Agency ─ Working With Uncertain Architectures

While the potential of agency is most frequently taken to be the power and freedom to act for oneself, for the architectural community this also involves the power and responsibility to act as intermediaries on behalf of others.

Presenting current thinking from practitioners and scholars from around the world, this book asks for a more active relationship between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. Considering issues of architectural research as an agency of transformation, this book explores how humanities research can better contribute towards understanding current architectural needs.

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk and Stephen Walker all teach and research at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. They are members of the Research Centre Agency, which conducts transformative research into architectural practice and education, suggesting research activity that both creates and responds to shifting conditions. Instead of remaining passively (and safely) within academic environments, Agency sees itself as a collective of agents acting both within and between the fields of research, practice, education, and civic life.

Introduction: Agency: Working with Uncertain Architectures Part 1: Intervene 1. Activism In Appalachia: Yale Architecture Students In Kentucky, 1966-1969 Richard W. Hayes 2. Environmental and Social Action in the Studio: Three Live Projects Along the Elizabeth River Phoebe Crisman 3. Secondary Agency. Learning from Boris Groys Dana Vais 4. On Consensus, Equality, Experts and Good Design: Public Interview with Roberta Feldman and Henry Sanoff An Architektur & Mathias Heyden Part 2: Sustain 5. Acting Up: Architectural Practice as Ecological Performance Karin Jaschke 6. Ethics And Aesthetics: Deleuze, Diagrams and Sustainability Stefan White 7. The Radical Potential of Architecture Richard Lister & Thomas Nemeskeri 8. Assemblage, Agency, and Ecologies of the Contemporary City Graham Livesey Part 3: Mediate 9. Against Determination, Beyond Mediation Ana Paula Baltazar & Silke Kapp 10. Agency and Automatism: Some Strategies of Irresponsibility in Architecture Michael Chapman 11. Interior Exile and Paper Architecture: A Spectrum for Architectural Dissidence Ines Weizman 12. Air Rights Helen Mallinson