Niche Tactics ─ Generative Relationships Between Architecture and Site

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment.

Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

Caroline O'Donnell is an assistant professor and director of the Master of Architecture Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. She is the principal of CODA, winner of the 2013 MoMA-PS1 Young Architects’ Program competition for the pavilion at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York, and editor-in-chief of The Cornell Journal of Architecture.