Beautifully Odd (Design in an Age of Radical Disruptions)

This book will speak to a general audience interested in design and architecture by exploring how our contemporary built environment is responding to the disruptive revolutions of our age: the digital transformation and the climate crisis.

The changes over the last two decades caused by a warming planet and rapid has introduced cataclysmic shifts in the ways buildings mediate our environment. Both phenomena have changed the meaning of space. The first has revealed that architectural space is not an empty void but a territory full of other active participants. The second has shown space to be more extensive and that what we can see with relations far beyond the perceptible physical realm. Architecture of the 21st century is embodying these disruptive forces I ways that can be mapped and discussed in relation to the history of the practice. Architects have come to realize that that our built environment is no longer controllable, reliable, or containable and is defined, instead, but its fragility and relativity to other fields.

The book will sketch the outlines of a new paradigm for architectural thinking based on five concepts for how we experience our built environment today: Navigation, Scale, Order, Materiality, and Time.