A House Deconstructed

(Paperback)

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Description

This book deconstructs a single recently constructed house located in Seattle, WA, in an attempt to recover its backstory. The information is presented along four vectors atoms, labors, sources and ingredients.

Though remarkably detailed, the A House Deconstructed contends that a huge proportion of what we know about the house is unknowable, not because our epistemological instruments arent strong enough or calibrated precisely enough, but because things themselves are indeterminate, uncertain. This begs the question about agency. If we are to critique our profession and even improve some of its claims about Sustainability, then we must develop a more robust understanding of the building industry and the sourcing and making of materials. We must even develop a stronger awareness of the history of atoms and how architecture brings that history into a remarkable focus.

Author Bio

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT . He is Diplom Architekt, ETH (1980) and received his PhD. From MIT in 1986. He works on a wide range of topics - both historical and theoretical. He has published books and articles on the 13th century churches at Lalibela to the crisis of contemporary architectural education. He is one of the country's leading advocates for global history and has published several books and articles on that topic, including the ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikramaditya Prakash and with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. Jarzombek recently published a book that interrogates the digital/global imaginaries that shape our lives: Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Vikramaditya Prakash is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Planning, and Digital Arts and Media. He received his B. Arch. From India and his M.A. and PhD from Cornell University. His books include Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, Colonial Modernities (co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma, Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide, and One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash. His most recent publication is Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial (co-edited with Maristella Casciato and Daniel Coslett). He is also the host of the ArchitectureTalk podcast.