By including ecological concerns in the design process from the outset, architecture can enhance life. Author Brook Muller understands how a designer’s predispositions and poetic judgement in dealing with complex and dynamic ecological systems impact the "greenness" of built outcomes. Ecology and the Architectural Imagination offers a series of speculations on architectural possibility when ecology is embedded from conceptual phases onward, how notions of function and structure of ecosystems can inspire ideas of architectural space making and order, and how the architect’s role and contribution can shift through this engagement. As an ecological architect working in increasingly dense urban environments, you can create diverse spaces of inhabitation and connect project scale living systems with those at the neighborhood and region scales. Equipped with ecological literacy, critical thinking and collaboration skills, you are empowered to play important roles in the remaking of our cities.

By including ecological concerns in the design process from the outset, architecture can enhance life. Author Brook Muller understands how a designer’s predispositions and poetic judgement in dealing with complex and dynamic ecological systems impact the "greenness" of built outcomes. Ecology and the Architectural Imagination offers a series of speculations on architectural possibility when ecology is embedded from conceptual phases onward, how notions of function and structure of ecosystems can inspire ideas of architectural space making and order, and how the architect’s role and contribution can shift through this engagement. As an ecological architect working in increasingly dense urban environments, you can create diverse spaces of inhabitation and connect project scale living systems with those at the neighborhood and region scales. Equipped with ecological literacy, critical thinking and collaboration skills, you are empowered to play important roles in the remaking of our cities.

The Environmental Imagination explores the relationship between tectonics and poetics in environmental design in architecture. Working thematically and chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present day, this book redefines the historiography of environmental design by looking beyond conventional histories to argue that the environments within buildings are a collaboration between poetic intentions and technical means. In a sequence of essays, the book traces a line through works by leading architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that illustrate the impact of new technologies on the conception and realisation of environments in buildings. In this, a consideration of the qualitative dimension of environment is added to the primarily technological narratives of other accounts. In this second edition, the book has been substantially rewritten and restructured to include further research conducted in the decade since the first edition. A number of important buildings have been revisited, in order to extend the descriptions of their environments, and studies have been made of a number of newly studied, significant buildings. A completely new essay offers an environmental interpretation of Luis Barragán’s magical own house in Mexico City and the earlier studies of buildings by Peter Zumthor have been gathered into a single, extended essay that includes a body of new research. On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Reyner Banham’s, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, the book concludes with a critical tribute to that seminal text. The Environmental Imagination will appeal to academics and practitioners with interests in the history, theory and technology of architecture.

2023 Finalist, PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning A guide to water-focused and climate-resilient architectural and urban design. Le Corbusier famously said, “A house is a machine for living in.” We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. Brook Muller offers an alternative: water-centric urban design that fosters sustainability, equity, and architectural creativity. Inspired by the vernacular, such as the levadas of Madeira Island and both the arid and drenched places of the American West, Muller articulates a “hydro-logical” philosophy in which architects and planners begin by conceptualizing interactions between existing waterways and the spaces they intend to develop. From these interactions—and the new technologies and approaches enabling them—aesthetic, spatial, and experiential opportunities follow. Not content merely to work around sensitive ecology, Muller argues for genuinely climate-adapted urban landscapes in which buildings act as ecological infrastructure that actually improve watersheds while delivering functionality and beauty for diverse communities. Rich in images and practical examples, Blue Architecture will change the way we think about our designed world.

The Architectural Imagination at the Digital Turn asks what it means to speak of a "digital turn" in architecture. It examines how architects at the time engaged with the digital and imagined future modes of practice, and looks at the technological, conceptual and economic phenomena behind this engagement. It argues that the adoption of digital technology in architecture was far from linear but depended on complex factors, from the operative logic of the technology itself to the context in which it was used and the people who interacted with it. Creating a mosaic-like account, the book presents debates, projects and publications that changed how architecture was visualized, fabricated and experienced using digital technology. Spanning the university, new media art institutes, ecologies, architectural bodies, fabrication and the city, it re-evaluates familiar narratives that emphasized formal explorations; instead, the book aims to complicate the "myth" of the digital by presenting a nuanced analysis of the material and social context behind each case study. During the 1990s, architects repurposed software and technological concepts from other disciplines and tested them in a design environment. Some architects were fascinated by its effects, others were more critical. Through its discussion on case studies, places and themes that fundamentally influenced discourse formation in the era, this book offers scholars, researchers and students fresh insights into how architecture can engage with the digital realm today.

In The Emerald City, Dan Willis takes us on a flight of imagination that paradoxically never strays far from the most tangible, even intimate subjects. His essays range from the Tower of Babel to the Wizard of Oz, from Christo to Christmas trees, from the "lightness of being" to the "weight of architecture." This ultimately optimistic book suggests that architecture is as vital as ever: "It is tempting to say that our present cultural situation...has rendered architecture nearly impossible if not unnecessary. But it is also possible to look to what our lives, at the turn of the millennium, typically lack-fulfillment, spirituality, a sense of belonging, weight-and to conclude that the ground for architecture has never been more fertile. The texts-intelligent and readable-draw equally from literary sources, architectural practice, philosophical analyses, pop culture, and everyday experiences. Willis's perspective as a writer, architect, artist, and teacher informs his work; his texts are at once reflective and proactive, as they challenge readers to rethink their participation in the built environment. Accompanying the text are the author's original illustrations, which link the forms and forces surrounding architecture at the end of the twentieth century in novel, thought-provoking ways.

Boredom as an impetus for architectural theory and practice Any theorist or practitioner of architecture must confront, and even be compelled by, boredom. Called ennui, Langeweile, or acedia, boredom is a pressing concern, as the production and obsolescence of images accelerates with new technologies, leaving individuals saturated with information presented in fleeting displays that are easy to produce, easy to delete, and easy to consume. In this innovative book, Andreea Mihalache discusses the work of a quartet of well-known thinkers—designer Bernard Rudofsky, architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and artist Saul Steinberg—who all recognized this form of exhaustion and shallowness as the disease of the modern world. Rudofsky found it in a deeper and more intimate engagement between the human body and its environment. Proclaiming “Less is a bore,” Venturi, and later Scott Brown, explored excess as the remedy to boredom. With detachment and irony, Steinberg mocked the homogenous architecture of the American city. Taken together, Mihalache shows, these four offer a comprehensive view of the alienated relationship of individuals with their world at three different, yet interrelated scales: the body, the building, and the urban space.

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive—if hitherto overlooked—engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture—and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.