Agency

While the potential of agency is most frequently taken to be the power and freedom to act for oneself, for the architectural community this also involves the power and responsibility to act as intermediaries on behalf of others.

Presenting current thinking from practitioners and scholars from around the world, this book asks for a more active relationship between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. Considering issues of architectural research as an agency of transformation, this book explores how humanities research can better contribute towards understanding current architectural needs.

Florian Kossak, Doina Petrescu, Tatjana Schneider, Renata Tyszczuk and Stephen Walker all teach and research at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. They are members of the Research Centre Agency, which conducts transformative research into architectural practice and education, suggesting research activity that both creates and responds to shifting conditions. Instead of remaining passively (and safely) within academic environments, Agency sees itself as a collective of agents acting both within and between the fields of research, practice, education, and civic life.