Blue Architecture

Built environments are greedy. They consume much from nature. Blue Architecture provides a vision for reversing the scheme of things and a roadmap for buildings to produce ecosystem services. By giving creative agency to water, Brook Muller offers vital new approaches to urban architecture. ~Frederick R. Steiner, University of Pennsylvania, author of Making Plans: How to Engage with Landscape, Design, and the Urban Environment

A brilliant teacher, theorist and designer, Brook Muller claims the liminal as his domain in advancing water as a foundation for architectural and urban design. He connects poesis with pragmatics, historical vernaculars with the cutting-edge technological, and accountable supply chain with participatory community action. Muller takes on ecosystems courageously, preparing us for the complexity of the conditions we live in, and offering multiple relevant models for realizing hydrologically responsive urban architectures. I want to live in Muller's future, one in which designers are infrastructural collaborators and stewards helping usher in new processes as we build our common future. ~Frances Bronet, President, Pratt Institute

Spirited, teeming with firsthand accounts and exemplary projects drawn from around the world, Blue Architecture leads us through the ways architecture can holistically incorporate water systems beyond the footprint of a single building. Brook Muller not only delivers a different way to look at the role design can play in addressing environmental uncertainty, but also reveals the values designers might bring to their work. ~Anthony Acciavatti, Yale University, author of Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India's Ancient River

This decentralized account of architectural design reconceives the ways in which urban spaces are inhabited and the habituations of those living within such environs. Muller’s analysis carefully and critically meanders throughout different climates and cities, demonstrating the particular and non-universalizable agency of water...Written in an approachable manner for any student of the environment, architecture, art, or philosophy, Muller demonstrates an expertise and familiarity with the terrain of contemporary urban problems and their historical development...Arguing for an understanding of water as agential rather than material obstacle, Muller reconceives not only the task of urban architecture but sustainable development as a whole. ~Environmental Philosophy

With every crippling drought and devastating flood, it becomes clearer that climate change requires both new technics and new politics of urban water . . . it is architects and other professionals engaged primarily at the scale of sites and buildings who will find [Blue Architecture] most useful. ~Journal of the American Planning Association

Muller’s model pulls planners, designers, and scholars into a growing conversation that calls on water first to guide future populations away from isolated resource extraction, industrial conveyance, and erasure schemes whose ethics and economies are becoming outmoded, and toward our era’s urgency for more inclusive human-nature approaches. Brook Muller’s Blue Architecture rightly looks to water and watersheds as integrative designer-builders in 'the hydrological city'. ~H-Net Reviews