After the exhaustion of modernist functionalism and Koolhaasian bigness, architecture should be reconceived within the limits of the earth, as craft, stewardship, locality and bricolage. In short, architecture is just more complicated than that. So suggests Irénée Scalbert, architectural critic and historian, in his recent book, Totems: Selected Essays on Architecture, published by park Books this year,The title image of the totem — an object whose power comes from its correct form and from its community's investment in it or that, and not from mere symbolism — seems to me to gather in Irénée’s whole project: architecture as something made, charged with collective life, and irreducible to either pure function or decoded meaning. Isn’t that architecture itself?Irénée is everywhere online, not much by his own hand, except on Insta. The book is linked above. If you want and can, please support the A is for Architecture Podcast by listening in and sharing it, or by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me a Coffee. +Music credits: Bruno Gillick Image credit: Communal corn bin, Togoland. From A Camera Actress in the Wilds of Togoland, Meg Gherts, 1915.

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