Situated Practices in Architecture and Politics
Situated Practices in Architecture and Politics
Situated Practices in Architecture and Politics brings together five transformative architectural practices from around the globe – Fasil Giorghis Consulting in Addis Ababa, working with the World Monuments Fund; Patama Roonrakwit and CASE Architects in Bangkok; Guillaume Lévesque and Architectes de l’urgence et de la coopération in Montréal; Paulo Mendes da Rocha + MMBB Arquitetos in São Paulo; and Lacaton & Vassal in Paris – to critique the assumptions, working methods, and embedded social and political biases within “normal” architectural practice. Their changing ethics of practice, and the ways in which they problematize their contexts – neoliberal political and architectural economies, in deeply and increasingly unequal societies – inform an emerging critical discourse that is reshaping the field and its relationship to larger global forces. Architects must both sustain themselves and respond to the compelling concerns of our time; this book creates a forum for navigating such choices.
Kai Wood Mah and Patrick Lynn Rivers co-direct Afield, a design research practice bringing comparative interdisciplinary perspectives to contemporary social issues. Mah is a design historian, licensed architect in Québec, and Associate Professor of Architecture at Laurentian University; his architectural practice is interdisciplinary and grounded in site-specific investigations employing archives, fieldwork, social science methodologies, and research-creation. Rivers is a political scientist, currently Associate Professor in the Liberal Arts faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rivers' scholarship is presented in the book Governing Hate and Race in the United States and South Africa, as well as in peer-reviewed journals, newspapers, and magazines.
