Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place - Hardcover

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9781584656531: Architecture, Ethics, and the Personhood of Place

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1584656530 ISBN 13: 9781584656531

Publisher: University Press of New England, 2007

Architecture and environmental design are among the last professional fields to develop a sustained and nuanced discussion concerning ethics. Hemmed in by politics and powerful clients on one side and the often unscrupulous practices of the construction industry on the other, environmental designers have been traditionally reluctant to address ethical issues head on. And yet the rapid urbanization of the world's population continues to swell into new megacities, each less healthy, welcoming, secure, or environmentally sustainable than the next.Green, carbon-reduced, and sustainable building practices are important ways architects have recently responded to the symptoms of the crisis, but are these efforts really addressing the core issues? The architects, philosophers, poets, and other scholars whose works are included in this book - representing a variety of cultures and religions from around the globe - believe that a deeper, more radical change in our relationship to the built world needs to occur. Taking the Dine (Navajo) "Hogan Song" - an ancient song used to protect and nourish the personhood of newly constructed dwellings - as their inspiration, the authors' represent the leading edge of contemporary phenomenology and hermeneutics, in dialogue with Native American philosophy. Each essay seeks to recognize the living and breathing, even sacred, character of place.While offering a careful critique of modernist, corporate, or techno-enthralled design practices, these essays investigate an alternative "relational ecology" whose wisdom draws from ancient and often-marginalized voices, if not the whisperings of the earth itself.

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Review:

"A compendium of some of the best thinkers currently working in the area of phenomenology and the built environment." - Thomas Fisher, Dean, College of Design University of Minnesota "Recently, it has become obvious that that good architecture results from dialogue, from open-minded yet passionate exchange between designers, builders, clients, and others. The essays in this book open the conversation still further, welcoming marginalized peoples, non-human living beings, and the forces of the natural world into the conversation. A radically new - radically just - sense of architecture emerges from this account; ethical and energizing because entirely engaging." - David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture, Chairman, Graduate Group in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania"

About the Author:

GREGORY CAICCO held the Lincoln Chair of Ethics in Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University from 2001 to 2004.

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