Unless: The Seagram Building Construction Ecology

Description

Unless dissects the construction ecology, material geographies, and world-systems of a most modern of modern architectures: the Seagram Building. In doing so, this book aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet through architecture. In particular, the immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design. The enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A "beautiful" building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework.

Kiel Kenneth Moe is a registered practicing American architect. Moe has taught architecture and energy at University of Illinois at Chicago, Syracuse University, Northeastern University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

"Through more literal descriptions of architecture, architects, designers, researchers, and historians can come to see the terrestrial basis of building. Further, by refraining from abstracting those myriad processes, they can start to reason and imagine designs that better engage our terrestrial realities." --Kiel Moe, Metropolis Magazine