Joint book launch

Please join us at Citygroup in New York City on Saturday, January 20 at 3pm for the joint book launch of Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Commons edited by Brittany Utting and Architecture From Public to Commons Edited by Marcelo López-Dinardi, both out now from Routledge. These two volumes bring together a timely conversation about the spatial politics of architecture, its entangled histories, and its potential futures. Also on view is Reading Architecture from Public to Commons; the exhibition opens up the homonymous book to expose its contents visually, highlighting and complementing textual excerpts with imagery.

Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common (Edited by Brittany Utting, Routledge, 2023) 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 livable 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 questions such roles and norms, producing more hybrid entanglements between our bodies, our collective lives, and our environments? Exploring architecture through the lenses of gender and race studies, labor theory, and environmental justice, among many other themes, this book offers case studies that engage with the situated, embodied, and relational practices of care. 

Contributors include: Neeraj Bhatia, Jay Cephas, Lilian Chee, Hélène Frichot, Ignacio G. Galán, Gilly Karjevsky, Daniel Jacobs, Joy Knoblauch, Ani Liu, Fabiola López-Durán, Elsa MH Mäki, Piergianna Mazzocca, Ian Mun, Adrienne Rooney, Rosario Talevi, and Brittany Utting. 

Architecture from Public to Commons (Edited by Marcelo López-Dinardi, Routledge, 2023) provides a framework and collective reflection on understanding ways to reconsider and recast architecture within ideas and politics of the commons and practices of commoning beyond the public. The book opens with Institutions with a dialogue with the scales of the commons, the limits of language for fluid identities, the practices and challenges of architecture as an institution, the design of objects with apparent shared value in Chile, land protocols that explore alternatives to profit-seeking of property in New York, and spirited conversations about revolting against architectural labor from Abya Yala. Continuing chapters explore, under Territories, the boundaries of Blackness across the Atlantic between Ethiopia and Atlanta, the underground woven network with conflicting grounds of ipê wood between Brazil and the US, water cycles in depleted territories in Chile, indigenous women-led territorial and human rights struggles in Guatemala, climate change accidental commons in California, and the active search for racial justice between design and place in New Orleans. Contributions range from theoretical and historical essays to current case studies of on-the-ground practices in the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America.

Contributors include: Emanuel Admassu, Nandini Bagchee, coopia, Amira Hanafi, Janette Kim, Bryan C. Lee Jr., Marcelo López-Dinardi, Elis Mendoza, Marina Otero Verzier, Fernando Portal, Linda Schilling Cuellar, Pelin Tan, Luciana Varkulja, and a preface by Andrés Jaque.

Architectures of Care: From the Intimate to the Common
Edited by Brittany Utting
ISBN 9781032283753
300 Pages 75 B/W Illustrations
December 2023
Routledge

Architecture from Public to Commons
Edited by Marcelo López-Dinardi
ISBN 9781032394459
302 Pages 77 B/W Illustrations
December 2023
Routledge