Architecture is at a crossroads - to survive as a vehicle of contemporary human culture it must extend beyond conventional aesthetic and technological reductions but this requires determining how to affirm its relevancy within a globalized and technological culture. In a world where the supposed alternatives to the rationalist and functionalist building practices of modernity are often no more than empty formalism or extrapolation of deconstructivist positions into architecture, Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture seeks new possibilities.
The fifth volume in this acclaimed series on the history and philosophy of architecture crosses a wide geographical and temporal range, moving from Greco-Roman antiquity to tenth-century India to contemporary Thailand and New York. The inter-disciplinary essays share a common theme in their reflections on the meaning of 'place' and 'place-making' as a richer alternative to the conceptual abstraction of universal 'space.'
Contributors include Manuela Antoniu (Architectural Association, London), Barry Bell (Dalhousie), Ramla Benaissa (Pennsylvania & Drexel), Martin Bressani (McGill), Jennifer Carter (McGill), Edward S. Casey (Stony Brook), Ricardo L. Castro (McGill), Marco Frascari (Carleton), Jose Jacob (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Panos Leventis (Drury), Daniel M. Millette (British Columbia), David Spurr (Geneva), and Nick Temple (Lincoln).
