Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place

Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place
Author: Gregory Caicco
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2007
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781584656531

Architecture and environmental design are among the last professional fields to develop a sustained and nuanced discussion concerning ethics. Hemmed in by politics and powerful clients on one side and the often unscrupulous practices of the construction industry on the other, environmental designers have been traditionally reluctant to address ethical issues head on. And yet the rapid urbanization of the world's population continues to swell into new megacities, each less healthy, welcoming, secure, or environmentally sustainable than the next. Green, carbon-reduced, and sustainable building practices are important ways architects have recently responded to the symptoms of the crisis, but are these efforts really addressing the core issues? Taking the Dine (Navajo) "Hogan Song"--a song used to protect and nourish the personhood of newly constructed dwellings--as their inspiration, the architects, philosophers, poets, and other contemporary scholars contributing to this volume demonstrate that a deeper, more radical change in our relationship to the built world needs to occur. While offering a careful critique of modernist, corporate, or techno-enthralled design practices, these essays investigate an alternative "relational ecology" whose wisdom draws from ancient and often-marginalized voices, if not the whisperings of the earth itself. Contributors include: Richard Kearney, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karsten Harries, Edward Casey, Susan Stewart, David Abram, Stacy Alaimo, Jace and Laura Weaver, Philip Sheldrake, and Sebnem Yucel Young.

Intersections of Space and Ethos

Intersections of Space and Ethos
Author: Kyriaki Tsoukala
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2014-12-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 131766745X

The pressing economic, environmental and social crises emanate the need for a redefinition of the dominant views, perspectives and values in the field of architecture. The intellectual production of the last two decades has witnessed an impressive number of new design techniques and conceptual displacements reflecting the dynamic and fluid relation between man and his dwelling space. However, the contemporary market forces are favouring the growth of a star-system in architectural production based on technological innovation, spectacular imagery and formal acrobatics, and are neglecting the social, environmental and moral implications of spatial design. Perhaps the time has come to think anew the possible critical intersections between space and ethos, not only as an answer to the negative consequences of Modernity, but also as a remedy to the negative aspects of globalisation. The aim of the present collective volume is to enliven the ethical dimensions and dilemmas of architecture as they are shaped within the complexity of our times on two levels: the level of critical and reflective discourse and the level of social and cultural reality occasioned by post-industrial modes of production and new technologies. Thirteen distinguished academics and researchers investigate the complex relations between architecture, space and ethics from divergent and inter-disciplinary perspectives: philosophy, sociology, the humanities, the arts, landscape design, environmental design, urban design and architectural history and theory.

Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality

Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality
Author: Thomas Barrie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317179013

Architecture has long been understood as a cultural discipline able to articulate the human condition and lift the human spirit, yet the spirituality of architecture is rarely directly addressed in academic scholarship. The seventeen chapters provide a diverse range of perspectives, grouped according to topical themes: Being in the World; Sacred, Secular, and the Contemporary Condition; Symbolic Engagements; Sacred Landscapes; and Spirituality and the Designed Environment. Even though the authors’ approach the subject from a range of disciplines and theoretical positions, all share interests in the need to rediscover, redefine, or reclaim the sacred in everyday experience, scholarly analysis, and design.

Transcending Architecture

Transcending Architecture
Author: Julio Bermudez
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2015
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0813226791

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Design Ethics beyond Duty and Virtue

Design Ethics beyond Duty and Virtue
Author: Philippe d'Anjou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2017-06-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1443896144

Freedom is compelling in design; it has to be acknowledged, accepted, and comprehended in all its existential complexity to better understand and engage the intricate ethical domain of design practice. The book addresses that issue by thoroughly examining design ethics, and design in general, within an existentialist philosophical framework. Its inquiry reveals a puzzling and unsettling reality of design ethics, and hence what constitutes an ethical design practice where there is no exit for designers but complete acceptance of their freedom and responsibility. This book makes a unique, original, and invaluable contribution to the design literature and design ethics scholarship. Scholars, professors, students, and professionals in all design disciplines, as well as any person involved in arts, humanities, philosophy, social sciences, and engineering, will find philosophical insights that will challenge design thinking and inspire them to rethink design ethics as an agency of human existence making instead of code compliance. Making a case for existentialist design ethics, this book lays the ground for a radical transformation of how we conceive design, ethics in design practice, and the role of designers in the world.

The Caring City

The Caring City
Author: Davis, Juliet
Publisher: Policy Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1529201225

In this important contribution to urban studies, Juliet Davis makes the case for a more ethical and humane approach to city development and management. With a range of illustrative case studies, the book challenges the conventional and neoliberal thinking of urban planners and academics, and explores new ways to correct problems of inequality and exclusion. It shows how a philosophy of caring can improve both city environments and communities. This is an original and powerful theory of urban care that can promote the wellbeing of our cities’ many inhabitants.

Building the Architect's Character

Building the Architect's Character
Author: Kendra Schank Smith
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2017-12-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317199170

An understanding of architects’ character traits can offer important insights into how they design buildings. These traits include leadership skills necessary to coordinate a team, honest and ethical behavior, being well educated and possessing a life-long love of learning, flexibility, resourcefulness, and visionary and strategic thinking. Characteristics such as these describe a successful person. Architects also possess these traits, but they have additional skills specifically valuable for the profession. These will include the ability to question the use of digital media, new materials, processes, and methods to convey meaning in architectural form. Although not exhaustive, a discussion of such subjects as defining, imaging, persuading, and fabricating will reveal representational meaning useful for the development of an understanding of architects’ character. Through the analogies and metaphors found in Greek myth, the book describes the elusive, hard-to-define characteristics of architects to engage the dilemmas of a changing architectural landscape. Building the Architect’s Character: Explorations in Traits examines traditional and archetypal characteristics of the successful architect to ask if they remain relevant today.

Teaching Space, Place, and Literature

Teaching Space, Place, and Literature
Author: Robert T. Tally Jr.
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2017-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351693972

Space, place and mapping have become key concepts in literary and cultural studies. The transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space and spatiality into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits are erased or redrawn. Teaching Space, Place and Literature surveys a broad expanse of literary critical, theoretical, historical territories, as it presents both an introduction to teaching spatial literary studies and an essential guide to scholarly research. Divided into sections on key concepts and issues; teaching strategies; urban spaces; place, race and gender and spatiality, periods and genres, this comprehensive book is the ideal way to approach the teaching of space and place in the humanities classroom.

Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust

Shoah Presence: Architectural Representations of the Holocaust
Author: Eran Neuman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1317055241

Through the analysis of several commemorative acts in space, matter and image, namely museums and memorials, this book reflects on the ways in which architecture as a discipline, a practice and a discourse represents the Holocaust. In doing so, it problematises how one presents an extreme historical case in a contemporary context and integrates the historical into actuality. By examining several cases, the book defines the issues faced by various architects who dealt with this topic and discusses their separate and distinctive approaches. In each case, it analyses the ways in which the cultural and political contexts of commemoration led to a different interpretation of the condition. Focusing on the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum; Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the book discusses how the representation of history by architecture creates a dialectic process in which architecture mediates the past to the present, while at the same time creating a present saturated with historical contexts. It shows how, together, they are incorporated into one another and create a new reality: past and present intertwined.

Architectural Robotics

Architectural Robotics
Author: Keith Evan Green
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2016-02-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 026203395X

How a built environment that is robotic and interactive becomes an apt home to our restless, dynamic, and increasingly digital society. The relationship of humans to computers can no longer be represented as one person in a chair and one computer on a desk. Today computing finds its way into our pockets, our cars, our appliances; it is ubiquitous—an inescapable part of our everyday lives. Computing is even expanding beyond our devices; sensors, microcontrollers, and actuators are increasingly embedded into the built environment. In Architectural Robotics, Keith Evan Green looks toward the next frontier in computing: interactive, partly intelligent, meticulously designed physical environments. Green examines how these “architectural robotic” systems will support and augment us at work, school, and home, as we roam, interconnect, and age. Green tells the stories of three projects from his research lab that exemplify the reconfigurable, distributed, and transfigurable environments of architectural robotics. The Animated Work Environment is a robotic work environment of shape-shifting physical space that responds dynamically to the working life of the people within it; home+ is a suite of networked, distributed “robotic furnishings” integrated into existing domestic and healthcare environments; and LIT ROOM offers a simulated environment in which the physical space of a room merges with the imaginary space of a book, becoming “a portal to elsewhere.” How far beyond workstations, furniture, and rooms can the environments of architectural robotics stretch? Green imagines scaled-up neighborhoods, villages, and metropolises composed of physical bits, digital bytes, living things, and their hybrids. Not global but local, architectural robotics grounds computing in a capacious cyber-physical home.