The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture

Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White have done a superb job in delineating a critical field for understanding contemporary architecture. With the contributors, they weave together a set of narratives that offers a strong sense of place and time in crisis that is at once global and local. The result is an excellent assemblage of recent thoughts and concerns about the place of contemporary architecture in society. Wide-ranging, incisive and yet accessible, the essays in this book lead us to firmly believe that architecture matters, for its ways of impacting the ethico-political problems of our time, and how it may now be engaged to deal with the crisis of the 21st century.

Abidin Kusno, Professor, Environmental Studies, York University, Canada

At the core of this important volume is an essential questioning of structural violence and its emergent spatial and material embodiments at all scales in contemporary architecture. Disassembling binaries, unsettling systems of power, and countering formal narratives, this collection of deft authors signals how architectural discourse today is an essential mode for confronting the now...and never again.

Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, USA