Materials and Meaning in Architecture Book Release
I would like to share news of the publication of my third sole authored book, Materials and Meaning in Architecture: Essays on the Bodily Experience of Buildings (Bloomsbury, UK, 2020), which follows my 2015 book, Lefebvre for Architects, and 2005 book, Utopias and Architecture.
My Materials book takes up a non-foundationalist consideration of material, emphasizing material significance as deriving from what is done with matter, rather than from inherence. The first half of the book is made up of focused discussions of theories and practices of architecture, whereas the second half comprises detailed considerations of specific materials.
In addition to the publication of my Materials book, I have recently published two book chapters and a journal article: Can Architecture Really Do Nothing? Lefebvre, Bloch, and Jameson on Utopia in Political Theory and Architecture, Bell and Zacka, Eds. Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 214-234; The Right to the City: Centre or Periphery, in The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, The City and Urban Society, Leary-Owhin & McCarthy, Eds. Routledge, 2020, pp. 522-533; and Architecture as Anticipation: The Anticipatory Illumination of Drawing, in The Handbook of Anticipation, Poli R. (Ed.), Springer, Cham, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_34-1 .
All of my research and writing operates in a feedback loop with my teaching, primarily in Masters level architecture design studios, concentrated on resilience and remapping the Neo-Avant-Garde, as against the disappearance of architecture into the building industry. With its grounding in history, theory, philosophy and utopian studies, my research and teaching focus on possible architectures & cities outside of the narrow confines of the world interior of capital.
