Charles Correa (*1930 in Secunderabad) has played an instrumental role in the shaping of postcolonial architecture in India. He has also been a pioneer in addressing crucial issues of housing and urbanization in the Third World, including the proliferation of squatters. This anthology assembles a selection of essays and lectures whose subjects range from the metaphysical to the decidedly pragmatic and deal with architecture, urban planning, landscape, and individuals such as Le Corbusier, Isambard Brunel, and Mahatma Gandhi. It also contains a reprint of his seminal book The New Landscape (1985), long out of print, on urban development in the Third ...

The second installment of the Reader is centered on the theme ‘Mobilities and Fixtures’. In this issue Sean O’Toole interviews architect David Adjaye about African cityscapes, snapshot photography and failed utopias; Victor Lavalle uncovers the making of mercenaries in Uganda; Martin Kimani follows the African visa-seeker in the tragi-comedy that is the post 9/11 airport; Sherif El-Azma explores Cairo by foot; MADEYOULOOK and Santu Mofokeng imagine the didactic possibilities of trains; Manu Herbstein documents the ‘car-doctors’ of Accra; Chris Abani discovers the African city of Las Vegas; and Michael Watts examines oil cities.

Research regarding the significance and consequence of anthropogenic transformations of the earth’s land, oceans, biosphere and climate have demonstrated that, from a wide variety of perspectives, it is very likely that humans have initiated a new geological epoch, their own. First labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the merits of the Anthropocene thesis by the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences has also garnered the attention of philosophers, historians, and legal scholars, as well as an increasing number of researchers from a range of scientific backgrounds. Architecture in the Anthropocene: ...

An atlas of Canadian Ruralism including land use, infrastructure, community, structures, architecture, and important radical rural visions. Produced as part of the the studio “The New Ruralism” at University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, by Prof Mason White.

This conversation is the first of three recorded in Cairo about Cairo. Beth Stryker and Omar Nagati, through the description of their research and design work, introduce us to the post-revolution city and its multiple forms of informal architectures. We begin by evoking the numerous passageways of Downtown and the work of CLUSTER to rehabilitate two of them. We then describe these forms of informality, the danger in romanticizing them—by systematically assuming that they advance the common good—and what can be learn from them. We then conclude by problematizing the act of cartographying what was not meant to be mapped, ...

This is the account of a 14-hour drive around the perimeter of the largest city in South America. Exploring the edge condition of São Paulo, Justin McGuirk investigates the different forms of dwelling available to its would-be citizens, and meets some of the people carving a life for themselves on the verge of this unforgiving metropolis. Driving anti-clockwise, we take a journey backwards in time, moving from cardboard favelas and hastily built tower blocks, back to modernist social housing and the factory towns built early in the last century. Is this a tale, as the Brazilian flag attests, of “Order and ...

Lucy and I start this conversation around the legal strategies at work in contemporary India. Between the eminent domain, legal reminiscence of the colonial era used by state-backed developers, and the immanent domain that informal settlements constitute for their own survival in the city, we discuss about how law and its spatial practices can be used as political strategies. We also evoke William Burroughs’s fictitious territory of the Interzone as the place of suspension of the law, the thickness of the diagrammatic line designed by legal architects, a liminal space where one can deliberately inhabit, but where others are forced into. Lucy completed ...

Lina Bo Bardi pursued formal ideas, and she drew looking for them. But that’s not where architecture stopped for her. Zeuler Lima walks us through her work on paper.

Novelist and critic Jess Row traces, through postwar American fiction, the movement of the white imagination away from urban spaces and into empty, isolated landscapes.

They’re a kind of cabin or hut, very basic and awkwardly assembled, wedged into the space of the balcony between the guardrail and the wall of the building. The vertical sides are made of plywood, canvas or tarp, and are topped by a vegetal roofing that is more or less dry, more or less green, threaded with palm wattle. These huts are opaque and seem to communicate with apartments…

Moving houses looks into an old democratic tradition; to detach a house from its foundation and move it to another location. This process was relatively common throughout the first half of the 20th century. In the 1950s, people on the most remote islands in Nordland received disbursements from the state to float their houses to central islands with better infrastructure, and many of the houses in Vålerenga in Oslo and the wooden town in Stavanger were originally located on the countryside. Timber frame houses were moved as a whole or in larger parts, while notched houses were completely taken apart. As ...

“Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” is a collection marking collaborations. It takes migration as the central concept and historical event behind a set of feminist narratives of constructed environments and spatial and material practices. It tests the concept of migration as a method of writing antipatriarchal, antiracist, anticasteist, and antiformalist architectural histories. Our extensive individual research into architectures of migration and architectures by migrants and displaced people reinforced our principle of historiographical solidarity with those in the past and present who had been deterritorialized and dispossessed of land and home. Together, we aimed to build on the foundation of a ...