Mapping Controversies in Architecture

Cutting-edge digital technologies enable us to follow and map controversies in architecture. Drawing on a rich tradition of semiotics and literary theory, the mapping controversies method offers a new way of enquiry, which consists of following, documenting and visualizing ongoing controversies. In the field of architecture, it allows us to log, analyse and map the variety of elements a building is made of, and the vast range of factors that impinge on design, as well as all the actors involved in the design and building process - their various trajectories, changing positions, groupings, modalities of action, and the associations they trace. This book reveals how controversy mapping allows us to follow and better understand urban dynamics and design concepts rather than swiftly explaining them through social, political, cultural or economic factors. It demonstrates how the use of new digital technologies and the huge amounts of available web resources permit us to track both the urban and the social. Moreover, it highlights how the newest developments in architectural software can improve the analytical and visual potential of controversy mapping. By examining material from sources - press clippings, interviews, archives - which document and map design controversies, as well as drawing on semantic maps and recent applications of parametric modelling, the book encapsulates the dynamics of a controversy. In doing so, it argues that this approach could permit a more efficient educational philosophy and a more informed urban planning process. The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors'trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature. This book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? It places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature