A House Deconstructed traces a single modest Seattle house back through cosmic time, industrial supply chains, global labour networks, and the atomic constitution of its materials — revealing that what architects think they know about buildings is far less than they assume.
About This Book
The Office for Uncertainty Research (OUR) spent three years examining one house in Seattle, not to celebrate its design but to dismantle the certainties surrounding its making. Working across four analytical vectors — Atomic Consciousness, Production Consciousness, Labor Consciousness, and Source Consciousness — the research exposed how a contemporary building is entangled with histories stretching from supernovae to global supply chains to precarious labour. What emerged was not a cleaner picture but a more honest one: that indeterminacy is structural, not incidental. For architects and designers invested in sustainability discourse, material ethics, or the politics of construction, this book is a necessary provocation.
Key Features
- 260 pages of research-driven analysis combining material science, labour history, and architectural theory
- Authors: Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash
- Case study: a single modern house in Seattle, WA, examined across three years of research
- Published by Actar Publishers
What You'll Discover
- How the atomic history of building materials connects architecture to the earliest supernovae — a framework the authors call Atomic Consciousness
- The vast and often invisible web of industrial production behind standard architectural components, mapped through Production Consciousness
- How Labor Consciousness reveals the wide spectrum of temporal and economic conditions embedded in even the most ordinary construction
- Why genuine sustainability critique depends on acknowledging the irreducible uncertainty and indeterminacy at the heart of the building industry
About the Author
Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Prakash are the principals of the Office for Uncertainty Research (OUR). Their collaborative work here draws on architectural history and theory to interrogate the material and systemic conditions underpinning contemporary building practice.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 260
- Dimensions: 17.6 x 23.8 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781638400523
- Publisher: Actar Publishers
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and designers interrogating material ethics and sustainability, academics working in architectural theory or construction history, and practitioners seeking a more critical framework for understanding the buildings they make.