Environmental activism through design, the role of robotics and artificial intelligence in architecture, metaverse and carbon mitigation will be the hot topics of architecture books in 2023.

Released as the second part of our collaboration with ORO Editions, the 10 architecture books delve into the groundbreaking themes of the new year and opens up discussion to the urgent issues of today's era. 

Revealed by US publishing house ORO Editions, together with its research-based publishing arm Applied Research and Design Publishing (AR+D), the editors of ORO Editions emphasize speculative titles in the list, including Renovating Carbon: Re-imagining the Carbon Form by Erik G. L'Heureux and Lakshmi Menon, digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future by Wendy W. Fok, Designing-women's Lives: Transforming Place and Self by Toby Israel.

Meanwhile, take a look at 10 architecture books of 2022 by ORO Editions and AR+D. 

Read on more about the ten books by ORO Editions and AR+D to look forward to in 2023:

History Reinterpreted: The Myles Standish Hotel

"History Reinterpreted, the second published work from celebrated architect and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects Patrick Ahearn, explores the renovation and reimagination of the 1871 Myles Standish Hotel in Duxbury, Mass., as a grand single-family residence. Highlighting how new life and modernity can be breathed into an historic structure while still respecting the past, the volume includes the architect’s own hand-drawn elevations, before and after floor plans, and countless full-color photos from yesteryear and today to delight architecture and history enthusiasts alike."

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Sanctuary

"Sanctuary features a series of eighteen recent projects from the award-winning firm de Reus Architects. As a follow-up to Tropical Experience, de Reus Architects continues to add inspired, carefully crafted, timeless, and site-appropriate design to its growing body of work. Essays by Mark de Reus and Joseph Giovannini reveal the continued search that is inherent in design and the relentless effort to reveal how sprit of place contributes to design thinking. Each project is introduced with spectacular exterior and interior photography and gives the reader an in-depth look into de Reus Architects’ design thinking. With select projects from Hawaii, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest, Sanctuary explores a wide range of buildings showcasing de Reus Architects’ timeless and well-executed architecture."

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Designing-Women’s Lives

"Designing-Women’s Lives calls for a place-making revolution based on a culturally-nurtured ‘woman’s way of knowing,’ a ‘feeling’ sensibility, for example. Too often, this way of knowing, grounded in lived experience, is repressed in traditional design. Instead, this book illustrates how readers can use Design Psychology to explore their deep psychological connection to place as a catalyst for personal transformation. The author builds her case by interweaving her own design/life story, design-psychology-feminist theory, and stories of notable designing-women such as AIA gold-medal winner, Denise Scott Brown.

The book encourages readers to move on from asking “Will these blue chairs look good on my yellow walls?” to learning how they can find their voice through place-making. The author shows how designers and non-designers used the power of color, shape, layout, furniture, and special objects to cope with life-passages ranging from partnering to grief. Links to easy-to-do exercises provide aha! moments that inspire readers to use Design Psychology to create life-enhancing spaces that empower and shift place-making practice."

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Island Homes and Casual Elegance in Design

"Island Homes and Casual Elegance in Design presents the beautiful yet unpretentious new homes, residential renovations, and commercial buildings designed by Honolulu-based Peter Vincent Architects. A boutique firm founded in 1992, PVA specializes in custom-built architecture in a broad spectrum of styles and genres. Each project responds to the unique needs and vision of its client as well as the physical, social, and environmental opportunities and requirements offered by its site.

In stunning color photography, the book features twenty built works by PVA. Each shows the creative design, quality materials, and exacting proportions that set PVA apart. The text, crafted from interviews with managing partner Peter Vincent, tells an intimate story of each project and discusses the various personal experiences that have influenced his architectural philosophy. A foreword by Malia Mattoch McManus, author of The Hawaiian House Now, discusses how PVA projects respect their surroundings and the culture."

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Renovating Carbon

"With global building stock projected to double in the next two decades, the challenge of reducing the carbon expenditure becomes a planning-design-construction opportunity. This urgently warrants an assessment of existing architectural practices and employment/usage of building systems, by professionals and experts to facilitate sustainable and optimistic experimentations. It is high time that we rethink the creative aspects of not just technology and buildings systems, but also the culture and the foundation of the building industry.

The book begins to explore these facets of the complex relationship between the built environment, carbon mitigation and climate change through the low-carbon adaptive re-use of SDE1/3 of the School of Design and Environment (SDE) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The essays / articles extrapolate key themes on adaptive re-use to the hot and wet atmospheres on the urbanizing Equator. Unlike new-builds, the design and development of adaptive re-use projects straddle the existing realities of the built form and future projections of building use and operations."

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Environmental Activism By Design

"Environmental Activism by Design by architects and educators Coleman Coker and Sarah Gamble challenges designers to actively engage the environmental crisis through their work, while articulating an optimistic, tangible means to pursue community good and environmental justice through design activism and engagement. The authors assert that in addition to greener buildings, cheaper housing, and technological fixes, we must rethink pedagogy and praxis so that every single architecture graduate can define equity and transform the profession.

Environmental Activism by Design centers on the award-winning Gulf Coast DesignLab at the University of Texas, which works directly with clients and stakeholders to produce spaces for the public to learn and researchers to undertake their environmental work. Environmental Activism by Design asks readers to challenge themselves, as agents of social equity, environmental justice, and climate action, to pursue operative practices and transformation rather than mere keywords and consensus."

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Living + Dying INBETWEEN

"Reality isn’t what is used to be. As the world moves increasingly from the real to the virtual, the question emerges, who do we want to be as humans? The amount of time spent on devices is taking more of our time from the real world as we ‘fast forward’ to the virtual future. As we transform our work, play, living, education, and retail lifestyle, so too must architecture react and redefine the very nature of our public and private spaces. The challenge of our time is to learn to navigate INbetween these multiple realities on the spectrum between the real and the virtual world. As we progressively accept the technological advances in medicine that enhance our bodies, society will also begin to accept moving into the experiential, three-dimensional space of the virtual METAVERSE. This book presents a three-year exploration, research, and case studies for expanding the tools of architecture for creating within this new reality for Living + Dying INbetween the Real and the Virtual World."

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digitalSTRUCTURES

"digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future provokes a larger body of work that engages with digital property and data infrastructures. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies.” There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. If our everyday objects are digital and no longer physical, how does it challenge ecological questions? How does this affect the future of urban living?

The case-studies, interviews, and guest contributions prompt discussions that were part of the CityX Venice, Sezione del Padiglione Italia, at the 17th La Biennale di Venezia. Guest contributors were prompted to challenge and provoke the topics that are questioning the issues of open innovation models that operate a city, robotics and artificial intelligent systems, supply chains affected by digital storage, and data infrastructural arguments that play a large role within our Web 3.0 urban digital and real landscapes.

Using a mixed-media approach, the book couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and how data interacts with various open innovation models in digital property and real property."

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Becoming Urban: The Mongolian City of Nomads

"This book positions Ulaanbaatar as a unique case and one that allows us to view our urban world differently. Operating as a primordial soup of emerging conditions, Ulaanbaatar is conceived as an incubator for alternative urban concepts. The book rejects the agency of the masterplan as an effective tool in emerging urban conditions and instead positions the framework as a tool for incremental urbanism.

Although specific to the Ger districts of Mongolia, the story of how people, communities, planners, and politicians are grappling with the effects of becoming urban remains one of the critical issues facing the 21st century. How this process will be materialized and organized spatially, and by whom, will have profound ramifications on the climate and the social and economic make-up of our future cities."

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By Western Hands

"By Western Hands; Decorative Art from the Heart of the West celebrates the history of rustic design—from the Adirondacks and National Park “parkitecture” style to the work of legendary western furnituremaker Thomas Molesworth—and describes its evolution to the art form it is today, one that is born of an individual artisan’s creative process and uniquely inspired by place. The book includes leading voices in the movement, features original examples of bespoke mountain and rustic interiors, and showcases one-of-a-kind artworks from fifty of the best rustic and western decorative artisans working today. 

By Western Hands; Decorative Art from the Heart of the West is at once a history, a compendium and a curated showcase full of design inspiration, whether one owns a rustic, western or country home, or simply dreams of one."

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