The Informal Stance: Representations of Architectural Design and Informal Settlements (ORO EDITIONS) - Softcover

Federighi, Valeria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940743397 ISBN 13: 9781940743394

Publisher: Applied Research & Design, 2018

Synopsis

This book looks to the moment of encounter between architectural design and informal settlements as the most extreme demonstration of an increasingly evident disciplinary fascination for urban informality. It is an enduring fascination, arising from the need to test the boundaries of the discipline in the hope of finding it adaptable to change and willing to adapt. It is also a fascination that feeds off the gap that exists between the search for a renewed relevance of disciplinary tools, and the wider loss of faith in the project as a way to envision societal change. In fact, such fascination is played out within a seemingly structural contradiction: informal settlements originate as the effect of economic and political strategies that are deployed at the global scale; conversely, when dealing with informality, architecture searches for legitimization at the very small scale of the tactical and ultralocal. A relationship of inverse proportion is in place, between the constrained scope of architectural design and the scale of the issues it sets out to address.

About this title

About the Author:

Valeria Federighi is a practicing architect and temporary research fellow at the Politecnico di Torino. She holds a PhD (2017) and MArch (2011) from the same school, and a Master of Science in Design Research (2012) from the University of Michigan.

Review:

This has generated an “informal architecture” constituted of small-scale disciplinary means, or polite practices, as well as a series of converging discourses, questioning or trying to change the socio-political and professional landscape. These were produced most often in curated events and publications which concentrated varied directions, projects and processes, in an attempt to offer common identities and representations. Valeria Federighi’s book proposes a very useful and necessary epistemological examination of such representations. The book is triggered by the scientific difficulty in approaching the relationship between architecture and informality, all the more disarming in an era of global flows and interwoven determinations.
―Tudor Elian, Teaching Assistant, PhD, “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest (Tudor Elian)

About this edition

• Publisher: Applied Research & Design
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1940743397
• ISBN 13: 9781940743394
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 260