Toward a Critical Practice in Architecture

by Gevork Hartoonian (Editor)

The essays and interviews collected in this book attempt to address the idea of critical practice at a historical moment that, once again, the project of modernity should be re-examined. Telecommunication technologies and the commodification of the everyday life undermine the historicity of the built environment, which for a long time had benefited from homologies that one could make between the body, landscape, and technique. Critical practice seeks a constructive dialogue with the positive aspects of the cosmopolitan-humanism flourishing since the dawn of modernity. This is not to celebrate the globalisation of both capital and information industries. It is a plea to exploring themes central for a critical negotiation with the regime of late capitalism. Having this established, the book recognises the importance of the task that architects and academics face in formulating the architectonic manifestation of antinomies to late capitalism, many facets of which still remain hidden to us. If modernism sought to make a one-to-one correspondence between architecture and an industrious culture, the task of critical practice today involves demonstrating the ways that the spectacle permeating the culture of late capitalism informs the architectural. In addition to the scholarly essays, what makes this book particularly significant is the interviews conducted with academics and architects who have influenced contemporary architecture at both professional and pedagogical levels worldwide. This book was published as a special issue of Architectural Theory Review .

192 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2010