Completed in 2000, 9/10 Stock Orchard Street has resisted categorization and this has continued to challenge critics and observers. With contributions from well-known writers in the field, this book responds to the debate, reflecting positively and negatively on what the buildings represent and how they have performed, ten years on. Supported by a wealth of technical drawings and photographic material, the contributions discuss theory, practice, education, material culture, narrative, sustainability and construction, presenting conclusions relevant and insightful for today's readers, both professional and academic.

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of alternative approaches to architectural practice. At a time when many commentators are noting that alternative and richer approaches to architectural practice are required if the profession is to flourish, this book provides multiple examples from across the globe of how this has been achieved and how it might be achieved in the future. Particularly pertinent in the current economic climate, this book offers the reader new approaches to architectural practice in a changing world. It makes essential reading for any architect, aspiring or practicing.

In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York's Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard Street, Ziegelman takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments, down dimly lit stairwells, beyond the front stoops where housewives congregated, and out into the hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets. Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving traditions from home but always ready to improvise. 97 Orchard lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.

Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – 'naming' through timber, 'process-based' through concrete, and 'performance specification' through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or 'Preliminary Operations' as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

The discipline of architecture is currently undergoing a significant change as professional practice and academia seem to be transforming one another specifically through succinct research undertakings. This book continues the discussion started in The Changing Shape of Practice – Integrating Research and Design in Architecture on architectural offices’ modes of research and lines of inquiry in architecture and how it reshapes practice. The book aims to contribute to the mapping and discussion on research in architectural practice and its transformational impact and gives input to the discussions on where the architectural profession is heading. In this second volume, various research initiatives and modes in architectural practices are portrayed. The book also includes contributions that broaden the scope and put the developments into larger contexts, and present an overview of developments from different regional perspectives and of various social aspects of architecture. It also relates the developments in practice to educational efforts and to initiatives where the more traditional role of architects is challenged. The contributions include chapters by Walter Unterrainer, Anthony Burke, Renée Cheng and Andrea J. Johnson, and Michael U. Hensel, and on the practices atelier d’architecture autogérée, Helen & Hard, MVRDV and The Why Factory, NADAAA & Nader Tehrani, Nordic – Office of Architecture, Schmidt Hammer Lassen, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Void, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, and Älvstranden Utveckling.