Atlas of Material Worlds

Mapping the Agency of Matter for a New Landscape Practice
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-0-367-62415-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 378 Seiten, Format (B × H): 140 mm x 218 mm, Gewicht: 671 g

Atlas of Material Worlds is a highly designed narrative atlas illustrating the agency of nonliving materials with unique, ubiquitous, and often hidden influence on our daily lives.

Employing new materialism as a jumping-off point, it examines the increasingly blurry lines between the organic and inorganic, engaging the following questions: What roles do nonliving materials play? Might a closer examination of those roles reveal an undeniable agency we have long overlooked or disregarded? If so, does this material agency change our understanding of the social structures, ecologies, economies, cosmologies, technologies, and landscapes that surround us? And, perhaps most importantly, why does material agency matter? This is the story of the world’s driest nonpolar desert, pink flamingos, and cerulean blue lithium ponds; industrial shipping logistics, pudding-like jiggling substrates, and monuments of mud; galactic bodies, radioactive sheep, and the yellowcake of uranium.

Put simply, this book dares readers to see the world anew, from material up. Atlas of Material Worlds offers this new relationship to our host environment in a time of mounting crises—accelerating climate change, ballooning socioeconomic inequality, and rising toxic nationalism—uniquely telling materialist stories for practitioners and students in landscape, architecture, and other built environment disciplines.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Professional, and Professional Practice & Development

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seibert, Matthew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gestaltung, Darstellung, Bautechnik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Uranium. Big Bangs: Metal as Metaphor.

Denise Hoffman-Brandt

2. Lithium. Tracing the Green Energy Paradox across Battery, Body, Landscape, and Cosmos.

Matthew Seibert

3. Crude. The Bakken Fossil Fuel Frontier.

Collen Tuite and Ian Quate

4. Clay. Spies in the Making: Imperial Oil Economies and the Geographies of Mediterranean Food

Kristi Cheramie

5. Sand. 825 Miles: or, How to Make a Beach

Rob Holmes

6. Mud. And Its Meaning in a Port Town

Brian Davis

7. Metabolite. Material as Physical History of a Relationship.

Elizabeth Hénaff

Über Autor(innen)

Matthew Seibert is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia and former co-founder of Landscape Metrics, a visualization studio that specialized in data and design. Beyond his present studies in the agency of nonliving materials, his work employs representation as interrogative and speculative tools, from the employment of game engines as new model systems to study the experience of place, to the intervention within historical trajectories by crafting rich parafictions as both critique and potential future.