Reconstructing Architecture: Critical Discourses and Social Practices (Volume 5) (Pedagogy and Cultural Practice)

Questioning architecture's complicity with the status quo, this volume moves beyond critique to outline the part architects are playing in building radical social movements and challenging dominant forms of power. Historically, architecture has constructured the environments that house the dominant culture. Yet, as the essays in this work demonstrate, there exists a strong tradition of critical practice in the field, one that attempts to alter existing social power relations. Engaging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, each chapter addresses an oppositional discourse that has developed within the field and then reconstructs it in terms of a new social project: feminism; social theory; environmentalism; cultural studies; race and ethnic studies; and critical theory.