Intersections Architectural Histories and Critical Theories

Over the last decade, critical theories of different kinds have had an enormous impact on many different disciplines and practices. Intersections is the first book to survey comprehensively this impact on Architecture, providing sixteen essays that intersect a particular critical theory with specific architectural ideas, projects and events. An extended essay by the editors gives an in-depth introduction to the subject. Essays range from psychoanalysis and interiors; colonialism and modern urbanism; gender and the renaissance; to heteroptopia and Las Vegas. Contributors come from Europe and the USA, and include Iain Borden, Zeynep Celik, Sarah Chaplin, Beatriz Colomina, Darell Fields, Murray Fraser, Diane Ghirado, Joe Kerr, Clive Knights, Neil Leach, Barbara Penner, Jane Rendell, Katherine Shonfield, Helen Thomas, Jeremy Till, Henry Urbach and Sarah Wigglesworth.

Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1. Chamber to Transformer: Epistemological Challenges and Tendencies in the Intersection of Architectural Histories and Critical Theories. Tendency 1: Theory as Objects of Study. 2. Walter Benjamin, Mimesis and the Dreamworld of Photography. 3. Historical Errors and Black Tropes. 4. Space House: The Psyche of Building. 5. The Fragility of Structure, the Weight of Interpretation: Some Anomalies in the Life and Opinion of Eisenman and Derrida. Tendency 2: Theorised Interpretation. 6. A Fitting Fetish: the Interior of the Maison de Verre. 7. Sublimation (el Pedregal). 8. Beyond the Empire of the Signs. 9. Dark Lights, Contagious Space. 10. Colonialism, Orientalism and the Canon. 11. Women and Space in a Renaissance Italian City. Tendency 3: Theorising Historical Methodology. 12. Heterotopia Deserta: Las Vegas and Other Spaces. 13. Thick Edge: Architectural Boundaries in the Postmodern Metropolis. 14. 'Serpentine Allurements': Disorderly Bodies/Disorderly Spaces. 15. The Construction of Identity: Virginia Woolf's City. 16. Thick Time: Architecture and the Traces of Time. 17. The Use of Fiction to Reinterpreting Architectural and Urban Space. Index.

Iain Borden and Jane Rendell both lecture in architectural history and theory at The Bartlett, University College London, UK.