How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today’s dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power.

The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.

In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

This book examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.

With The Proposal Magid attempts to bring together architect Luis Barragán’s professional and personal archives by probing the architect’s official and private selves, and the interests of various individuals and governmental and corporate entities who have become the archives’ guardians. Magid, with permission of the Barragán family, commissioned a small amount of Barragán’s cremated remains to be transformed into a diamond.

In the seventh volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the Viennese émigré architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance in a contemporary world saturated with visual information.

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts.  In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.

Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s. In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.”

Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth.

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.