Author Description

"This book is a lyrical document of a decade or so of recent transformations in the city of Vancouver, B.C. Public fountains, pleasure-grounds, bridges, gardens, office towers, suburbs, shrubs, restaurants, and motion are among its subjects. The book also serves as a practical guide for the navigation and appreciation of contemporary cities. Poet and essayist Lisa Robertson maintains the Office for Soft Architecture to construct propositions and reports for the advancement of natural history of civic surface"--Book jacket front flap. "If architecture is the language of concrete and steel, then Soft Architecture needs a vocabulary of flesh, air, fabric and colour. It’s about civic surface and natural history. It’s about social space, clothing, urban geography, visual art and the intersection of all these. This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson, the ambulatory Office for Soft Architecture. There are essays – many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries – on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites – poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be. Soft Architecture exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism, some place where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert."--Coach House Books website (www.chbooks.com).