of conflicting isms, modern post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive. From his relative isolation in Helsinki, he is thrust into the community of this century's most revolutionary artists and thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Einstein, Beckett, Borges, Magritte, and McLuhan. Through Pietila Connah reflects on architecture's progress and excess in this century, tracing a path through multiple meanings and intellectual adventures. More metaphysical inquiry than conventional monograph, this extraordinary study draws from various sources to "read" architecture as Pietila does, as a form of cultural composition in which all theory, literature, music, art, or natural phenomena are potential sources for architectural meaning. Like the existential detective in the pulp crime novels on Fantomas, the elegant French philosopher-thief, Connah offers fragmentary clues, contradictory solutions, and digressive speculations on the particular mystery, misery, and miracle that is modern architecture, but wisely leaves the final verdict up to his discerning readers. Roger Connah's extensive collaboration with Reima Pietila has provided him with a unique opportunity to trace the architect's inimitable approach to architecture and culture. Since 1986 the author has been living in India working as a freelance writer; he is visiting Professor at The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and The Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262031646
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
In this tantalizing work, Roger Connah explores the peculiar odyssey of twentieth-century architecture through the buildings and writings of Finlands iconoclastic architect, Reima Pietila. Among architects, Pietila is a cult figure, a respected but often misunderstood outsider and "arctic shaman," only recently granted the international acclaim and appreciation that are his due. Pietila's complex, geomorphic structures have been compared to the work of Gaudi and Bruce Goff and variously labeled surrealistic, romantic, or expressionistic. Writing Architecture positions Pietila at the heart of contemporary architectural debates - the carnival of conflicting isms, modern post-modern, post-structuralist, deconstructive. From his relative isolation in Helsinki, he is thrust into the community of this century's most revolutionary artists and thinkers, including Wittgenstein, Einstein, Beckett, Borges, Magritte, and McLuhan. Through Pietila Connah reflects on architecture's progress and excess in this century, tracing a path through multiple meanings and intellectual adventures. More metaphysical inquiry than conventional monograph, this extraordinary study draws from various sources to "read" architecture as Pietila does, as a form of cultural composition in which all theory, literature, music, art, or natural phenomena are potential sources for architectural meaning. Like the existential detective in the pulp crime novels on Fantomas, the elegant French philosopher-thief, Connah offers fragmentary clues, contradictory solutions, and digressive speculations on the particular mystery, misery, and miracle that is modern architecture, but wisely leaves the final verdict up to his discerning readers. Roger Connah's extensive collaboration with Reima Pietila has provided him with a unique opportunity to trace the architect's inimitable approach to architecture and culture. Since 1986 the author has been living in India working as a freelance writer; he is visiting Professor at The National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and The Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi.
Crisis of the Object
Author: Gevork Hartoonian
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134172095
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Looking back over the twentieth century, Hartoonian discusses the work of three major architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, in reference to their theoretical positions and historicizes present architecture in the context of the ongoing secularization of the myths surrounding the traditions of nineteenth century architecture in general, and, in particular, Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic. Providing a valuable contribution to the current debates surrounding architectural history and theory, this passionately written book makes valuable reading for any architect.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134172095
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 342
Book Description
Looking back over the twentieth century, Hartoonian discusses the work of three major architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, in reference to their theoretical positions and historicizes present architecture in the context of the ongoing secularization of the myths surrounding the traditions of nineteenth century architecture in general, and, in particular, Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic. Providing a valuable contribution to the current debates surrounding architectural history and theory, this passionately written book makes valuable reading for any architect.
Early Postmodernism
Author: Paul A. Bové
Publisher: Boundary 2 Book
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In the decade that followed 1972, the journal boundary 2 consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of boundary 2, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové's contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. Early Postmodernism demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. Contributors. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West
Publisher: Boundary 2 Book
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
Book Description
In the decade that followed 1972, the journal boundary 2 consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of boundary 2, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové's contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. Early Postmodernism demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. Contributors. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West
Toward A Minor Architecture
Author: Jill Stoner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300281
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being—western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book. Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete. Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300281
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being—western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book. Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete. Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.