This fascinating argument from Jonathan Hill presents the case for the significance and importance of the immaterial in architecture. Architecture is generally perceived as the solid, physical matter that it unarguably creates, but what of the spaces it creates? This issue drives Hill's explorative look at the immaterial aspects of architecture. The book discusses the pressures on architecture and the architectural profession to be respectively solid matter and solid practice and considers concepts that align architecture with the immaterial, such as the superiority of ideas over matter, command of drawing and design of spaces and surfaces. Focusing on immaterial architecture as the perceived absence of matter, Hill devises new means to explore the creativity of both the user and the architect, advocating an architecture that fuses the immaterial and the material and considers its consequences, challenging preconceptions about architecture, its practice, purpose, matter and use. This is a useful and innovative read that encourages architects and students to think beyond established theory and practice.

Immaterial/Ultramaterial, the second volume in the Millennium Matters series, investigates today's revolutionary new materials and methods of fabrication, and the profound impact they are having on the continuing evolution of architecture.

Directly confronting the nature of contemporary architectural work, this book is the first to address a void at the heart of architectural discourse and thinking. For too long, architects have avoided questioning how the central aspects of architectural “practice” (professionalism, profit, technology, design, craft, and building) combine to characterize the work performed in the architectural office. Nor has there been a deeper evaluation of the unspoken and historically-determined myths that assign cultural, symbolic, and economic value to architectural labor. The Architect as Worker presents a range of essays exploring the issues central to architectural labor. These include questions about the nature of design work; immaterial and creative labor and how it gets categorized, spatialized, and monetized within architecture; the connection between parametrics and BIM and labor; theories of architectural work; architectural design as a cultural and economic condition; entrepreneurialism; and the possibility of ethical and rewarding architectural practice. The book is a call-to-arms, and its ultimate goal is to change the practice of architecture. It will strike a chord with architects, who will recognize the struggle of their profession; with students trying to understand the connections between work, value, and creative pleasure; and with academics and cultural theorists seeking to understand what grounds the discipline.

Presents more than thirty of the architect's recent works, including high-profile commissions such as the Suntory Museum in Tokyo and the Ondo Civic Center in Kure; the exlusive Lotus House in Zushi; large-scale urban developments in Sanlitun Village South in Beijing, and more.

Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.

Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill’s investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture’s relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather’s effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.

From the comprehensive scale of the city to the small scale of the installation, Architecture Is All Over responds to the field's dichotomous conditions of monumentality and invisibility. Structured as an unfolding spectrum that ranges from obsolescence to pervasiveness, this twenty-contributor collection assembles recent and historical evidence of the discipline's "all over-ness." The title's double entendre celebrates the enduring instability, unpredictability and mutability that form architecture's motive core. In conversations, speculations and case studies, Architecture Is All Over refuses the easy figment of crisis to narrate new possibilities for design theory and praxis.

Into the Great Wide Open is a book about a search for a form of practice in architecture. Practice here is understood both as a critical reflection of a status quo and its history, as well as forms of (active) intervention through designing and planning. The book is a fragmentary snapshot of an on going, constantly developing and altering process to find a place in the production and reflection of our built environment, and implicitly disputes the question: “What is to be done?”

In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.

Through a collection of 13 chapters, Peggy Deamer examines the profession of architecture not as an abstraction, but as an assemblage of architectural workers. What forces prevent architects from empowering ourselves to be more relevant and better rewarded? How can these forces be set aside by new narratives, new organizations and new methods of production? How can we sit at the decision-making table to combat short-term real estate interests for longer-term social and ethical value? How can we pull architecture—its conceptualization, its pedagogy, and its enactment—into the 21st century without succumbing to its neoliberal paradigm? In addressing these controversial questions, Architecture and Labor brings contemporary discourses on creative labor to architecture, a discipline devoid of labor consciousness. This book addresses how, not just what, architects produce and focuses not on the past but on the present. It is sympathetic to the particularly intimate way that architects approach their design work while contextualizing that work historically, institutionally, economically, and ideologically. Architecture and Labor is sure to be a compelling read for pre-professional students, academics, and practitioners.