Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies: An Architecture

(Paperback)

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This book isolates and dissects long-overlooked architectural typologies to unveil political aesthetics and protocols along geographic boundaries shaping contemporary society.

Exclusions, Edges, and Ecologies is an investigation for identifying and documenting the infrastructural and architectural typologies along political boundaries. By revisiting building typology as a method, this project purposefully meets the entanglement between architecture and power structures. The study of the architectural type and the interrogation of architecture's role becomes its call for social and political change.

New architectural imagination can be formed by revealing some of the most overlooked and dismissed spaces at the edges of architecture. Citizenry edges do not only begin and end at nation-state borders but expand from within the interior of common social junctures. City is no longer boundary by fortified walls or defined through the old binaryrural to urban, country to city, etc. Planetary grounds includes the imagination for breaching the edge of the atmosphere and a vast ecology of infrastructure to support the launch complex for leaving earth entirely. Exclusions,

Edges, and Ecologies catalogs an architectural type across diverse historical and geopolitical scales, from the interior to vast territories of remote land, to reveal the edges of architecture and delaminate the boundaries of our contemporary design discourse.

Author Bio

Csar A. Lopez is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work explores the entanglements between architecture and territory and the politics that dictate them. He draws from his experiences growing up in the Mxico-United States border region to look beyond its fortification and investigate ways political geographies form human and environmental subjects. From 2013 to 2022, Lopez was an Associate and the Representation Lead at The Open Workshop where his primary role was developing the office's representational project, which aims to frame collateral populations and environments that often go unheard in the discipline. His work included many widely published projects and installations, including New Investigations in Collective Form, which was awarded the 2021 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Faculty Design Award, Commoning Domestic Space at the 17th Venice Biennale, and The Center Won't Hold at the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Lopez has published his research and design work in ARQ Magazine (Chile, 2022), Pidgin Magazine (Princeton, 2021), Bracket [Takes Action] (AR+D, 2020), Momentum Magazine (2020), Art Journal (2020), and Places Journal (2017). Lopez is an Assistant Professor in Architecture at the University of New Mexico, School of Architecture and Planning, where he teaches studios on territorial typologies and seminars on representation as a counter-political device. He has previously taught at the California College of the Arts, Architecture Division and the University of California, College of Environmental Design. Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group Grounding Design. He recently received his Doctor of Design degree (DDes) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Office for Urbanization. Nesbit's work focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of "technical lands." His experience spanning over a decade includes leading design teams for public architecture and large-scale urban projects, along with managing sponsored design research projects for city governments, local institutions, and NGOs. Currently, his research examines the 20th-century American spaceport complex at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and aerospace history. Nesbit has published several journal articles, book chapters, and is editor of Nature of Enclosure (Actar, 2022), co-editor of New Geographies 11 Extraterrestrial (Actar, 2019), Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment (Routledge, 2019), Chasing the City: Models for Extra-Urban Investigations (Routledge, 2018), and host and producer of three podcasts series. Nesbit is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Temple University, and previously taught at several institutions, including Harvard University, Northeastern University, University of North Carolina Charlotte, University of New Mexico, and Texas Tech University.