Mapping Controversies in Architecture

Reviews / Votes

'By crossing the tools of science studies with the digital techniques of mapping controversies, this book renews the critique of architecture. It offers a new way to place architecture and design as one of the most exciting ways to explore the common world because it takes controversies as the normal state of affair. With many lively examples it is a masterpiece of theory made empirical.' Bruno Latour, Institut d'A0/00tudes Politiques de Paris, France 'Yaneva brilliantly proposes a new and robust ethnographic approach to built form: mapping the controversies in which they emerge and seeing them as "connectors" with unique properties - neither just reflections of society or constructors of it, nor as cold materials - but as dynamically tying together different media, materials, peoples and things in a distinctly architectural way. This represents a profound shift in the way we can think anthropologically about the analysis of buildings and what buildings "do" and how they emerge socially and materially in the widest possible sense.' Victor Buchli, University College London, UK 'Mapping Controversies in Architecture is a fresh and highly productive challenge to the tendency of architectural theory to represent architecture as a static object. In Yaneva's richly documented analysis, buildings become animated ecosystems, "in the making" long after the completion of their final design. Yaneva's innovative methodology, hybridizing parametric animation and 'post-parametric' computation, unfolds buildings as multi-dimensional controversies. Political tides, technological shifts, financial crises and aesthetic experimentation are but a few of the actors Yaneva follows in demonstrating architecture's fundamentally connective role. In doing so, she extends a powerful platform for discourse well beyond the architectural community.' Ariane Lourie Harrison, Yale School of Architecture, USA 'Yaneva makes a heartfelt attempt to address the very real problem currently threate