Smaller Architecture by Michael Meredith is a pointed polemic against the globalised gigantism of contemporary practice, proposing in its place an ethics of scale, care, and radical localness drawn from Schumacher, Jacobs, Morris, and Ruskin.
About This Book
Taking its name from a phrase coined by Robin Evans, Smaller Architecture mounts a sustained critique of what Meredith calls Larger Architecture: the world of Bigness celebrated by Rem Koolhaas, the speculative real estate models that underwrite corporate mega-firms, and the signature branding of star architecture optimised for an image-saturated attention economy. Against these forces, Meredith constructs an alternative — one rooted in the economic thought of E. F. Schumacher, the urban theory of Jane Jacobs, and the philosophical writings of Emanuele Coccia, Edouard Glissant, and Cornel West. The result is a call to slow down, scale down, and redirect architectural ambition toward smaller practices organised along anarchist, locally embedded, and radically inclusive lines. Essential reading for anyone questioning the institutional and financial structures that shape built work today.
Key Features
- 79 pages of polemical and philosophical writing on architectural scale, ethics, and practice
- Written by Michael Meredith
- Published by Architecture Exchange, ISBN 9780998375038
What You'll Discover
- How the globalisation of architecture and the logic of Bigness have produced a Larger Architecture that prioritises scale and financial speculation over craft and care
- An alternative economic and social vision for practice, drawing on Schumacher's small-is-beautiful economics and Jane Jacobs's fine-grained urbanism
- How anarchist and radically inclusive organisational models might reshape the internal structures of smaller architectural offices
- A reconsideration of aesthetics and ethics in the tradition of William Morris and John Ruskin, reframed for a moment when the pace and scale of production demand deliberate contraction
About the Author
Michael Meredith is an architect and writer whose work engages the theoretical and institutional conditions of architectural practice. Smaller Architecture draws on a wide range of intellectual sources — from political economy to continental philosophy — to articulate a position on what architecture could be outside the structures of large-scale corporate production.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 79
- Dimensions: 13.3 x 20.3 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780998375038
- Publisher: Architecture Exchange
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and students questioning the politics of practice, theorists interested in the ethics of scale, and readers drawn to the intellectual traditions of Morris, Ruskin, Jacobs, and Schumacher as applied to contemporary built culture.