Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture
- First comprehensive analysis of water-based infrastructural challenges across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins
- Provides a uniquely contemporary design-research framework for multi-disciplinary strategies across multiple scales of river basins
- Reaches a diverse body of audiences, including academic, professional, designers, multiple disciplines, and communities
Way Beyond Bigness is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilises a three-part, integrative design-research methodology, structured as: Appreciate + Analyze, Speculate + Synthesize, and Collaborate + Catalyze. To do such, Way Beyond Bigness realigns watersheds and architecture across multiple: scales (site to river basin), disciplines (ecologists to economists), narratives (hyperbolic to pragmatic), and venues (academic to professional). The research critiques and recasts Oxford Dictionary’s two very different definitions for a ‘watershed’: 1) “An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas” and 2) “An event or period marking a turning point in a situation in a course of action or state of affairs” and its two very different definitions for ‘architecture’: 1) “The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings” and 2) “the complex or carefully designed structure of something.” The book highlights the author’s comprehensive work of over more than a decade, including in depth field research across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine, along with a diverse body of academic and professional collaborations, ranging from the speculative to the community-based.
- Publisher
- ORO Editions
- ISBN
- 9781940743592
- Published
- 9th Nov 2023
- Binding
- Paperback / softback
- Territory
- World excluding USA, Canada, Australasia & Asia (except Japan; China non-exclusive)
- Size
- 229 mm x 152 mm
- Pages
- 596 Pages
- Illustrations
- 160 color
Distributed by ACC Art Books
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