Over 60 years on from its inception, the celebrated Fun Palace civic project – developed in the 1960s by the radical theatre director Joan Littlewood and the architect Cedric Price – continues to capture the architectural imagination. Despite the building itself never being realized, much of the previous analysis of the Fun Palace has been devoted to Price and his drawings. The critical role that Littlewood played, however, remains largely unrecognized by architectural scholarship, and a whole area of the project's cultural agenda remains overlooked. Architecture, Media, Archives is the first serious study of the complex relations between Littlewood and Price, reframing the Fun Palace as an extended media project and positioning Littlewood more clearly as co-designer. Drawing on extensive archival material, the book considers how, due to a lack of institutional support, the aims of the Fun Palace – to transform the passive mass-audiences of post-war consumer society into active citizens, through forms of self-directed, pleasure-led and open exchange – were realized through different 'sites of information' throughout the 1960s. From broadsheets, pamphlets and journals to films and press news, the book addresses the conditions of production, circulation, storage and reception of these 'sites' and reveals how they not only recorded the transformation of the project, but also fundamentally enhanced and informed its meaning in specific ways. The book also raises important questions about the agency of the Fun Palace archive in shaping the reception of the project in the decades since its inception, presenting its analysis through a novel 'Fun Palace Reception Index and Chart', fundamentally altering our view of the project itself and transforming the way in which we understand the technological and cultural production of the 1960s.

In the wake of architecture's digital turn, contemporary practices have taken up archaic, even "prehistoric," models for the practice of architecture and how it might develop trenchant relationships to contemporary audiences. Underneath a wildly diverse and variable set of appearances, Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech reveals architectures that evince a stable and shared set of commitments to design as an act before speech--that is, they exceed the structural and semiotic propositions of the twentieth century which have long served as a point of beginning for the imagination of architectural thought itself. Featuring essays from Catherine Ingraham, Lucia Allais, Stan Allen, Phillip Denny, Edward Eigen, Sylvia Lavin, Antoine Picon, and Marrikka Trotter, Inscriptions rethinks architecture at the moment just before it is presupposed as the material of an indeterminably meaningful mark, the moment just before text becomes speech and before architecture becomes building--the site of inscription.

In the popular imagination, archives are remote, largely obsolete institutions: either antiquated, inevitably dusty libraries or sinister repositories of personal secrets maintained by police states. Yet the archive is now a ubiquitous feature of digital life. Rather than being deleted, e-mails and other computer files are archived. Media software and cloud storage allow for the instantaneous cataloging and preservation of data, from music, photographs, and videos to personal information gathered by social media sites. In this digital landscape, the archival-oriented media theories of Wolfgang Ernst are particularly relevant. Digital Memory and the Archive, the first English-language collection of the German media theorist’s work, brings together essays that present Ernst’s controversial materialist approach to media theory and history. His insights are central to the emerging field of media archaeology, which uncovers the role of specific technologies and mechanisms, rather than content, in shaping contemporary culture and society. Ernst’s interrelated ideas on the archive, machine time and microtemporality, and the new regimes of memory offer a new perspective on both current digital culture and the infrastructure of media historical knowledge. For Ernst, different forms of media systems—from library catalogs to sound recordings—have influenced the content and understanding of the archive and other institutions of memory. At the same time, digital archiving has become a contested site that is highly resistant to curation, thus complicating the creation and preservation of cultural memory and history.

"The process of investigation, analysis, and testing makes Architecture Research Office (ARO) as much a laboratory as a design firm. For Stephen Cassell, Adam Yarinsky, and their team, the starting point of each commission is not the development of an abstract "idea" for the project, but an intensive, hands-on occupation with a project's conditions, with its physical, economic, and social contexts. This practical approach to making architecture, to shrinking the distance between thinking and building, is much evident in their work, which manages to be simultaneously thoughtful and sensual." "The seven projects featured in this, the first monograph on the work of this firm, range from self-directed research (ARO's paper wall project), to private living spaces (the SoHo Loft), to commercial interiors (the Qiora Store and Spa), to the popular U.S. Armed Services Recruiting Station in Times Square, to the stunning Colorado House in Telluride. All of these projects challenge design conventions, while delighting the senses with their unusual materials, careful detailing, and unexpected spatial discoveries." "With essays by Stan Allen, Philip Nobel, Guy Nordenson, and Sarah Whiting."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Should all-inclusive engagement be the major task of architecture? All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture: Towards the Future of Social Change presents the case that the answer is yes. Through original contributions and case studies, this volume shows that socially engaged architecture is both a theoretical construct and a professional practice navigating the global politics of poverty, charity, health, technology, neoliberal urbanism, and the discipline's exclusionary basis. The scholarly ideas and design projects of fifty-eight thought leaders demonstrate the architect's role as a revolutionary social agent. Exemplary works are included from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Africa, Asia and Europe. This book offers a comprehensive overview and in-depth analysis of all-inclusive engagement in public interest design for instructors, students, and professionals alike, showing how this approach to architecture can bring forth a radical reformation of the profession and its relationship to society.