Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, Leslie Kanes Weisman (eds.): The Sex of Architecture (1996)

“This book brings together 24 provocative texts that collectively express the power and diversity of women’s views on architecture today. This volume presents a dialogue among women historians, practitioners, theorists, and others concerned with critical issues in architecture and urbanism.”

Publisher Harry N. Abrams, 1996
ISBN 0810926830, 9780810926837
320 pages
via Dubravka

Reviews: Nadir Lahiji & D.S. Friedman (AA Files 1999), Durham Crout (J Architectural and Planning Research 2000).

WorldCat

PDF (6 MB)

Reinhold Martin, Jacob Moore, Susanne Schindler (eds.): The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate. A Provisional Report (2015)

This book builds on the research of the House Housing exhibitions, putting the historical relationship of architecture and real estate in the context of the contemporary debate about dramatically rising rates of inequality.

“In 2013, in the United States, the median-income white household’s net worth was thirteen times that of the median-income black household. In 2014, the world’s eighty-five richest individuals held as much wealth as the world’s poorest 3.5 billion. In 2015, 88,000 households applied for the chance to live in fifty-five below market-rate apartments, accessible through a “poor door” on New York City’s Upper West Side.

What is inequality? Typically, inequality is defined by a combination of economic measures referring to income and wealth. Entire populations, in the language of statistics, are measured and managed according to their place on the inequality spectrum: patronage for the 1%, morality for the ambiguous “middle class,” and austerity for the rest. This economic inequality is, however, inseparable from social disparities of other kinds—particularly in the provision of housing. More than just a building type or a market sector, housing is a primary architectural act—where architecture is understood as that which makes real estate real. It begins when a line is drawn that separates inside from outside, and ultimately, one house from another. The relation that results under the rule of real estate development is—by its very structure—unequal.

This is the art of inequality. Its geographies are local and global. Its histories are distant and present. Its design is ongoing. Its future is anything but certain.” (from the back cover)

With contributions by Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, Erik Carver, Cezar Nicolescu, Pollyanna Rhee, and Sonya Ursell.

Publisher Buell Center, Columbia University, New York, September 2015
Open access
ISBN 9781941332221
238 pages
HT Dubravka Sekulić

Exhibitions
Publisher

PDF, PDF (25 MB)

Keller Easterling: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014)

“Extrastatecraft controls everyday life in the city: it’s the key to power – and resistance – in the twenty-first century.

Infrastructure is not only the underground pipes and cables controlling our cities. It also determines the hidden rules that structure the spaces all around us – free trade zones, smart cities, suburbs, and shopping malls. Extrastatecraft charts the emergent new powers controlling this space and shows how they extend beyond the reach of government.

Keller Easterling explores areas of infrastructure with the greatest impact on our world – examining everything from standards for the thinness of credit cards to the urbanism of mobile telephony, the world’s largest shared platform, to the “free zone,” the most virulent new world city paradigm. In conclusion, she proposes some unexpected techniques for resisting power in the modern world.”

Publisher Verso, 2014
ISBN 1781685878, 9781781685877
252 pages

Project website

Reviews: Self (AR 2014), Wark (2014), Garrett (Antipode 2015), Chan (Art Papers 2015), Owens (Icon 2015), Coggan (Oculus 2015), Harwood (Artforum 2015), Barber (CAA 2018).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (added on 2019-7-8)
EPUB, EPUB (3 MB, updated on 2019-7-8)