On Surface and Place is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces and foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Departing from Gottfried Semper s discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles, the study emerges from the reading of photographs, a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall facade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of connected ideas and questions, combining many different themes, writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and...

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist...

Examining discomfort s physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture s position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort s triumph so much as discomfort s curious dispersal into practices that form modern life and what that dispersion reveals of...