Miguel Guitart MArch ’03 has edited the book “Approaching Architecture: Three Fields, One Discipline” (Routledge/Taylor&Francis, 2023). The book explores the necessary and relevant overlaps and connections between three major fields of the architectural discipline – research, pedagogy, and professional practice. In so doing, this important text works as a collective reflection around the problematics of professional fragmentation existing between the learning and teaching of architecture and its impact in the built environment of our cities. The book sustains that the most comprehensive approach to the discipline is through the simultaneous exercise of the three field areas.

The book is particularly timely and generous in its cultural and geographic scope, and takes on the mission to represent a large group of academics, pedagogues, and practitioners from almost all continents – Antarctica is not represented. The United States, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland, South Africa, China, Japan, are all represented in the 18 carefully edited contributions. They manifest a shared common ground: that of the critical interaction between the three fields in the everyday exercise of the profession, inside the classroom and out. With an introduction by former Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture Dean Nader Tehrani, the book is endorsed by prestigious scholars including Marc J. Neveu (Arizona State University), Beatriz Colomina (Princeton University), Ozayr Saloojee (Carleton University), and Alberto Campo Baeza (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid).  

Follow Miguel Guitart on Instagram: @miguel.guitart