Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures

by Brook Muller Narrated by Will Tulin

Overview

2023 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning



Le Corbusier famously said, "A house is a machine for living in." We now confront the litany of environmental challenges associated with the legacy of the architectural machine: a changing climate, massive species die-off, diminished air and water quality, and resource scarcities. Brook Muller offers an alternative: water-centric urban design that fosters sustainability, equity, and architectural creativity.



Inspired by the vernacular, such as the levadas of Madeira Island and both the arid and drenched places of the American West, Muller articulates a "hydro-logical" philosophy in which architects and planners begin by conceptualizing interactions between existing waterways and the spaces they intend to develop. From these interactions-and the new technologies and approaches enabling them-aesthetic, spatial, and experiential opportunities follow. Not content merely to work around sensitive ecology, Muller argues for genuinely climate-adapted urban landscapes in which buildings act as ecological infrastructure that actually improve watersheds while delivering functionality and beauty for diverse communities. Rich in practical examples, Blue Architecture will change the way we think about our designed world.

Editorial Reviews

H-Net Reviews

Muller’s model pulls planners, designers, and scholars into a growing conversation that calls on water first to guide future populations away from isolated resource extraction, industrial conveyance, and erasure schemes whose ethics and economies are becoming outmoded, and toward our era’s urgency for more inclusive human-nature approaches. Brook Muller’s Blue Architecture rightly looks to water and watersheds as integrative designer-builders in 'the hydrological city'.

Environmental Philosophy

This decentralized account of architectural design reconceives the ways in which urban spaces are inhabited and the habituations of those living within such environs. Muller’s analysis carefully and critically meanders throughout different climates and cities, demonstrating the particular and non-universalizable agency of water...Written in an approachable manner for any student of the environment, architecture, art, or philosophy, Muller demonstrates an expertise and familiarity with the terrain of contemporary urban problems and their historical development...Arguing for an understanding of water as agential rather than material obstacle, Muller reconceives not only the task of urban architecture but sustainable development as a whole.

Journal of the American Planning Association

With every crippling drought and devastating flood, it becomes clearer that climate change requires both new technics and new politics of urban water . . . it is architects and other professionals engaged primarily at the scale of sites and buildings who will find [Blue Architecture] most useful.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159649171
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/06/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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