Chora

Architecture is at a crossroads - to survive as a vehicle of contemporary human culture it must extend beyond conventional aesthetic and technological reductions but this requires determining how to affirm its relevancy within a globalized and technological culture. In a world where the supposed alternatives to the rationalist and functionalist building practices of modernity are often no more than empty formalism or extrapolation of deconstructivist positions into architecture, "Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture" seeks new possibilities. The fifth volume in this acclaimed series on the history and philosophy of architecture crosses a wide geographical and temporal range, moving from Greco-Roman antiquity to tenth-century India to contemporary Thailand and New York. The inter-disciplinary essays share a common theme in their reflections on the meaning of 'place' and 'place-making' as a richer alternative to the conceptual abstraction of universal 'space.'