Welcome to the Design and Built Environment Research Guide!
This guide features resources that will assist you in your research. Please let me know if you have feedback about this guide or need research help! My office is located in the back, left corner of the Gunnin Architecture Library. Please feel free to drop by to see me and/or make an appointment for a longer talk. I do have a lot of meetings on campus, so if I'm not here in my office, please send me an email or schedule a meeting.
Ann Holderfield, Art & Architecture Librarian/Director, Gunnin Architecture Library
Designing Spatial Culture
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Big House Little City
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***Shortlisted for the Architectural Book Awards 2024*** Combining architectural and urban thinking in an unusual and engaging way, this book presents an integrated approach to architectural theory and design. Leon Battista Alberti's assertion in his famous Renaissance treatise that 'the city is like a big house, and the house is in turn like a little city' forms the springboard for a series of reflections on architecture's relationship with urbanism and how their once intimate symbiosis, unravelled by International Style Modernism, can be recovered. Explicit references to Alberti's house-city phrase have been made by figures as diverse as the architects Louis Kahn, Aldo Van Eyck, Denys Lasdun and Niels Torp and novelist Italo Calvino. But, as the book shows, thinking of buildings as little cities provides a new lens through which to reappraise the contributions of many other architects, including Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Eliel Saarinen, Bernard Rudofsky, Hans Scharoun, Leon Krier, Fumihiko Maki, Charles Correa and Team 10. In doing so, the author identifies common themes that form an unexpected bridgehead between the urban and architectural approaches of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Renaissance and 20th century. The book explores buildings from across the globe, including lesser-known projects, such as Wright's unbuilt house in Italy or Saarinen's master plan for Cranbrook Academy, as well as more recent projects by Niels Torp, Behnisch Architekten, Sou Fujimoto, Peter Barber and WOHA. It concludes with practical case studies of residential, health, education and workplace projects from different countries, fulsomely illustrated with many drawings and photographs. These show how architectural design viewed through an urban lens provides a conceptual framework for breaking down the scale of large buildings and integrating them with their context. And crucially, these also show a very accessible way of explaining evolving designs to the intended users and eliciting their participation in the design process. The book offers a compelling approach to the design of projects at all scales, within an ecological perspective: the sense that big and small, cities and buildings must be approached holistically if we are to reverse the degradation and depletion of our habitat, both natural and man-made.
Architectures of Care
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Drawing from a diverse range of interdisciplinary voices, this book explores how spaces of care shape our affective, material, and social forms, from the most intimate scale of the body to our planetary commons. Typical definitions of care center around the maintenance of a liveable life: encompassing everything from shelter and welfare to health and safety. Architecture plays a fundamental role in these definitions, inscribed in institutional archetypes such as the home, the hospital, the school, and the nursery. However, these spaces often structure modes of care that prescribe gender roles, bodily norms, and labor practices. How can architecture instead engage with an expanded definition of care that eschews such roles and norms, producing more hybrid entanglements between our bodies, our collective lives, and our environments? Chapters in this volume explore issues ranging from disabled domesticities and nursing, unbuilding whiteness in the built environment, practices and pedagogies of environmental care, and the solidarity networks within 'The Cloud'. Case studies include Floating University Berlin, commoning initiatives by the Black Panther party, and hospitals for the United Mine Workers of America, among many other sites and scales of architectural care. Exploring architecture through the lenses of gender studies, labor theory, environmental justice, and the medical humanities, this volume will engage students and academics from a wide range of disciplines.
Probiotic Cities
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Probiotic Cities covers a body of work that is at the forefront of emerging knowledge within architecture, towards designing informed indoor and built environment microbiomes. Sited within the broader field of Bio Design, the book presents highly experimental design research at the intersection of architecture, engineering and microbiology. The book describes work which explores novel strategies towards directly (re)introducing beneficial microbes into buildings and cities. Through discussion of both the work and the processes and methodologies used, it provides a framework to enable designers and practitioners to begin to engage with contemporary human-microbe relationships towards the design of healthy and resilient cities. The book defines a new microbial paradigm for architecture that engages with broader emerging ecological or 'more than human' philosophies for design within the age of the Anthropocene.
Building Culture
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An insider's look at art museums and how they shape the ways we view art, through the eyes of the architects who design them. Architects and art lovers everywhere will enjoy this remarkable collection of interviews from sixteen of the world's most celebrated, thoughtful, and innovative architects who have designed many of the world's greatest museums. Spanning generations, geographies, and methods of architectural practice, these architects share the complex and fascinating process of creating spaces for art. Building Culture includes interviews with:​​ Frank Gehry, who reveals how a half-century of dialogue with the visual arts influenced his revolutionary Guggenheim Bilbao​. Kulapat Yantrasast, who describes his rethinking of exhibition design and how it expands the presentation of work in venerable institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is currently redesigning the galleries for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas​. Walter Hood, whose long interest in improvisational techniques in music informed his design for outdoor performance spaces in the Oakland Museum​. Elizabeth Diller, whose conception of the Shed in New York City's Hudson Yards was influenced by decades of work in conceptual and performance art. Esteemed architects who have designed, renovated, or created galleries for MoMA, the New Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York; the National Gallery and the Tate Modern in London; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the CentrePompidou in Paris, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in Japan; the Museum of West African Art (currently under construction) in Nigeria; and many others. ​ This lively compendium reveals intensely varied architectural philosophies from a diverse group of established and up-and-coming professionals. Engaging personal recollections of relationships with artists and curators, along with 80 captivating images, provide further insight into the design process and timeless inspiration for architecture students, artists, museum professionals, and anyone fascinated by architectural design, public space, and museum culture.
Botanical Architecture
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An original call to reorient architecture around our relationship to plants. When we look at trees, we see a form of natural architecture, and yet we have seemingly always exploited trees to make new buildings of our own. Whereas a tree creates its own structure, humans generally destroy other things to build, with increasingly disastrous consequences. In Botanical Architecture, Paul Dobraszczyk looks closely at how elements of plants--seeds, roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and canopies--compare with and constitute human-made buildings. Given the omnipresence of plant life in and around our structures, Dobraszczyk argues that we ought to build as much for plants as for ourselves, understanding that our lives are always totally dependent on theirs. Botanical Architecture offers a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture.
