The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice Series

Architectural Aesthetic Speculations expands our understanding of the role of formal aesthetic criteria in twentieth-century artistic practices and reveals potentially transformative aspects in the art of architectural composition. The book stages an encounter of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's (1925–1995) constructivist sensibility and architect Louis Kahn's (1901–1974) mode of architectural figuration. This book is of interest to architects, artists, historians and theorists and to those wishing to learn about contemporary aesthetic practice and theory.

The Society of Interiors discusses a variety of spatial practices which critique, reveal, and resist the economical logic of a neo-liberal market. A market that caters for exclusiveness and individualities, where public space becomes an interior, that is highly controlled and privatized. The different essays unpack, develop and expand a diversity of interior and spatial practices in urban contexts that allow for a diverse public, express differences, and create other experiences and situations. Authors include the architect and researcher Tatjana Schneider, editor of the publication Spatial Agency (Routledge 2011); the activist architect Petra Pferdmenges from alive architecture in Brussels, the architectural theorist Peter Lang; the architect and artist Tor Lindstrand; as well as Rochus Hinkel, whose research focuses on the intersections between interior, architecture and urban environments.

Set amidst the experimental ecology of practices that supports feminist thinking and doing in architecture, this small book outlines an instruc- tion guide that presents six provocative steps toward the invention of productive concept-tools. It invites readers to explore creative and messy methodologies that combine an aesthetics with a practical ethics. Frichot encourages us to think and do architecture in ways that challenge a dog- matic status quo that celebrates major gures, while overlooking the care and labour of minor gures and practices.

If architecture is a design-centred discipline which proceeds by suggesting propositional constructions then, Zambelli argues, archaeology also designs, but in the form of reconstructions. He proposes that whilst practitioners of architecture and archaeology generally purport to practice in future-facing and past-facing-modes respectively, elements of these disciplines also resemble one another. Zambelli speculates that whilst some of these resemblances have remained explicit and revealed, others have become occluded with time, but that all such resemblances share homological similarities of interconnected disciplinary origin making available in the scandalous space between them a logically underpinned, visually analogical form of practice.

Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, af- fordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross' "five stages of grief" – from pro-sprawl 'denial', NIMBY 'anger', revisionist NewUrban, 'bargaining', 'depressed' starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of 'acceptance'.

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and mainte- nance for our precarious environment-worlds.

Diagrams: Tropes, Tools and Abstract Machines examines the pervasive roles of diagrams as analytical, generative, narrative and critical devices manifest in design practices by architects and non-architects that draw on thick cultural milieus and that operate at personal, architectural and urban scales. What are potentials of diagrams beyond representation, as situated cultural practices, corporeal engagement and choreographic script, as instruments of speculation and invention, as manifestation of ideas and incrimination of ideology, as abstract machines in scenarios of allopoïesis, autopoïesis and cosmopoïesis?

This book offers a vision of the London Underground written in the form of a ficto-historical narrative, which combines history and fiction in the creation of a set of theoretical propositions for London's subterranean transportation network. Its amateur-scholar protagonist takes the reader on a labyrinthine journey into the world of research, with sources personified and their works appropriated and subverted. The book offers a model for practising writing and research in the context of architectural history and theory.

What futures are we designing by default? What collaborations are we complicit in? How can we incorporate an active civic engagement into our professional and creative practice – into our everyday lives? Esther Anatolitis presents a dynamic snapshot of her own practice from a distinctly Australian context but with a global perspective, offering tools and techniques for integrating civic engagement into daily practice. Taking leaps across spatial, creative, professional and political work, this is an unsettling text.

Sonic Wilderness accesses the critical value of unusual vinyl records that concern our relationship with nature. These wild records reveal unconventional perspectives on the entanglements of human life with animals, gardens and plants. They form a lyrical unconscious exposing the conventions and ideologies of popular music, their warped perspectives and acoustic radioactivity comprising a resistance to enduring social, psychological and political conditions.