TERRITORIES

Architecture is increasingly understood through the language of images. This is often at the expense of architecture’s more valuable agency as a strategic and social practice, embroiled in the complexities of the contemporary city. The book, therefore, moved beyond formal aesthetics of materials and composition, instead exploring the social, economic, cultural, ecological and political ‘territories’ of practice. This was achieved through a number of strategies, such as reinventing ways to visually communicate ‘the project’, expanding ‘the project’ beyond buildings, referencing key historical and cultural ‘prompts’ throughout the book, and commissions three provocative essays.

The design of the book was a close collaboration between TERROIR and the book’s designer Marcus Piper, with periodic participation of the book’s editor. A key intent was to move away from conventional photography and invest heavily in the language of diagrams and illustrations. Imaging strategic thinking, rather than visual aesthetics. Alongside this, images of cities, historical places and other archival material was folded into the narrative. While relatively easy to describe, the reality of the production process meant a significant investment of time and detailed review and revision, to create information rich, yet intuitively comprehendible narratives.

The impact of any book is in its reading and the distribution of knowledge. To this end the book is available across Australia and through our international distributors, in Europe and America. As Professor of Practice at UTS, TERROIR Director Gerard Reinmuth will draw on the material in this book, and its approach to understanding architecture, as a key educational tool. There is an urgent need to rethink what architecture is, both from an ecological and climate perspective, but also as a social and political practice, as a spatial and material practice, which this book hopes to support and engender.

Key features of the book include the way in which discussion on the relevance and potency of architecture toggles between the local, the intimate and specific, to the global, the international and the macro. This is both a narrative feature and a graphic and visual feature. Maps, ideograms and illustrations are harnessed to their full value. The direct unsentimental quality of Lombardi’s drawings is an inspiration to flow diagrams, used as a tool for unpacking the social and political terrain of each urban project. These diagrams enable an understanding of relationality, illustrating the flows of complex interconnected actors and involved entities. A range of graphic elements were developed to help give the book a strong and clear sense of identity, through the use of colour, transparency/density, a strong grid logic and the dynamic interplay of text and image.