The fifth book in the Folio series features leading architects as they test out their ideas and designs among the students and staff of the National University of Singapore's Department of Architecture. The ideas cover a range of issues, including tropicalism, dreams and architecture.

For over twenty years, the Chora series has received international acclaim for its excellence in interdisciplinary research on architecture. The seven volumes of Chora have challenged readers to consider alternatives to conventional aesthetic and technological concepts. The seventy-eight authors and eighty-seven scholarly essays in the series have investigated profound cultural roots of architecture and revealed rich possibilities for architecture and its related disciplines. Chora 7, the final volume in the series, includes fifteen essays on architectural topics from around the world (France, Greece, Iran, Italy, Korea, and the United States) and from diverse cultures (antiquity, Renaissance Italy, early modern France, and the past hundred years). Thematically, they bring original approaches to human experience, theatre, architectural creation, and historical origins. Readers will also gain insights into theoretical and practical work by architects and artists such as Leon Battista Alberti, Peter Brook, Douglas Darden, Filarete, Andy Goldsworthy, Anselm Kiefer, Frederick Kiesler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and Peter Zumthor. Contributors to Chora 7 include Anne Bordeleau (University of Waterloo), Diana Cheng (Montreal), Negin Djavaherian (Montreal), Paul Emmons (Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech), Paul Holmquist (McGill University), Ron Jelaco (McGill University), Yoonchun Jung (Kyoto University), Christos Kakalis (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture), Lisa Landrum (University of Manitoba), Robert Nelson (Monash University), Marc J Neveu (Woodbury University), Alberto Pérez-Gómez (McGill University), Angeliki Sioli (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education), Nikolaos-Ion Terzoglou (National Technical University of Athens), and Stephen Wischer (North Dakota State University).

This book offers, for the first time, access to the chronological arc of John Habraken’s writing in a single collection. Few architects or scholars have so consistently and patiently pursued such a humane and culturally vital set of radical questions related to the behaviour of the built environment as N. John Habraken. From the publication of his first book in 1960, he has quietly helped redraw the map of architectural research, education, practice, design methods and theory. His insights lead us to a better understanding of how the built field works, contributing to the development of methods enabling professionals to contribute to its coherence and resilience. Following an introductory essay by the editors, placing Habraken’s work in context, this collection is organized in two sections and further organized around a number of specific themes: The Built Field; Role of the Architect; Control; Sharing Forms; Examples of Ways of Doing; Open Building; Tools; and Cultivating the Built Environment. A series of interviews with the author enable him to reflect on his journey of inquiry, research, advocacy and teaching – and the relationship between ways of seeing and ways of doing. Offering theoretical perspectives and methodological ways forward, this book will be of interest to architects, planners and urban designers tackling the challenges of the contemporary built environment that Habraken identifies, as well as educators and students.

The tropical belt – where large areas of South East Asia, India, Africa and parts of both North and South America are located – forms the biggest landmass in the world and has one of the highest numbers of rapidly developing cities. Coincidentally, architecture in these regions shares common problems, the most easily identifiable being the tropical conditions of climate and natural environment. The context for architecture here is fraught with conflicts between tradition and modernization, massive influx of rural poor into urban areas, poorly managed rapid urban development as well as the cultural and social strain of globalization. Many local and overseas architects, planners and city fathers are interested in the social and environmental dimensions of these areas that contribute towards short terms solutions and long term sustainable developments. This book, developed from the first conference of the International Network for Tropical Architecture, supplies a wealth of information from experts worldwide covering the cultural, environmental and technical aspects of thinking, researching and designing for the tropics.

In his books and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. He is “one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience,” says the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s articles—many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice—and offers ample justification for such high praise. Sante is best known for his groundbreaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and his critical tour de force, “The Invention of the Blues,” Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.