There is almost nothing new left to say about the urgent need to reduce our devastating impact on the biosphere that supports us. In architectural terms, we have been told since the 1960s that mainstream architecture is not engaged enough with the environmental consequences of what it produces and how it produces it. The usual approach is to propose new ways of designing and building to persuade the reader of the centrality of environmental concerns. But too many readers have remained reso...

Those involved in the creation of public spaces think a great deal about the users of those spaces. Users think little, if at all, about those who create them. There are many: planners, developers, investors, contractors, special-interest groups, governments from local to national, and above all in this book, designers. The complex sets of relationships in which the designer is enmeshed remain largely unknown, as does the effect of those relationships on the public spaces they design....

Susannah Hagan boldly discusses the fraught relationship between key dominating areas of architectural discourse - digital design, environmental design, and avant-garde design.Digitalia firstly demonstrates that drawing such firm lines between architectural spheres is damaging and foolish, particularly as both environmental and avant-garde practices are experimenting with the digital, and secondly remonstrates with an avant-garde that has repudiated the social/ethical agen...

Ecological Urbanism: The Nature of the City asks the questions that are important inside and outside the built environment professions: what are climate change, urbanisation and ecology doing to the theory and practice of urban design? How does Ecological Urbanism figure in this change? What is Ecological Urbanism?In answer, this book is neither definitive – impossible when a subject is still in motion – nor encyclopaedic – equally impossible when so much has been written ...

Within the concept of the 'sustainable city' nothing is fixed, mapped or agreed upon. To some, the term encompasses innovation, change and commitment to the future and to others it means preservation, conservatism and a watchful eye on the future.City Fights follows on from the symposium 'Energy and Urban Strategies', which brought together contributors from a wide variety of disciplines, with the aim of developing sharp ideas about making better and more sustainable cities in envi...

In 1965, the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander published a landmark theoretical critique of modern urban design, and by extension, modern design in general. His critique was different from others of the day in that it was not based on a social or political argument, but on a structural analysis, rooted in then-emerging insights from the fields of mathematics and cognition. Here, published again on its fiftieth anniversary, is Alexander’s classic text, together with new in...

Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the...

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures.Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predic...

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past.Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key med...

Philosophy of Technology: An introduction for technology and business students is an accessible guide to technology’s changes , their ubiquitousness, and the many questions these raise. Designed for those with no philosophical background in mind, it is ideal for technology and engineering students or specialists who want to learn to think critically about how their work influences society and our daily lives.The technological, business environment and daily experiences are...

On rediscovering surroundings when information goes everywhere.The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath al...

This new selection of essays follows Chris Abel's previous best selling collection, Architecture and Identity. Drawing upon a wide range of knowledge and disciplines, the author argues that, underlying technological changes in the process of architectural production are fundamental changes in the way we think about machines and the world we live in. Key topics include: new patterns of urbanism in the fast growing cities of asia pacific; metaphorical extensions of mind and body in cyberspac...