The threshold as both boundary and bridge: investigations of spaces, public and private, local and global. Today, spaces no longer represent a bourgeois haven; nor are they the sites of a classical harmony between work and leisure, private and public, the local and the global. The house is not merely a home but a position for negotiations with multiple spheres—the technological as well as the physical and the psychological. In A Topology of Everyday Constellations, Georges Teyssot considers the intrusion of the public sphere into private space, and the blurring of notions of interior, privacy, and intimacy in our societies. He proposes that we rethink design in terms of a new definition of the practices of everyday life. Teyssot considers the door, the window, the mirror, and the screen as thresholds or interstitial spaces that divide the world in two: the outside and the inside. Thresholds, he suggests, work both as markers of boundaries and as bridges to the exterior. The stark choice between boundary and bridge creates a middle space, an in-between that holds the possibility of exchanges and encounters. If the threshold no longer separates public from private, and if we can no longer think of the house as a bastion of privacy, Teyssot asks, does the body still inhabit the house—or does the house, evolving into a series of microdevices, inhabit the body?

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.

The tension between interior and exterior has always been present in architecture, differently articulated over the centuries, and expressed through several means of representation. Contemporary architecture is often characterized by the total interpenetration of interior and exterior configurations: often the differentiation between these two dialectical poles has become undistinguishable, boundaries blurry and the result of any design process is a hybrid product, based on the superposition of different and heterogeneous layers. Starting from the 18th century, Interior Landscapes describes the principles of the relationship between interior and exterior landscapes in architecture. It unveils the invariant forms that have crossed the History of Architecture, and which have periodically re-emerged to shape contemporary design episodes. By borrowing different interpretative elements—drawings, photographs, illustrations—Interior Landscapes is configured as a visual atlas, aimed to demonstrate how, through the contamination of interior and exterior, always- new architectural insights emerge. Comprising detailed essays that contribute insightfully to the international discourse, Stefano Corbo unpacks the general re-organization of topics internal to the territory of architecture. This book distinguishes itself with almost 70 unique plates of etchings, sketches, illustrations and photographs, each linking carefully and directly the visual with the theory, providing unique entry points and examinations of this text’s fascinating observations.

Winner, Robert Motherwell Book Award, Outstanding Book on Modernism in the Arts, The Dedalus Foundation, 2019 As Latin American elites strove to modernize their cities at the turn of the twentieth century, they eagerly adopted the eugenic theory that improvements to the physical environment would lead to improvements in the human race. Based on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the “inheritance of acquired characteristics,” this strain of eugenics empowered a utopian project that made race, gender, class, and the built environment the critical instruments of modernity and progress. Through a transnational and interdisciplinary lens, Eugenics in the Garden reveals how eugenics, fueled by a fear of social degeneration in France, spread from the realms of medical science to architecture and urban planning, becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity in the new Latin world. Journeying back and forth between France, Brazil, and Argentina, Fabiola López-Durán uncovers the complicity of physicians and architects on both sides of the Atlantic, who participated in a global strategy of social engineering, legitimized by the authority of science. In doing so, she reveals the ideological trajectory of one of the most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, who deployed architecture in what he saw as the perfecting and whitening of man. The first in-depth interrogation of eugenics’ influence on the construction of the modern built environment, Eugenics in the Garden convincingly demonstrates that race was the main tool in the geopolitics of space, and that racism was, and remains, an ideology of progress.

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.

The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture’s obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset’s revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany’s rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture’s ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.

Urbanization is a system of power and knowledge, and today’s city functions through the expansive material infrastructures of the urban order. In The Urban Apparatus, Reinhold Martin analyzes urbanization and the contemporary city in aesthetic, socioeconomic, and mediapolitical terms. He argues that understanding the city as infrastructure reveals urbanization to be a way of imparting functional, aesthetic, and cognitive order to a contradictory, doubly bound neoliberal regime. Blending critical philosophy, political theory, and media theory, The Urban Apparatus explores how the aesthetics of cities and their political economies overlap. In a series of ten essays, with a detailed theoretical introduction, Martin explores questions related to urban life, drawn from a wide range of global topics—from the fiscal crisis in Detroit to speculative development in Mumbai to the landscape of Mars, from discussions of race and the environment to housing and economic inequality. Each essay proposes a particular “mediator” (or a material complex) that is shaped by imaginative practices, each answering the question “What is a city, today?” The Urban Apparatus serves as an “urban” bookend to the architectural questions explored by Martin in his earlier book Utopia’s Ghost, and ultimately offers readers a way to think politically about urbanization.