Books and Edited Volumes by David Gissen
The Architecture of Disability , 2023
From the publisher: "Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modifica... more From the publisher: "Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for “the construction of disability,” this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world.
Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.
By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture."
University of Minnesota Press, 2014
The following is adapted from the publisher's description: Within Manhattan, between the 1960s an... more The following is adapted from the publisher's description: Within Manhattan, between the 1960s and early 1980s, the City’s great park networks, sanitarian projects of light, air, and water, and its monumental public works appeared to be falling apart. Images of flooded streets, blackened air, collapsed highways, and burning buildings characterize many people's sense of the city’s landscape during this period. At the same time, architects in New York reimagined interior space as a response to a perceived transformation in the urban environment. David Gissen reveals that a new chapter in New York’s environmental history was unfolding inside the city’s silvery late-modern architecture.
In Manhattan Atmospheres, Gissen uncovers an alternative environmental history by examining the interiors of megastructural apartment complexes, post-modern office buildings, and mammoth museum complexes that were built in this era. These environments were integral to New York City’s restructuring and also some of the most politicized fabrications of "nature" found in the city. Behind the tinted and mirrored glass of these buildings, the vaporous cooled and warmed atmospheres offered protection from pollution, stewarded urban greenery, and helped preserve precious cultural artifacts.
Caught in politicized debates about culture, environment and architectural meaning, these spaces were far from simple solutions to the city’s dilemmas. Making a significant contribution to postwar architectural history, critical geography, and urban studies, Gissen deftly demonstrates how these sealed environments were not closed off conceptually from the surrounding city but instead were key sites of environmental production and, in turn, a new type of socionatural form."
Princeton Architecture Press, 2009
From the publisher:
"We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, m... more From the publisher:
"We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these "subnatural forces" are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice."
Future Anterior, 2019
This is the introduction to the special issue of Future Anterior on "Preservation and Disability.... more This is the introduction to the special issue of Future Anterior on "Preservation and Disability." The introduction is an extended essay on the concept of "the preservation of disability." This particular formulation offers us a way to entangle human impairment and the built environment beyond the limitations of "accessibility" and the ideas of "accessible design." Rather, the preservation of disability imagines how human impairment might become an intervention into the aesthetics and ultimate meaning of the historic past and the built environment, more generally.
Wiley/Architecture Design, 2010
From the publisher:
"Advancing a new relationship between architecture and nature, Territory emp... more From the publisher:
"Advancing a new relationship between architecture and nature, Territory emphasises the simultaneous production of architectural objects and the environment surrounding them. Conceptualised within a framework that draws from physical and human geographical thought, this title of Architectural Design examines the possibility of an architecture that actively produces its external, ecological conditions. The architecture here scans and modifies atmospheres, arboreal zones, geothermal exchange, magnetic fields, habitats and toxicities – enabling new and intense geographical patterns, effects and sensations within architectural and urban experience. Territory charts out a space, a territory, for architecture beyond conceptualisations of context or environment, understood as that stable setting which pre-exists the production of new things. Ultimately, it suggests a role for architecture as a strategy of environmental tinkering versus one of accommodation or balance with an external natural world."
Papers by David Gissen
Art in America, 2020
This commissioned essay proposes an architectural environmental politics that revisits qualities ... more This commissioned essay proposes an architectural environmental politics that revisits qualities of space once deemed sickly -- an alternative environmentalism informed by disability aesthetics and politics. In the late 19th and early 20th century, architects in Europe, the US and their colonial holdings sought ways to "solarize" space through "radiant" forms that would rid urban space of disease by increasing the intensity of sunlight. Much of the aesthetics of modernity is rooted in these aesthetic tropes. Today, this version of modernity makes little sense due to climate change (chiefly) and transformed virology and microbiological treatment and modeling. I examine ways to recover the "dark day" rid by various visions of a future city. This article is an extract from a chapter of a forthcoming book -- where the "dark day" is one of countless examples of how we can revisit historic architectural thinking on impairment and space.
Log 46, 2019
This essay addresses the return of classicism as a presumed vanguard aesthetic in many contempora... more This essay addresses the return of classicism as a presumed vanguard aesthetic in many contemporary architecture schools and the wider turn towards historicism in vanguard contemporary architectural aesthetics. It recovers another, far more provocative, vision of classical aesthetics in the work of recent scholars and that challenges the role of classicism as emblematic of timeless, disciplinary, architectural values. The title of the essay is a play on the second Chicago Architecture Biennale's theme of "Make New History"(2017-18). That exhibition was emblematic of the manner in which a turn towards history was and is positioned against more explicit political engagements in contemporary architecture.
AA Files 76, 2019
Commissioned by the Architectural Association for its relaunch of AA Files, this essay critically... more Commissioned by the Architectural Association for its relaunch of AA Files, this essay critically examines the architectural concept of nature with a strong focus on ideas and designs from the past 25 years. "Nature" joins forty other commissioned essays by architects, historians and writers and that form an A-Z dictionary of contemporary architectural thought. The issue was edited by the AA Publications new director Maria Giudici.
Future Anterior, 2018
This paper explores the theory, methods, and results of a writing workshop taught by the author a... more This paper explores the theory, methods, and results of a writing workshop taught by the author at Columbia University's Graduate Program in Historic Preservation in 2016. The workshop examined various charters and proclamations that outlined the "rights of monuments," as well as theories regarding the extension of rights to the non-human. Participants in the writing studio then collectively drafted some rights for monuments for today. In addition to the ideas in the attached paper, the workshop tried to bring the mentality of the design studio -- where methods, theories and proposals interact freely and speculatively -- into the writing projects staged within a history and theory seminar.
Copy Culture: Sharing in the Age of Digital Reproduction; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2018
This essay examines how environments and environmental histories appear in unexpected ways within... more This essay examines how environments and environmental histories appear in unexpected ways within reproductions of art and other cultural artifacts. While we tend to consider an artifact to be the subject of a reproduction, techniques from photographs to contemporary digital processes inadvertently capture environmental data as well. I explore some of the history of this phenomenon, a few who exploit this aspect of reproductions, and conclude with an "environmental reproduction" of my own. the latter demonstrates the potential of this conditioning of artifacts in reproductions.
The Architect's Newspaper, 2018
An exploration of the hurdles facing students with disabilities as they pursue a career in archit... more An exploration of the hurdles facing students with disabilities as they pursue a career in architecture. The essay examines challenges in the physical structure of architecture schools, historiographical aesthetics that suggest a type of athletic "romanticism" inherent in the acquisition of architectural knowledge, and the inaccessibility of construction as a key element of the history and practice of architecture and architectural knowledge. The essay is meant as a call for change and a radical insertion of perspectives to rethink the accessibility of education and the dangers of certain forms of labor.
Log, "New Ancients" , 2015
Journal of Architectural Education, 2015
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2014
Booklet from the Exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (June 2014 - September 2014)
Pratt School of Architecture Journal, 2012
Kerb, RMIT Landscape Journal, Melbourne, 2011
Landform Building (Stan Allen, ed..), 2011
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Books and Edited Volumes by David Gissen
Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.
By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture."
In Manhattan Atmospheres, Gissen uncovers an alternative environmental history by examining the interiors of megastructural apartment complexes, post-modern office buildings, and mammoth museum complexes that were built in this era. These environments were integral to New York City’s restructuring and also some of the most politicized fabrications of "nature" found in the city. Behind the tinted and mirrored glass of these buildings, the vaporous cooled and warmed atmospheres offered protection from pollution, stewarded urban greenery, and helped preserve precious cultural artifacts.
Caught in politicized debates about culture, environment and architectural meaning, these spaces were far from simple solutions to the city’s dilemmas. Making a significant contribution to postwar architectural history, critical geography, and urban studies, Gissen deftly demonstrates how these sealed environments were not closed off conceptually from the surrounding city but instead were key sites of environmental production and, in turn, a new type of socionatural form."
"We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these "subnatural forces" are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice."
"Advancing a new relationship between architecture and nature, Territory emphasises the simultaneous production of architectural objects and the environment surrounding them. Conceptualised within a framework that draws from physical and human geographical thought, this title of Architectural Design examines the possibility of an architecture that actively produces its external, ecological conditions. The architecture here scans and modifies atmospheres, arboreal zones, geothermal exchange, magnetic fields, habitats and toxicities – enabling new and intense geographical patterns, effects and sensations within architectural and urban experience. Territory charts out a space, a territory, for architecture beyond conceptualisations of context or environment, understood as that stable setting which pre-exists the production of new things. Ultimately, it suggests a role for architecture as a strategy of environmental tinkering versus one of accommodation or balance with an external natural world."
Papers by David Gissen
Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.
By recontextualizing the history of architecture through the discourse of disability, The Architecture of Disability presents a unique challenge to current modes of architectural practice, theory, and education. Envisioning an architectural design that fully integrates disabled persons into its production, it advocates for looking beyond traditional notions of accessibility and shows how certain incapacities can offer us the means to positively reimagine the roots of architecture."
In Manhattan Atmospheres, Gissen uncovers an alternative environmental history by examining the interiors of megastructural apartment complexes, post-modern office buildings, and mammoth museum complexes that were built in this era. These environments were integral to New York City’s restructuring and also some of the most politicized fabrications of "nature" found in the city. Behind the tinted and mirrored glass of these buildings, the vaporous cooled and warmed atmospheres offered protection from pollution, stewarded urban greenery, and helped preserve precious cultural artifacts.
Caught in politicized debates about culture, environment and architectural meaning, these spaces were far from simple solutions to the city’s dilemmas. Making a significant contribution to postwar architectural history, critical geography, and urban studies, Gissen deftly demonstrates how these sealed environments were not closed off conceptually from the surrounding city but instead were key sites of environmental production and, in turn, a new type of socionatural form."
"We are conditioned over time to regard environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about sustainable and green design revolves around efforts to clean or filter out these primitive elements. While mostly the direct result of human habitation, these "subnatural forces" are nothing new. In fact, our ability to manage these forces has long defined the limits of civilized life. From its origins, architecture has been engaged in both fighting and embracing these so-called destructive forces. In Subnature, David Gissen, author of our critically acclaimed Big and Green, examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature. Each chapter provides an examination of a particular form of subnature and its actualization in contemporary design practice."
"Advancing a new relationship between architecture and nature, Territory emphasises the simultaneous production of architectural objects and the environment surrounding them. Conceptualised within a framework that draws from physical and human geographical thought, this title of Architectural Design examines the possibility of an architecture that actively produces its external, ecological conditions. The architecture here scans and modifies atmospheres, arboreal zones, geothermal exchange, magnetic fields, habitats and toxicities – enabling new and intense geographical patterns, effects and sensations within architectural and urban experience. Territory charts out a space, a territory, for architecture beyond conceptualisations of context or environment, understood as that stable setting which pre-exists the production of new things. Ultimately, it suggests a role for architecture as a strategy of environmental tinkering versus one of accommodation or balance with an external natural world."
The elements we reconstruct include an enormous ramp from the fifth century BCE that once connected the Acropolis to the Agora below; a gallery of paintings at the top of the ramp; and a small stone seat, described by an ancient visitor to the site, that offered rest. These elements vanished long ago, and none have any precisely known physical, visual, or material quality. We use contemporary ideas about impairment, access, and disability aesthetics to reconstruct them into a variety of physical forms as valid as any other. Disability emerges as a form of historical inquiry, archaeology, and reconstruction—informed by the experience of collective human difference.