Architecture as Measure

(Paperback)

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In light of the current political crisis around climate change, what can architecture possibly contribute towards a new planetary imaginary of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism

Architecture as Measure is an elaboration on this question, and on the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. It positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination.

The book takes on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which all extrapolate broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as form, representation and materiality. In that way, the book is an invitation to boost architectures planetary effect by collapsing the centers and the peripheries of the discipline, by colliding its very outside with its very core interior.

Reviews

"An impressively organized and presented study of seminal and deftly written scholarship, "Architecture as Measure" is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to professional and academic library Sustainability & Green Design, Architectural Criticism, and Architecture Project Planning & Management collections and supplemental Architectural curriculum studies lists."-- "Midwest Book Review"
"Through models and drawings that are both hyper-realistic and disturbingly dreamlike, Turan and her San Francisco-based firm, NemeStudio, create displays of existing building types deformed, distorted to reveal their origins in extractive industries, or combined to construct narratives of the violence we are perpetuating on this planet.... Architects such as Turan are important not because of what they build, but because of how they practice. In other words, they are architects in the profoundest and most effective way possible." --Aaron Betsky, Architect Magazine

Author Bio

Neyran Turan is an architect and a partner at NEMESTUDIO, an architectural office that has been recognized with several awards, most recently the Architectural League New York Prize for Young Architects, multiple citations at the Architects' Newspaper's Best of Design Awards, ACSA Faculty Design Award, Notable Award at the Core 77 Design Awards, and multiple Graham Foundation awards. She is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Architecture at the University of California-Berkeley. NEMESTUDIO's work, ranging from installations to buildings and landscapes, has been exhibited internationally at the Storefront Art and Architecture Gallery, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles, Druker Design Gallery of Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), Pratt Manhattan Gallery, Parsons New School of Design Gallery in New York, Chicago Architecture Biennial, SALT in Istanbul, Piazzale Donatello in Florence, and the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial "Are We Human," among other venues. Turan's work focuses on alternative forms of environmental imagination within architecture and their capacity for new aesthetic and political trajectories within architecture and urbanism. Turan is founding chief-editor of the Harvard GSD journal New Geographies, which focuses on contemporary issues of urbanism and architecture, and is the editor-in-chief of the first two volumes of the journal: New Geographies 0 (2008) and New Geographies: After Zero (2009).