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.
Jacques Rancière is one of the leading thinkers not only of contemporary aesthetic theory but contemporary philosophy in general. After his break from Althusser, Rancière developed the radical and axiomatic principal of the absolute equality of intelligences and capacities that defined his entire body of work, from his critique of philosophy, to his historical studies of emancipated modes of labor and education, to the articulation of dissensus from the order of the police. Rancière’s trajectory as a philosopher led him towards aesthetics where offered a radical reinterpretation of the political meaning of aesthetics and with it, of modernism and postmodernism that, having shaken the world of art, is now shaking the world of architecture. This book brings Jacques Rancière’s demand for equality and his reformulation of aesthetics into direct dialogue with architecture. In doing so, it inquires into the role that architecture plays in distributing the sensible, in creating aesthetic experiences, in creating order or dissensus, in serving as a mode of critique, and in emancipating or stultifying its users and subjects. Through this detailed exchange between Rancière and four of the world’s leading architectural thinkers; Anthony Vidler, Joan Ockman, Peggy Deamer and Michael Young, a debate unfolds within the book that tests the implications of Rancière’s aesthetic philosophy for architectural practice today; questioning the way we write architectural history, how architects draw, what the labor of the architect is, and that questions key architectural ideas such as the distribution, function, use, ornament, discipline and design.
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2025
6.5 x 0.5 x 9.5 inches
192
978-1350342804
Joseph Bedford
Architecture Exchange Press
2020
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
200
978-1350133457
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
2024
6 x 0.4 x 9 inches
188
978-1350263062
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.
