Building Arguments

A collaboration between Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Building Arguments will present texts by Canadian architects on the built environment, focusing on themes like the design of human interaction; relationships between people and spaces; new technologies and material invention; and sustainability and ecology. Edited and contextualized by a contemporary scholar or practitioner, books in the series deploy the CCA’s rich and deep holdings of mid- to late twentieth-century architectural archives and will cast new light on Canadian architects’ contributions in the field of architecture writ large. In taking up writing, either as a discursive pedagogical project or in scholarly or professional publications, architects, landscape architects, and urban planners approach the built environment and the practice of architecture with a tool that might be more accessible or easily shareable with other disciplines. As Denise Scott Brown writes in Words About Architecture (2009), “building an argument is like building a building … there must be a logic and pattern.” Building arguments is always necessary for practitioners of architecture. What, though, can readers gain from the results? By bringing architects’ published and unpublished writings into dialogue with current scholars and practitioners, this series will address this question and more. Small, portable, and short, but also well-designed and inviting to the reader, the first volumes in Building Arguments will appear in 2020.