127 x 203, 282 pages, full colour printing, perfect bound, softcover, 2023

Chez Etym. is an edited collection which draws together new work from 13 architects, academics, artists, poets, photographers, and graduates from Europe and Australia. Through a soft lens and a reverence for the written word, Chez Etym.’s primary focus is ‘place’ explored from the periphery. For the authors, place is born from the temporal and exists as a series of tacit layers spread across space and time. Thus place presents a crucial essence of being; an intensely human consideration that shifts in perspective from society, to landscape, cities, history, and the transcendental. This multifaceted understanding is crucial to any argument on how we do, or should, live in our environment. It offers a key to understanding planetary timescales of climate change, mnemonic timescales of cultural identity, the ecological timescales of an (increasingly extinct) environment, and the responsibility we owe to our environments.

In Chez Etym., these themes are explored with a zeal for meaning layered through language: Paul Stallan considers governmental education policy and its symbiosis with social concerns manifest in Glasgow’s urban realm; Brit Andresen uses two built works to explore the poetics of architecture as landscape; Lisbeth Funck and Matthew Anderson recount a landscape-charged workshop at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin; and the editors explore ontological and philosophical musings on death and erased cultural identity. The outcome is a contemporary precis of understated potency, on how to design with place, taking root in the subconscious and gently affecting the reader’s hand.

Contributors:
Brit Andresen, Paul Stallan, Lisbeth Funck and Matthew Anderson (Studio Positions), Migrant Landscapes (Paesaggi Migranti), Thom Igwe-Walker, Matthew Doran, Kenneth Steven, Alastair Jackson, Associates Architecture, Holly Gavin, Faulds Stark, Samuel Stair, Lily Éire Parsons.

Published with the support of Occupy, the 2022 Australasian Students of Architecture Congress.

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