Diversity in Design: Books on architecture

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America is an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States.

Set against a background of accepted notions of modernity relating to design and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this book provides a fascinating insight into women's social aspirations and identities. It offers new information and new interpretations in the study of gender, material culture and the built environment in the period 1860-1960.

The city is more than just a sum of its buildings; it is the sum of its communities. The most successful urban communities are very often those that are the most diverse. Just as poor urban design can lead to sterile monoculture, successful planning can support the conditions needed for diverse communities.

A ground-breaking visual survey of architecture designed by women from the early twentieth century to the present day 'Would they still call me a diva if I were a man?' asked Zaha Hadid, challenging as she did so more than a century of stereotypes about female architects.

This volume offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field of architecture by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century. By analyzing how architecture has intersected with histories of slavery, colonialism, and inequality--from eighteenth-century neoclassical governmental buildings to present-day housing projects for immigrants--Race and Modern Architecture challenges, complicates, and revises the standard association of modern architecture with a universal project of emancipation and progress.

Design with the Other 90%: Cities is the second installment in Cooper-Hewitt's ongoing and acclaimed exhibition and book series. It looks at some of the myriad challenges created by accelerated urban growth and presents design solutions that address the consequences. Exploring the multidisciplinary, overlapping relationships between urban planning and design, education, social entrepreneurship, climate change, sanitation and water, migration, public health and affordable housing in these communities, Design with the Other 90%: Cities looks at the efforts of international and locally based organizations, designers and communities collaborating with settlement residents to give them a chance at a more prosperous life.

In Building Sex, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky looked at how traditional gender roles have influenced architecture. In Queer Space, he examines how same-sex desire is creating an entirely new architecture.

Buildings have always been an expression of human sexuality. In this book, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky takes a look at the man-made world and concludes that it is just that: made by men and not women. The structure of buildings and the layout of cities in the modern world have almost always been determined by men, and the abstract and alien order of grids and columns that has resulted imprisons us in a way of living based on repression and, in some cases, oppression. By contrast, it is women who create the interior spaces within these man-created environments. Comfortable, beautiful, seductive, and logical, these interiors act as areas of escape, self-definition, and sometimes even revelation.