Description
Book Synopsis2023 Finalist, PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban PlanningA 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 interactionsand the new technologies and approaches enabling themaesthetic, spatial, and experiential opportunities follow. No
Trade ReviewThis decentralized account of architectural design reconceives the ways in which urban spaces are inhabited and the habituations of those living within such environs. Muller’s analysis carefully and critically meanders throughout different climates and cities, demonstrating the particular and non-universalizable agency of water...Written in an approachable manner for any student of the environment, architecture, art, or philosophy, Muller demonstrates an expertise and familiarity with the terrain of contemporary urban problems and their historical development...Arguing for an understanding of water as agential rather than material obstacle, Muller reconceives not only the task of urban architecture but sustainable development as a whole. * Environmental Philosophy *
With every crippling drought and devastating flood, it becomes clearer that climate change requires both new technics and new politics of urban water . . . it is architects and other professionals engaged primarily at the scale of sites and buildings who will find [
Blue Architecture] most useful. * Journal of the American Planning Association *
Muller’s model pulls planners, designers, and scholars into a growing conversation that calls on water first to guide future populations away from isolated resource extraction, industrial conveyance, and erasure schemes whose ethics and economies are becoming outmoded, and toward our era’s urgency for more inclusive human-nature approaches. Brook Muller’s
Blue Architecture rightly looks to water and watersheds as integrative designer-builders in 'the hydrological city'. * H-Net Reviews *
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. Hydraulic or Hydrologic?
- 2. Aqueous Mediums, Urban Architectures, Anadromous Beings
- 3. Liquid-Shaped Space
- 4. In Concentrate
- 5. Reconstituting Architectural Horizons
- 6. Redrawing Waters
- Epilogue: Reflections in Depths
- Glossary of Terms for the Water-Conscious Designer
- Notes
- References
- Permissions
- Index
