Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (Second Edition)

Dirty Theory returns in a revised second edition.

Helene Frichot troubles architecture’s will to purity by thinking with dirt—subnature, repair, maintenance, and the entangled more-than-human world. With a new Afterword, the book equips studios and seminars with indisciplined, on-the-ground theory for designing amid planetary mess.

Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture invites readers to think architecture not from above but from the ground up – through the dust, dirt, and everyday entanglements that shape our built environment. Helene Frichot shows how “dirty theory” crosses disciplinary boundaries, acknowledges care, repair, and maintenance as part of architectural intelligence, and confronts the messy realities of material, infrastructure, and power relations. In this second, fully revised edition, Frichot reflects on the reception of Dirty Theory and connects her arguments with feminist, decolonial, and ecological perspectives. An inspiring book for architects, students, and educators who seek to reimagine architecture as a critical and collective practice.

Dirty theory follows the dirt of material and conceptual relations from the midst of complex milieus. It messes with mixed disciplines, showing up in ethnography, in geography, in philosophy, and discovering a suitable habitat in architecture, design and the creative arts. Dirty theory disrupts a comfortable status quo, including our everyday modes of inhabitation and our habits of thinking. This small book argues that we must work with the dirt to develop an ethics of care and maintenance for our precarious environment-worlds.

Philosopher and architectural theorist, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot’s research and teaching is internationally recognized. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies in Architecture and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Currently, she is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, living, loving and working on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung.

184 Pages, Format: 12 cm x 16,5 cm, Softcover, ISBN 978-3-88778-564-2, English,

Available as e-book on Kindle, iBooks , Bookmate 
7,99 €