Building Practice

"... Far from a run-of-the-mill compilation of flashy projects, this reader on the profession’s next generation offers up valuable insight that many young practitioners would be wise to heed." — Architectural Record

Building Practice features interviews with architects, designers, educators, curators, fabricators, strategists, critics, and activists who are advancing speculative design through the culture and politics of building, capturing critical and formative moments associated with building a practice. Each interview reveals strategies for linking practical and theoretical forms of knowledge and evidences the active creation of unique approaches to contributing positively to both architectural culture and the built environment. Collectively, an introduction, 12 short texts on topics that are pertinent to architecture today, and thirty-two interviews convey how architects claim conceptual territory regarding form, space, order, materiality, and aesthetics, and push for design to have meaning and value in relation to cultural, environmental, political, and social concerns. The individuals and practices profiled in this book collectively partition themselves from previous generations of experimentally motivated practices while individually exemplifying their own inimitable affinities, techniques, and sensibilities. Building Practice shares the first acts of an emerging generation of practices and identifies the peripheral yet pivotal aspects of building a practice today.