In the past two decades economic bubbles inflated and architectural spending around the globe reached fever pitch. In both well-established centers of capital accumulation and far--flung locales, audacious building projects sprang up, while the skyscraper, heretofore more commonly associated with American capitalism, seemed as if it might pack up and relocate to Dubai and Shanghai. Of course, much has changed in the past couple of years. In formerly free-spending Dubai, the tallest building in the world is now is named after the president of Abu Dhabi after he stepped in with last--minute debt financing. In cities across the United States, housing prices have nose-dived and cleared lots sit ready for commercial redevelopment that likely won't take place for another decade. Similar stories are not hard to find in many other nations. Architecture firms that swelled in flush days are jettisoning employees at a startling rate. In the context of economic instability (and its attendant social and political consequences), this edited volume brings together scholars, critics, and architects to discuss the present state of uncertainty in the practice and discipline of architecture. The chapters are organized into three main areas of inquiry: economics, practice, and technology. Within this larger framework, authors explore issues of security, ecological design, disaster architecture, the future of architectural practice, and the ethical obligations of the social practice of design. In doing so, it argues that this period has actually afforded architecture a valuable moment of self-reflection, where alternative directions for both the theory and practice of architecture might be explored rather than continuing with an approach which was so nurtured by capitalist prosperity and affluence.

This polemic is essential reading for anyone converned with the state and direction of architecture and urban planning today and will provake wide-ranging discussion.

In the last two hundred years, the earth has increasingly become the private property of a few classes, races, transnational corporations, and nations. Repeated claims about the "tragedy of the commons" and the "crisis of capitalism" have done little to explain this concentration of land, encourage solution-building to solve resource depletion, or address our current socio-ecological crisis. The Commons in an Age of Uncertainty presents a new explanation, vision, and action plan based on the idea of commoning the land. The book argues that by commoning the land, rather than privatising it, we can develop the foundation for prosperity without destructive growth and address both local and global challenges. Making the land the most fundamental priority of all commons does not only give hope, it also opens the doors to a new world in which economy, environment, and society are decolonised and liberated.

The Death of Drawing explores the causes and effects of the epochal shift from drawing to computation as the chief design and communication medium in architecture. Drawing both framed the thinking of architects and organized the design and construction process to place architects at its center. Its displacement by building information modeling (BIM) and computational design recasts both the terms in which architects think and their role in building production. Author David Ross Scheer explains that, whereas drawing allowed architects to represent ideas in form, BIM and computational design simulate experience, making building behavior or performance the primary object of design. The author explores many ways in which this displacement is affecting architecture: the dominance of performance criteria in the evaluation of design decisions; the blurring of the separation of design and construction; the undermining of architects’ authority over their projects by automated information sharing; the elimination of the human body as the common foundation of design and experience; the transformation of the meaning of geometry when it is performed by computers; the changing nature of design when it requires computation or is done by a digitally-enabled collaboration. Throughout the book, Scheer examines both the theoretical bases and the practical consequences of these changes. The Death of Drawing is a clear-eyed account of the reasons for and consequences of the displacement of drawing by computational media in architecture. Its aim is to give architects the ability to assess the impact of digital media on their own work and to see both the challenges and opportunities of this historic moment in the history of their discipline.

Architectural Regeneration will address the different perspectives, scales and tools of architectural regeneration by means of detailed overviews of the current state of thinking and practice, with case studies from around the world used as examples to support the theoretical arguments.

Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect's best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till's writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.

Foreword -- Urbanisms : working with doubt -- Geo-spatial -- Experiential phenomena -- Spatiality of night -- Urban porosity -- Sectional cities -- Enmeshed experience : partial views -- Psychological space -- Flux and the ephemeral -- Banalization versus qualitative power -- Negative capability -- Fusion : landscape/urbranism/architecture -- Coda : dilated time -- The megaform and the helix / by Kenneth Frampton -- Project credits -- Image credits -- Acknowledgments.