The Architecture Exchange produces two series of books: Exchange Books (with Bloomsbury Press) that document the intellectual exchanges platform between architecture and contemporary theory and Workshop Books (with AE Press) that document the dialogues that emerge from our workshops.
Theory’s Curriculum catalyzes an emerging discourse upon the fate and future of architectural theory in our time. It gathers philosophical reflections, historical diagnoses, and polemical arguments from a younger generation of teachers, writers, academics, historians, and theorists who are each charged with teaching architectural theory to new generations of students in the classroom. Together they reassess the standard ways in which architectural theory has been taught, either through a history of theoretical concerns, a tabulation of theoretical frameworks, or a roster of authors. They address themselves to the conditions that frame theoretical labors; and reflect on who constructs architecture’s theoretical canon, who speaks as a theorist, who theory speaks about, who theory addresses, and about what, why, how, and for what purpose.
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2020
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
1
978-0998375021
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2021
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
1
978-0998375014
Is there an Object-Oriented Architecture? brings Graham Harman’s philosophy into confrontation with architecture. As one of the leading thinkers in the Speculative Realism movement, Harman has developed a unique realist position in philosophy that sees the universe as a carnival of equal objects with no hierarchy between humans and nonhumans. In his model, Unicorns, triangles, bicycles, neutrons, and humans are all things with enduring essences that outlast their partial transformations. It is a democratic vision of the universe that knocks humans off their ontological pedestal as arbiters of what is real. This book places Harman into dialogue with six of the worlds leading architectural thinkers Peter Carl, Jonathan Hale, Lorens Holm, Patrick Lynch, Peg Rawes and Adam Sharr each of whom question Harman’s ideas and question architecture through and with Harman in order to develop the implications of of his Object-Oriented philosophy for architecture.
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2016
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
1
978-0998375014
Imagining Architecture Beyond the End Times captures the reflections of a generation caught between the failures of utopian thought and cynical reason. The book seeks to retool old means in search of new ends; of new stars by which to navigate in an age of dis-aster, literally, an age without stars. The eight essays presented here are the result of a closely shared conversation. They are the revised labor of a week of collective living, discussing the times in which we live and in which the task of practicing architecture is historically situated. They present differing reactions to the state of the present and to the conception of time and history as determinants of architectural imagination. They variously propose critique, provocation, aphorism and manifesto, with sentiments of confidence, anger, retrenchment, modesty, irony and hope. They are imaginative gestures aimed at kick-starting the faltering motor of history, in a world that appears too frequently, as the saying goes, as being blown backwards into the future.
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2022
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
1
978-0998375014
This book brings Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic model of politics into direct dialogue with architecture and inquiries into the role that architecture plays constructing the political order of society, either by concealing or revealing its antagonisms and ideological conflicts. In doing so, it asks in what ways architecture operates politically; whether institutionally, in terms of its spaces and its part in forming cities, or as an aesthetic object with mediatic agency. Through this detailed exchange between Mouffe and four of the world’s leading architectural thinkers; Reinhold Martin, Ines Weizman, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Sarah Whiting, a debate unfolds within the book that tests the implications of Mouffe’s agonistic model of politics for architectural practice today; how architectural history, architectural drawing, the making of spectacular monuments, the design and policies behind housing, the making of public and private space, all potentially contribute to the formulation of the channeling of social conflict into an agonistic form.