Architectures of Refusal

This AD issue explores how architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture by taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, challenging mythologies, and foregrounding emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world. It demonstrates that refusal is a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy, and alliances across multiple disciplines.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 136 pages
Publication date: 04 November 2022
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc

Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been growing recognition of the systemic complicity of architecture in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, as well as privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issue reveals how designers, practitioners, scholars, and architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture. The work is both literal and figural: taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, and challenging mythologies that include drawing-as-analogue, building-as-object, architect-as-hero, and nature-as-other.

Architecture has both potential and responsibility for political agency in the public realm. The contributions to this issue foreground emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world, demonstrating that refusal is no longer just absence and denial, but a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy, and alliances across multiple disciplines.

Contributors:
Piper Bernbaum, Carwil Bjork-James, Thiresh Govender, Lucia Jalón Oyarzun, Jennifer Newsom, and Tom Carruthers, Cong Chi Nguyen, Quilian Riano, Hannah Le Roux, Alberto de Salvatierra, Cathy Smith, Chat Travieso, and Ilze Wolff.

Weight: 576g
Dimension: 277 x 216 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781119833963