Niche Tactics: Generative Relationships between Architecture and Site (Routledge 2015), the first book by architecture's Edgar A. Tafel Assistant Professor Caroline O'Donnell, explores architecture's relationship with site and its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment.
The language of evolution has been creeping into architecture — words like species, brood, and mutation have become commonplace. But there is one aspect that is often left behind: site. This book goes back to the basics of evolution theory and considers how we might think and design differently if we no longer neglect the role of the environment in the translation from evolution to architecture. Niche Tactics provides a series of case studies that investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, but also zooms out to look at the role of context in ecology, film, language, jokes, and teratology.
