Foreign Exchange: Conversations on Architecture Here and Now

Foreign Exchange: Conversations on Architecture Here and Now presents new nine new essays that respond to the online conversation series, which took place during one of the most turbulent periods in education, research, and practice in architecture, from November 2020 to September 2021.

Writers include Alex Curtis, Marwa El Mubark, Michael K. Hayes, Gary Hamilton. Alice Bowler, Philip Comerford, Livia Hurley and Emmett Scanlon.

The book is edited by Livia Hurley and Emmett Scanlon, assistant editor is Luke Corish, designed by Eamonn Hall.

Foreign Exchange: Conversations on Architecture Here and Now was funded by the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, in partnership with the Embassy of Switzerland in Ireland. 

Open to new and diverse voices, conversations, and critical perspectives Story, Building is a new publishing press that aims to explore the value and meaning of architecture in contemporary Ireland. Architecture has been cut adrift from much contemporary discussion. Framed as part of a divisive popular discourse that thrives on click-through headlines and binary, instant-reactions, architecture depends on an  image driven media discourse that celebrates the spectacle and the novel, stripping architecture of its social, spatial, and material agency. Intended for both a public and professional audience, Story, Building will unravel, assess, and redraw the terms and conditions under which architecture (in all its forms, by all its constituents) is produced, used and consumed, its very causes and its effects.