Staff Picks

My Home As I Remember describes literary and artistic achievements of First Nations, Inuit and Metis women across Canada and the United States, including contributions from New Zealand and Mexico. Their voices and creative expression of identity and place are richly varied, reflecting the depth of the culturally diverse energy found on these continents.

The alleged failings of low-income neighborhoods attracts a great deal of academic and political scrutiny and research. However, the realities of localized spaces-such as family home front doors, bedrooms, street corners, and local schools-have not received nearly as much attention. With In Their Place, Stephen Crossley highlights how these spaces are represented from afar by politicians who exaggerate stories for political gain and how these fabrications actively manipulate media coverage of these British individuals and communities. A devastating critique of the Conservative government's approach to tackling inequality, In Their Place will reorient those interested in human geography away from the large scale transnational policies back to the physical spaces that show the realities of life for Britain's low-income neighborhoods.

This innovative book names the unnamable urban zones that usually remain invisible. As the landscape architect James Corner has pointed out, a void cannot be labeled because "to name it is to claim it in some way."
By compiling and enumerating existing terms, A Glossary of Urban Voids is a fascinating and compelling attempt to name the unnamable, to define that which should have no precise definition. It records terms, names and labels used to designate leftover spaces resulting from processes of urban abandonment that originate from some kind of obsolescence or loss.
These processes of abandonment open up the space, liberating it from existing ideological frameworks (financial, capital, cultural), allowing for divergent spatialities to emerge and ultimately offering opportunities to imagine alternative types of public space.

Housing is a basic need that, for many all over the world, remains unmet or inadequate. In order to ensure the availability of quality living space for everyone, architecture and urban development can contribute significantly to finding new solutions. The challenge of affordable housing lies in achieving an optimum relationship between costs and the 'home quality' value, which is dependent on many local parameters and cultural preferences. In light of this and based on examples of exceptional residential buildings, this book presents not only theoretical approaches but also strategies for creating affordable living spaces. These strategies can be compared by analysing projects in their economic, social, and urban development contexts. The central question is: how can different approaches for creating affordable residential space be applied and translated to other contexts?

"This publication is a cultural report produced as an outcome of research project CSO-2011-23079: The Squatters' movement in Spain and Europe: contexts, cycles, identities and institutionalisation (PI: Miguel A. Martinez), which has been funded by the Spanish Plan of Research and Development, between 2012 and 2014." -- from page 355.

Ricardo Tranjan places tenants and landlords on either side of the class divide that splits North American society. What if there is no housing crisis, but instead a housing market working exactly as intended? What if rent hikes and eviction notices aren't the work of the invisible hand of the market, but of a parasitic elite systematically funneling wealth away from working-class families? He breaks down pervasive myths about renters, mom-and-pop landlords, and housing affordability. In a society where home ownership is seen as the most important hallmark of a successful life, Tranjan refuses to absolve the landlords and governments that reap massive profits from the status quo. The tenant class must face powerful systems of disinformation and exploitation to secure decent homes and fair rent. Tranjan argues that organized tenants have the power to fight back.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today’s soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions. In the creative city, the neutralization or incorporation of subcultural movements, the organic translation of the gritty into the quaint, and the professionalization of the artist combine with armies of eager freelancers and interns to constitute the friendly user interface of a new social sphere in which, for those who have been granted a place within it, an elaborate retooling of traditional markers of difference has allowed class distinctions to be either utterly dissolved or willfully suppressed. The result is a handful of cities selected for revitalization rather than desertion, where artists in search of cheap rent become the avant-garde pioneers of gentrification, and one no longer asks where all of this came from and how. And it may be for this reason that, for Rosler, it becomes all the more necessary to locate the functioning of power within this new urban paradigm, to find a position from which to make it accountable to something other than its own logic.--publisher's description

"To provide for ever-growing populations, cities build new neighbourhoods, transform old industrial areas, and renew the existing urban fabric. The focus now is on energy-neutral neighbourhoods, but in order for these to work, residents must be engaged and the tactics embedded within a broader social policy. This book revisits the neighbourhood as the appropriate scale to build our urban futures: it is small enough to be tangible, large enough to make a difference. Introducing the concepts of neighbourhood arrangements and ecologies, it provides a new perspective on the relation between participants, resources, and rules to spark change and realise future sustainable living"--Publisher info.

Place and Placelessness has taken its place as a classic of the phenomenological approach to the study of place and has influenced a generation of scholars.
Shows how the concepts of place have been modified and yet continue to be of vital importance in interpreting a world which travel and commerce have made very different from that of 1976. In his words: “sense of place has the potential to serve as a pragmatic foundation for addressing the profound local and global challenges, such as climate change and economic disparity, that are emerging in the present century.”

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday' is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists, who, in the face of exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, explore commoning as the subject as well as the means of their collective study. The power of the commons, this book suggests, does not reside in the promise of a coming together free of friction. As different dimensions of power organize the terrain of the social, social movements are often caught between competing agendas, and in the gap between aims and everyday life. It is precisely the sites of these struggles that the book calls "spaces of commoning". As such, this study is part of a much wider recognition of the necessity to rethink and undo the methodological premises of Western sciences, arts, and architecture, and to raise unsettling questions on research ethos, accountability, and the entanglement of power and knowledge.

The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion includes minor, seemingly benign weapons like "no loitering" signs and bouncers, but also big, headline-grabbing things like eminent domain and city-county consolidation. It includes policies like expulsive zoning and annexation, but also practices like blockbusting, institutions like neighborhood associations, and physical things like bombs and those armrests that park designers put on benches to make sure homeless people don't get too comfortable. It includes historical things that aren't talked about too much any more (e.g., ugly laws), things that seem historical but aren't (e.g., racial steering), and things that are brand new (e.g., aging improvement district).--from publisher's description

The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. Peter Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing. A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back.

In 1903 Charles Woodward expanded his mail order catalog service into a department store called Woodward's. By the mid 1950's, Woodward's had defined one-stop shopping in Vancouver. The Woodward's 1993 closure intensified the sense of dispossession in the Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood long-affected by poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction. Currently in the last months of construction, the redevelopment of Woodward's is designed by Henriquez Partners as a complex of multi-use buildings, offering significant urban spaces, integrating market and social housing, and making an optimistic claim for inclusion -- one that may be seen as a model in its quest to become home for a heterogeneous array of culture. "Body Heat" tells the story of this redevelopment. The book features 20 interviews of key participants in this project. It also includes a myriad of images, historical photographs and memorabilia, amazing construction photographs, contextual documentary photography, and architectural drawings.

"This book was published in conjunction with the exhibition "Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow," created in collaboration with the IKEA Museum, held at the Design Museum, London from 7 November 2018 to 24 March 2019."--Page 298.

The book is an extended essay on the evolution of domestic living and culture; Rybczynski recounts the history of the material and cultural influences (such as intimacy and privacy, domesticity, ease) as well as ideas about light, air, and efficiency, all of which he claims to have helped shape the idea of comfort.

"This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition In the temple of the self : the artist's residence as a total work of art, Europe and America 1800-1948"--Colophon.

In Domesticity at War, Beatriz Colomina shows how postwar American architecture adapted the techniques and materials that were developed for military applications to domestic use. Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller's words, turning "weaponry into livingry."This new form of domesticity itself turned out to be a powerful weapon. Images of American domestic bliss—suburban homes, manicured lawns, kitchen accessories—went around the world as an effective propaganda campaign. Cold War anxieties were masked by endlessly repeated images of a picture-perfect domestic environment. Even the popular conception of the architect became domesticated, changing from that of an austere modernist to a plaid-shirt wearing homebody.

What began as an academic initiative to improve the quality of life of the poor strata of the population has now become a professional “do tank” offering services that cover the entire spectrum of urban development. The celebrated Chilean architect, winner of the 2016 Pritzker Prize and Director of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, Alejandro Aravena (born 1967) founded Elemental in 2001 in his hometown with the goal of alleviating social deprivation directly instead of hoping for a balance of income relations. Besides building public facilities and public housing, Elemental also develops new approaches for the reorganization of resources and the potential of cities by means of projects devoted to infrastructure and transportation. This volume, first published in 2013 and now back in print, documents the social activity and history of the international architectural team and sheds light on its financing strategies, for example through participatory building.

This manual sheds light on every aspect of designing housing. The organization of the living space and the residential building is dealt with systematically, from the breadth, depth, stacking, access to dwellings and the urban ensemble. This revised edition has been expanded with 20 new exemplary projects, boasts an improved structure and has been enriched with a new chapter about the process of design. Housing Design is primarily focused on residential construction in larger entities, such as stacked developments. Because of its wide-ranging approach to the theme, this manual is also useful when designing in low densities and even for the design of an individual house or villa. It provides the tools necessary to analyse the context of residential construction, ranging from large-scale tabula rasa plans to the infill of a gap in an urban elevation. With regard to the tectonics of residential construction, the supporting structure, the envelope, the scenography and the service elements are dealt with in turn, in each case considering the consequences of the choice of material and form for the space and the living experience. The manual pays considerable attention to the relationship between the domestic floor plan, space and how it is experienced.--Cover.

Published in conjunction with Cabin Fever, an exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery, curated by Jennifer M. Volland, Bruce Grenville and Stephanie Rebick, and presented from June 9 to September 30, 2018.

"Space is both a product and a prerequisite of social relations, it has the potential to block and encourage certain forms of encounter. In Common Space, activist and architect Stavros Stavrides calls for us to conceive of space-as-commons -- first, to think beyond the notions of public and private space, and then to understand common space not only as space that is governed by all and remains open to all, but that explicitly expresses, encourages and exemplifies new forms of social relations and of life in common. Through a fascinating, global examination of social housing, self-built urban settlements, street trade and art, occupied space, liberated space and graffiti, Stavrides carefully shows how spaces for commoning are created. Moreover, he explores the connections between processes of spatial transformation and the formation of politicised subjects to reveal the hidden emancipatory potential of contemporary, metropolitan life."--Publisher's website.

In 1993 Rachel Whiteread created a work of art which was hailed as one of the greatest public sculptures made by an English artist in the twentieth century. Whiteread's concrete and plaster cast of an entire house in the East End of London attracted equal measures of praise, wonder and controversy. Her monumental sculpture, on view when she won the Turner Prize, attracted some 3,000 visitors a day before it was demolished in January 1994. This book is made in collaboration with the Artangel Trust and provides a unique document of this remarkable work.Photographs and working drawings chart House's progress from construction to demolition. Six distinguished authors contribute their responses and the book also surveys the whole spectrum of critical reaction to the work.