Some good news from the Architectural Association. Clara Olóriz Sanjuán and her team have been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for an edited book on Landscape as Territory. Full details here. I have a piece in the book, based on a lecture I gave at the AA in 2015.
Landscape as Territory is a cartographic book project that critically addresses the agency of architects in the so-called “urban age,” through an understanding of territory as a design praxis through which consequential landscapes are produced. Territory, understood as a “political technology,” has the capacity to involve architects and designers into complex social, political, technical, legal, strategic, and economic processes that are both historical and geographical engines of contemporary urbanization. Territorial praxis is interrogated in a collection of threaded theory and design contributions where essays pose key questions that are addressed through projective cartographies, unfolding arguments related to three sections: (1) territory, (2) critical cartographies and (3) agency. This material proposes a critical reappropriation of cartographic tools, complicit in the production of territories, to question and expand the architect’s agency, beyond its current disciplinary confinements.