Unorthodox Ways to Think the City

This book argues that architecture and the city and their processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and urban cultural context. It performs an open intellectual reading that traverses architecture and architectural theory, but also art theory and history, cartography, philosophy, literature and cultural studies, to unfold a series of ‘figures’ that are ambiguously placed between the representation and the construction of space in architecture and the city. The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.

Teresa Stoppani is an architect and architectural theorist. She lectures in History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, UK. Her writings focus on the relationship between architectural theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence on the specifically architectural of other spatial and critical practices. She is the author of Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (2010) and co-editor of This Thing Called Theory (2016). She is the instigator and founder of the architecture research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, and an editor of Architectural Histories and of The Journal of Architecture.