Intersections: Architectural Histories and Critical Theories

by Iain Borden (Editor), Jane Rendell (Editor)

Over the last decade, critical theories of different kinds have had an enormous impact on many different disciplines and practices. Intersections is the first book to survey comprehensively this impact on Architecture, providing sixteen essays that intersect a particular critical theory with specific architectural ideas, projects and events. An extended essay by the editors gives an in-depth introduction to the subject. Essays range from psychoanalysis and interiors; colonialism and modern urbanism; gender and the renaissance; to heteroptopia and Las Vegas. Contributors come from Europe and the USA, and include Iain Borden, Zeynep Celik, Sarah Chaplin, Beatriz Colomina, Darell Fields, Murray Fraser, Diane Ghirado, Joe Kerr, Clive Knights, Neil Leach, Barbara Penner, Jane Rendell, Katherine Shonfield, Helen Thomas, Jeremy Till, Henry Urbach and Sarah Wigglesworth.

Genres: Architecture

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2000

About the author

Iain Borden is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, England.

His research explores how architecture and cities are experienced and re-used by the public.

Architecture and cities are crucial to how people live and society operates. Without homes, shops and parks, without offices, workplaces and airports, our world would grind to a halt. As a historian and theorist of architecture and urban culture, he is interested not just in how our cities function but also how they are designed, what they mean to people and how they are experienced.

To do this, he has studied a diverse range of subjects and places, from Italian renaissance piazzas to surveillance cameras in shopping malls, from architectural modernism to recent postmodernism, from issues of gender and ethnicity in cities to the way architecture is represented in cinema and photography. In particular, he has completed an in-depth study of the urban practice of skateboarding, looking at how skateboarders adopt modern cities as their own pleasure-ground, creating a culture with its own architecture, clothes, attitudes and social benefits. He has also extended this investigation into the world of automobile driving, looking at movies to explore how people’s experiences of the city from the car changes their engagement with architecture and urban space. Recent work explores how specific places and buildings in cities worldwide can be encountered through different kinds of social engagement, such as memory and risk-taking.