Overview

Architecture and Affect is motivated by two questions: Why does dismissed affective evidence trouble us? What would it mean for architecture to assemble such discrepant evidence into its discourse? Arguing that the persistent refrains of lived affect dwell in architecture, this book traces such refrains to a concept of architecture wedged in the middle ground—jammed amidst life, things and events. Rather than being aloof from its surrounds, architecture-in-the-midst challenges an autonomous epistemology. Beyond accounting for the vivid but excluded, this book develops a frame and a disposition for thinking critically about, speculatively through, and being grounded by, encounter. Examining affect through a constellation of spaces in contemporary Singapore, it details architecture’s uneasy but inextricable relationship with key subjects relegated to the incommensurate, the peripheral, the scenic and the decorative. The outcome is a politicized architectural discourse simultaneously grounded and speculative; bridging depth and intuition, thinking and feeling.

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9781472454638

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Reviews

'Chee takes us on an encounter-as-detour, tracking spatial stories imbued with affect and haunted by precarious power relations. Undoing the discipline's instrumental ambitions and revealing the fallacy of its purported autonomy, she asks: If we become better attuned to the micro-politics of radically open-ended affective encounters, can our knowledge practices in architecture be transformed?' ----- Helene Frichot, University of Melbourne 'A dialectical ingenuity, Chee's Architecture and Affect provocatively recasts the role of architectural history and theory as being three things at once: intellectual, affectively lived, and speculative. Giving alternative and intimate insights into Singapore's spatial politics, this beautifully illustrated and eccentric fly-on-the-wall work is a critical and imaginative profundity of lasting memory.' ----- CJ Lim, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Author Information

Lilian Chee is Associate Professor of Architectural Theory and Design at the National University of Singapore, where she co-leads the Research by Design Cluster. Her research revolves around architectural representation, affect theory, feminist politics, and creative practice methods. Her works include the award-winning essay film 03-FLATS (2014), the documentary Objects for Thriving (2022), and a co-edited book Remote Practices (2022). She leads a Social Sciences Research Council funded project about home-based labour. She writes on affect, architectural representation and domesticity.

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