1st Edition
Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space
Ordnance: War + Architecture & Space investigates how strategies of warfare occupy and alter built and other landscapes. Ranging across the modern period from the eighteenth century to the present day, the book presents a series of case-studies which operate in and between a number of settings and scales, from the infrastructures of the battlefield to the logistics of the domestic realm. The book explores the patterns, forms and systems that articulate militarised spaces, excavates how these become re-circulated and reconfigured within other domains and discusses the often ephemeral legacies and residues of these architectures. The complexities of unpicking the spaces of the 'fog of war' are addressed by an inter-disciplinary approach which deploys graphic and textual analyses and techniques to provide new and unique perspectives on a hitherto underexplored aspect of architectural and spatial discourse: the tactics and programmes through which the built environment has historically been made to respond to the imperatives and threats of conflict and, in the context of the 'war on terror', continues to be so in ever more pervasive ways.
Biography
Gary A. Boyd, Denis Linehan
’War and architecture are usually seen as mutual opposites, in that the former destroys urban and social fabrics while the latter hopes to repair and improve them. Yet this excellent collection of essays shows that the two are far more intertwined than perhaps we would wish. On a fascinating journey we are taken from the squares of colonial Savannah over to Ireland and Britain, then to France and Germany in the Second World War, plus a digression to look at soldiers’ gravestones from an earlier conflict in the Crimea. It is a chilling but highly informative read.’ Murray Fraser, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, UK ’From colonies, bunkers and camouflaged buildings to maps, railways, watchtowers, counter-terrorist street furniture, even homes... Like no book before it, Ordnance really gets to grips with the many ways in which militarism stalks everyday architecture, infrastructure, landscape and memory. A startling and beautifully illustrated collection that should become a pivotal text in burgeoning debates about the architectures of war past and present.’ Stephen Graham, Newcastle University, UK
