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Title:
Architectures of spatial justice

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Establishing an ethics of spatial justice to lead architecture forward, Dana Cuff shows why the discipline requires critical examination—in relation to not only buildings and the capital required to realize them but privilege, power, aesthetics, and sociality. The book draws on studies of architectural projects from around the world, with instructive case studies from Chile, Mexico, Japan, and the United States that focus in particular on urban centers, where architecture is most directly engaged with social justice issues. Emerging from more than two decades of the author's own project-based research, the volume examines ethically driven practices that break with professional conventions to correct long-standing inequities in the built environment, uncovering architecture's limits—and its potential.

Title:
(How) do we (want to) work (together) (as (socially engaged) designers (students and neighbours)) (in neoliberal times)?

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Since 2011, the Studio Experimentelles Design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg has experimented with local design support as a contemporary practice. The student-led program advocates a community-based, cooperative approach to design. In the summer of 2020, the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin Design Lab #6 hosted Studio Experimentelles Design's eponymous online research festival.” Divided into two parts, this compendium chronicles the studio’s politically and socially committed approach through lectures, research, conversations, and project documentation from the online festival and five years of studio work. Both the festival's debate about working conditions and the studio's practice critically examine the imperative of committed designers today to radically reorient their approach, the content of their work, and their relationship with the actors for whom they design.

Title:
The power of pro bono

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The Power of Pro Bono presents 40 pro bono design projects across the country. The clients include grassroots community organizations like the Homeless Prenatal Program of San Francisco, as well as national and international nonprofits, among them Goodwill, Habitat for Humanity, KIPP Schools and Planned Parenthood. These public-interest projects were designed by a range of award-winning practices, from SHoP Architects in New York and Studio Gang in Chicago, to young studios including Stephen Dalton Architects in Southern California and Hathorne Architects in Detroit, to some of the largest firms in the country, such as Gensler, HOK and Perkins + Will. This book is inspired and informed by the advocacy and design work of Public Architecture, a national nonprofit founded in 2002 by San Francisco-based architect John Peterson.

Title:
Local architecture: building place, craft, and community

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$63.00
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In architecture, as in food, local is an idea whose time has come. Of course, the idea of an architecture that responds to site; draws on local building traditions, materials, and crafts; and strives to create a sense of community is not new. Yet, the way it has evolved in the past few years is indeed defining a new movement. From the rammed-earth houses of Rick Joy and Pacific Northwest timber houses of Tom Kundig, to the community-built structures of Rural Studio and Francis Kere, designers everywhere are championing an architecture that exists from, in, and for a specific place.

Title:
Socializing architecture: Top-down/bottom-up

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$71.95
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Situated at the intersection of architecture, art, public culture, and political theory, ''Socializing architecture'' urges architects and urbanists to intervene in the contested space between public and private interests, to design political and civic processes that mediate top-down and bottom-up urban resources, and to mobilize a new public imagination toward a more just and equitable urbanization. Drawn from decades of lived experience, Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman engage the San Diego–Tijuana border region as a global laboratory to address the central challenges of urbanization today: deepening social and economic inequality, dramatic migratory shifts, explosive urban informality, climate disruption, the thickening of border walls, and the decline of public thinking. ''Socializing architecture'' follows ''Spatializing justice'' (Cruz and Forman, 2022). It is organized into two main sections—essays and projects—and continues to build a compelling case for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Through analysis and diverse case studies, the authors show architects and urbanists how to alter the exclusionary policies that produce public crisis and instead realize new political and economic strategies that advance a more equitable and convivial architecture.

Title:
Remote places, public spaces: The story of creative works with ten small communities

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The SMOTIES network is a partnership of ten design universities, research centres, creative agencies, and national associations. Each partner selected a small and remote place in their country to benefit from the design of cultural and creative regenerations within public spaces and in collaboration with local stakeholders. The project is part of the Human Cities network, a platform for interdisciplinary exchange, examining and acting to improve the livability of indoor and outdoor public spaces to incubate innovative processes for social cohesion through participatory design.

Title:
Design for good: a new era of architecture for everyone

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“That’s what we do really: we do miracles,” said Anne-Marie Nyiranshimiyimana, who learned masonry in helping to build the Butaro Hospital, a project designed for and with the people of Rwanda using local materials. This, and other projects designed with dignity, show the power of good design. Almost nothing influences the quality of our lives more than the design of our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our public spaces. Yet, design is often taken for granted and people don’t realize that they deserve better, or that better is even possible. In Design for Good, John Cary offers character-driven, real-world stories about projects around the globe that offer more—buildings that are designed and created with and for the people who will use them. The book reveals a new understanding of the ways that design shapes our lives and gives professionals and interested citizens the tools to seek out and demand designs that dignify.

Title:
Participation in art and architecture: Spaces of interaction and occupation

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$55.95
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If participation has been an ideal in politics since ancient democracy, in art it became central only with the avant-gardes emerging from WWI and the Russian Revolution. Politics and aesthetics are still catching up with each other. In the 21st century, since the revolutionary unrest of the 1960s, participation in art and architecture has lost its utopian glow and become the focus of a fierce debate: does 'participatory' art and architecture shape social reality, or is it shaped by it? Contemporary critics see in participation only technocratic control, while others embrace it as a viable politics in an era of global capitalism. This innovative book breaks the impasse by looking at how participants themselves exert power, rather than being victimized or liberated from it. From artists hijacking Google Earth to protesters setting up a museum of the revolution in Cairo, art, architecture and daily life are explored in their participatory dimension.

Title:
Things we do together: The post-reader

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Things We Do Together. The Post-Reader is a collection of essays and honest conversations with practitioners. It is based on experiences and observations of long-term processes taking place at the intersection of art, education, and activism. Collaboration is more than simply a mechanism for the collective management of resources. It can be a way of disrupting existing systems both in the art world and in everyday life, where capitalism and extreme individualism lead to the collapse of communities and the deepening of social inequalities. The publication’s starting point was the exhibition-meeting "Gotong Royong Things We Do Together" at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, at the end of 2017.

Title:
What makes an assembly: stories, experiments and inquiries

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$48.00
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Bringing together accounts written by those who practice assemblies, and contributions from artists, activists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists, as well as three architectural experiments that attempt to imagine models for a future assembly, the book proposes a critical inquiry into the potential of assemblies to shape political subjects. What Makes An Assembly? examines the tensions that exist in all assemblies between the need for form and the danger of formalization; between the scripts, rituals, and architectural settings from which they derive, and their capacity to erupt and emerge anew.