It could be argued that deconstruction has to a considerable extent been formed by critical accounts of it. This collection reprints a cross section of these important works, charting the ways in which deconstruction is conceptualized and demonstrating the impact it has had on a wide range of traditions. The essential pieces in this set include writings by Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Culler, Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and a wide range of key thinkers in areas as diverse as psychoanalysis, law, gender studies, and architecture. The major themes covered include: * Vol. 1: Part I: "What is Deconstruction?"Part II: "Philosophy"* Vol. 2: Part III: "Literary Criticism"Part IV: "Feminism and Queer Theory"* Vol. 3: Part V: "Psychoanalysis"Part VI: "Religion/Theology"Part VII: "Architecture"* Vol. 4: Part VIII: "Politics"Part IX: "Ethics"

The work of landscape architecture firm Hargreaves Associates is globally renowned, from the 21st Century Waterfront in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to London's 2012 Olympic Park. Founded by George Hargreaves in 1983, this team of designers has transformed numerous abandoned sites into topographically and functionally diverse landscapes. Hargreaves Associates' body of work reflects the socioeconomic and legislative changes that have impacted landscape architecture over the past three decades, particularly the availability of former industrial sites and their subsequent redevelopment into parks. The firm's longstanding interest in such projects brings it into frequent contact with the communities and local authorities who use and live in these built environments, which tend to be contested grounds owing to the conflicting claims of the populations and municipalities that use and manage them. As microcosms of contemporary political, social, and economic terrains, these designed spaces signify larger issues in urban redevelopment and landscape design. The first scholarly examination of the firm's philosophy and body of work, Unearthed uses Hargreaves Associates' portfolio to illustrate the key challenges and opportunities of designing today's public spaces. Illustrated with more than one hundred and fifty color and black-and-white images, this study explores the methods behind canonical Hargreaves Associates sites, such as San Francisco's Crissy Field, Sydney Olympic Park, and the Louisville Waterfront Park. M'Closkey outlines how Hargreaves and his longtime associate Mary Margaret Jones approach the design of public places—conceptually, materially, and formally—on sites that require significant remaking in order to support a greater range of ecological and social needs.

Tschumi Parc de la Villette is the first publication to document comprehensively Bernard Tschumi's first, and arguably still most celebrated project. With new and republished writing including a text by Bernard Tschumi and Anthony Vidler's "Trick-Track" originally published in 1986, alongside a newly-commissioned essay assesing the Parc from a contemporary and historical perspective, this book documents Parc de la Villette from its conception, through the 30 years of its existence, to the present. Tschumi Parc de la Villette includes drawings, concept sketches, models and photographs showing the development of the Parc over three decades, brought together in a single volume for the first time since the 1980s. One of the "Grands Projets" commissioned by the French Government in the 1980s, Parc de la Villette set a benchmark for urban parks in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Tschumi constructed a series of follies across the site, creating what he called "the largest discontinuous building in the world". Published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Parc, Tschumi Parc de la Villette broadly celebrates the project, and articularly the way in which it has been embraced by generations of Parisians and a diverse international public.

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

Reconstructing Architecture was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. To create architecture is an inherently political act, yet its nature as a social practice is often obscured beneath layers of wealth and privilege. The contributors to this volume question architecture's complicity with the status quo, moving beyond critique to outline the part architects are playing in building radical social movements and challenging dominant forms of power. The making of architecture is instrumental in the construction of our identities, our differences, the world around us-much of what we know of institutions, the distribution of power, social relations, and cultural values is mediated by the built environment. Historically, architecture has constructed the environments that house the dominant culture. Yet, as the essays in Reconstructing Architecture demonstrate, there exists a strong tradition of critical practice in the field, one that attempts to alter existing social power relations. Engaging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, each chapter addresses an oppositional discourse that has developed within the field and then reconstructs it in terms of a new social project: feminism, social theory, environmentalism, cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and critical theory. The activists and scholars writing here provide a clarion call to architects and other producers of culture, challenging them to renegotiate their political allegiances and to help reconstruct a viable democratic life in the face of inexorable forces driving economic growth, destroying global ecology, homogenizing culture, and privatizing the public realm. Reconstructing Architecture reformulates the role of architecture in society as well as its capacity to further a progressive social transformation. Contributors: Sherry Ahrentzen, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Bradford C. Grant, California Polytechnic State U, San Luis Obispo; Richard Ingersoll, Rice U; Margaret Soltan, George Washington U; Anthony Ward, U of Auckland, New Zealand. Thomas A. Dutton is an architect and professor of architecture at Miami University, Ohio. He is editor of Voices in Architectural Education (1991) and is associate editor of the Journal of Architectural Education. Lian Hurst Mann is an architect and editor of Architecture California. A founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, she is editor of its bilingual quarterly Ahora Now and a coauthor of Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up (1993).

"Acclaimed as one of the world's foremost modern architects, Bernard Tschumi achieved early fame by winning the competition to design the Pare de la Villette on the northeast edge of Paris, featuring bright red "deconstructivist" pavilions. Tschumi is widely credited with leading the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at New York's Columbia University into the digital age and positioning the school at the forefront of the architectural vanguard. During his fifteen-year tenure, Tschumi has continued to build and the results are amply illustrated in the first monograph to document Tschumi's full career."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, among others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work.

In this book, Mugerauer emphasizes the interplay between European continental philosophy and North American environments and architecture. Drawing on a keen understanding of conceptual trends in both scholarship and the design professions, he clarifies various competing philosophical visions and their considerably different perspectives on environment, place, and architecture. The book covers Derrida's deconstruction, Foucault's genealogy, Heidegger's originary thinking, and Eliade's hermeneutics in order to interpret cultural displacements and the possible recovery of "place," especially through interpretation of dwelling, sense of place, landscapes, architecture, planning, urban design, and technology. Mugerauer identifies a series of design principles that might facilitate mutual understanding.

A sharp and lively text that covers issues in depth but not to the point that they become inaccessible to beginning students, An Introduction to Architectural Theory is the first narrative history of this period, charting the veritable revolution in architectural thinking that has taken place, as well as the implications of this intellectual upheaval. The first comprehensive and critical history of architectural theory over the last fifty years surveys the intellectual history of architecture since 1968, including criticisms of high modernism, the rise of postmodern and poststructural theory, critical regionalism and tectonics Offers a comprehensive overview of the significant changes that architectural thinking has undergone in the past fifteen years Includes an analysis of where architecture stands and where it will likely move in the coming years