Books published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

Nights of the Dispossessed brings together artistic works, political texts, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to sense, chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings.

Moving beyond reductive notions of identity, myths of authenticity, fetishized traditionalism, or the constructed opposition of tradition and modernity, The Arab City: Architectural and Representation critically engages contemporary architectural and urban production in the Middle East. Taking the "Arab City" and "Islamic Architecture" as sites of investigation rather than given categories, this book reframes the region's buildings, cities, and landscapes and broadens its architectural and urban canons. Arab cities are multifaceted places and sites of layered historical imaginaries; defined by regional and territorial economies, they bridge scales of production and political engagement. The essays collected here investigate cultural representation, the evolution of historical cities, contemporary architectural practices, emerging urban conditions, and responsive urban imaginaries in the Arab World. With contributions from Ashraf Abdalla, Senan Abdelqader, Nadia Abu El­Haj, Su'ad Amiry, Amale Andraos, Mohammed al-Asad, George Arbid, Mohamed Elshahed, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Rania Ghosn, Saba Innab, Adrian Lahoud, Lila Abu Lughod, Ziad Jamaleddine, Ahmed Kanna, Bernard Khoury, Laura Kurgan, Ali Mangera, Reinhold Martin, Timothy Mitchell, Magda Mostafa, Nasser Rabbat, Hashim Sarkis, Felicity Scott, Hala Warde, Mark Wasiuta, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, and Gwendolyn Wright.

Heritage occupies a privileged position within the built environment. This book examines historic preservation as an enterprise of ideas, methods, institutions, and practices that must reorient toward a new horizon in which equity and sustainability become critical guideposts for policy evolution.

Paths to Prison aims to expand the ways the built environment's relationship to and participation in the carceral state is understood in architecture. The collected essays implicate architecture in the more longstanding and pervasive legacies of racialized coercion in the United States.

Founded by anthropologist Edward T. Hall, proxemics developed amid cold war political tensions and social and civil unrest. Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction presents selections from Hall's extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science.

The field of historic preservation is becoming more socially and culturally inclusive, through more diversity in the profession and enhanced community engagement. Bringing together a broad range of practitioners, this book documents historic preservation's progress toward inclusivity and explores further steps to be taken.

Ways of Knowing Cities considers the role of technology in generating, materializing, and contesting urban epistemologies-from ubiquitous sites of "smart" urbanism to discrete struggles over infrastructural governance to forgotten histories of segregation now naturalized in urban algorithms to exceptional territories of border policing.

Andres Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation bring new subjects into the fold of architecture. Documenting a series of performances, research projects, installations, films, characters, and exhibitions, Superpowers of Scale demonstrates the breadth of architectural knowledge and its possible representations.

Modern Management Methods asks how the value of a building is produced through instruments of expertise, management ideologies, and historical narratives. It uses the imaging techniques of conservation and the documentary detritus of heritage preservation to show how scientific methods attempt to produce stable notions of history and value.

A rapid proliferation of large-scale perennial exhibitions has resulted in the biennial / triennial becoming an integral part of field of architecture. Biennials / Triennials questions a range of curatorial agents and visits sites of recent exhibitions that reveal what is at stake in the newfound ubiquity of the architectural -ennial.

This book explores how enhancing the collection, accuracy, and management of data can aid in identifying vulnerable neighborhoods, understanding the role of older buildings, and planning sustainable growth. For preservation to play a dynamic and inclusive role, policy must evolve beyond designation and regulation and use evidence-based research.

This book brings together science fiction, history, visual art, and exploration to reframe the relationship among climate, crisis, and creation. A Year Without a Winter presents stories by four renowned science fiction authors alongside critical essays, extracts from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and dispatches from extreme geographies.

The Empire Remains Shop speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today. Based on a public installation, the book catalogues and develops the installation's critical program, using food to trace new geographies across the present and future of our postcolonial planet.

This collection of essays by architect Mario Gooden investigates the construction of African American identity and representation through the medium of architecture. These five texts move between history, theory, and criticism to explore a discourse of critical spatial practice engaged in the constant reshaping of the African Diaspora. African American cultural institutions designed and constructed in recent years often rely on cultural stereotypes, metaphors, and clichés to communicate significance, demonstrating "Africanisms" through form and symbolism¿but there is a far richer and more complex heritage to be explored. Presented here is a series of questions that interrogate and illuminate other narratives of "African American architecture," and reveal compelling ways of translating the philosophical idea of the African Diaspora's experience into space.

In Extremis is a cartography of contemporary global architecture, focusing upon the close relationship between different building types and the landscapes in which they are situated, illuminating the resonances and contrasts, continuities and discontinuities between new work and the natural or urban environment. With essays by Alessio Assonitis, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Palaasma, Dimitri Philippidis, Jeannette Plaut, Jilly Traganou.