Architecture from Public to Commons

This book provides an urgent framework and collective reflection on understanding ways to reconsider and recast architecture within ideas and politics of the commons and practices of commoning.

Architecture from Public to Commons opens with Institutions the dialogue with the scales of the commons, the limits of language for fluid identities, the practices and challenges of architecture as an institution, the design of objects with apparent shared value in Chile, land protocols that explore alternatives to profit-seeking of property in New York, and spirited conversations about revolting against architectural labor from Latin America. Continuing chapters explore, under Territories, the boundaries of Blackness across the Atlantic between Ethiopia and Atlanta, the underground woven network with conflicting grounds of ipê wood between Brazil and the US, water cycles in depleted territories in Chile, indigenous women-led territorial and human rights struggles in Guatemala, climate change accidental commons in California, and the active search for racial justice between design and place in New Orleans. Contributions range from theoretical and historical essays to current case studies of on-the-ground practices in the US, the Middle East, Europe, and Central and South America.

Bringing together architects, scholars, artists, historians, sociologists, curators, and activists, this book instils an urgent framework and renewed set of tools to pivot from architecture’s traditional public to a politicized commons. It will greatly interest students, academics, and researchers in architecture, urban design, architectural theory, landscape architecture, political economy, and sociology.

Marcelo López-Dinardi is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Texas A&M University. He is interested in the scales of design, the role of the public and commons, and in architecture as an expanded media. He is the editor of Architecture from Public to Commons (Routledge, 2023) and Degrowth (ARQ, 2022). He is working on the project Cemented Dreams: Material and Ecological Stories in Puerto Rico. The project examines the role of cement, architecture, the environment, and politics in the context of colonial Puerto Rico to present day, as a fellow of the Mellon-funded initiative Bridging the Divides: Post Disaster Futures Study Group of CENTRO’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. In 2022, he was nationally elected At-Large Director for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Board of Directors for 2022–2025. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (cum laude) and an MS in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices for Architecture from the GSAPP at Columbia University.