Project Archive: An Architectural Survey of Socially Engaging Extracanonical Works | Volume 1 - Socially Engaging Forms of Domesticity

Namrata Dhore, Christina Truwit & Sofie Kusaba

Softcover | 15.24 x 1.91 x 22.86 cm | 170 pp

ORO Editions | 2023 | 9781957183473

This book is a culmination of socially engaging architectural projects from the Global South (Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania) that provide solutions to current socio-environmental issues. Featured projects provide a direct channel to people operating within a projects context to make their perspective more accessible.

Project Archive reforms the contemporary architectural discipline’s understanding of the built environment. The content encourages the audience to acknowledge the role of architecture as a political actant. Featured projects prioritise an attitude that goes beyond its formal elements of the current architectural canon. The projects give importance to both formal aesthetics and the ability to serve the urgent social needs of a community.

Included projects also forefront lower-tech solutions. They enforce culturally resilient models of domesticity as sustainable living and a longer-term response to ongoing environmental crises. Thus, showcasing extra-canonical works provides an opportunity to reflect on diverse solutions.

The content endorses learnings from regionally specific and environmentally resilient models of architecture. This book provides diversity in knowledge systems, and varied responses to; reforming traditional modes of domesticity, response to environmental and social crises and diverse conditions of a landscape.

Developed through a decentralised research process, the book also creates space for interdisciplinary projects with contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, historians, architects, etc. Featured list of writers include members at varied levels within academic institutions, architecture enthusiasts and independent researchers