Building/Object: Shared and Contested Territories of Design and Architecture (Aesthetics and Contemporary Art)

Building/Object addresses the space in between the conventional objects of design and the conventional objects of architecture, probing and reassessing the differences between the disciplines of design history and architectural history

Each of the 13 chapters in this book examine things which are neither object-like nor building-like, but somewhere in between – air conditioning; bookshelves; partition walls; table-monuments; TVs; convenience stores; cars – exposing particular political configurations and resonances that otherwise might be occluded. In doing so, they reveal that the definitions we make of objects in opposition to buildings, and of architecture in opposition to design, are not as fundamental as they seem.

This book brings new aspects of the creative and experiential into our understanding of the human environment.

Charlotte Ashby is an art and design historian based at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Modernism in Scandinavia (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2017) and co-editor of Imagined Cosmopolis: Internationalism and Cultural Exchange, 1870s-1920s (2019).

Mark Crinson is Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck, University of London. Among his books are Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (2003) and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (I.B. Tauris, 2017).