CENTER 23: A I R explores spatial, visual, technical, and metaphorical implications of air for architecture
The Center for American Architecture and Design has released the twenty-third volume of its multi-award-winning book series CENTER: Architecture and Design in America. Edited by Professor Michael Benedikt, CENTER 23: A I R is devoted to the subjects of air quality, air movement, and air conditioning, and also to air as something sensual, metaphorical, even metaphysical: air in the sky, air in our streets, and in buildings.
As Benedikt notes in his addendum to the preface of CENTER 23, which addresses the impact of COVID-19 on our understanding and experience of air: “CENTER 23 is about the air we breathe and feel on our skins: how buildings move it and medicate it. It is about the intimate connection between space seen as a volume of nothingness—as the freedom to see and move—and space seen as a substance in motion, having temperature, odor and essential, body-contacting, body-entering goodness. Architecture shapes and apportions air as much as it does space.”
Featuring a collection of essays by architecture practitioners, theorists, and writers, as well as images from the A I R symposium and exhibition hosted at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture in Fall 2018, CENTER 23 offers a unified approach to air as a subject, one that is not only spatial, visual, and technical, but is also about air’s meaning to the body, directly, and to the imagination indirectly.
Essay contributions include “Preface” by Michael Benedikt; “Taking to the Air” by Steven Connor, reprinted from the book The Matter of Air: Science and the Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion Books, 2010); “Phasing Densities” by Sean Lally; “Sky Control” by Geoff Manaugh; “Atmospheres of Late Modernity” by David Gissen; “Coolth: Everybody’s Doing It” by Salvatore Basile, reprinted from the book Cool: How Air Conditioning Changed Everything (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and “From Bodies to Breathable Skins” by Rafael Beneytez-Duran. Featured projects from the A I R exhibition include vAIRiation by Matt Fajkus; ATMOS by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder; Fan Dance by Michael Benedikt; Innocent Air? by Samira Daneshvar and Veruska Vasconez; and The Future of Breathing by Shihan Zhang.
For more information about CENTER 23, and to purchase a copy from the Center for American Architecture and Design, visit: https://soa.utexas.edu/publications/center-23-i-r. CENTER 23: A I R may also be purchased from Amazon.