Conceived as part of the one-year investigation Catching Up with Life, A Section of Now aims to re-establish a dialogue between architecture and society that would allow for architecture to begin to contend with and address our changed and changing social norms. The publication serves as a meditation on new behaviours, rituals, and values and their spatial implications and seeks to catalyze urban and architectural interventions that accommodate, influence, and, in some cases, pre-empt our new lived realities. Authors address topics ranging from the safety of digital spaces to how normative life trajectories affect the elderly and the many selves each of us puts forward, while architects present frameworks for spaces for blended families, thirty-year-old retirees, and contested monuments, among many others.

Bringing together analytical essays about the contemporary moment and the direction in which society is moving, projective texts that outline new architectural types to address societal needs, alongside television series, photography, and architecture and design projects, A Section of Now outlines a new relationship between the spaces in which we live and the ways we live within them.

Editor: Giovanna Borasi
With contributions from Andrea Bellavita, Tei Carpenter, Mario Gooden, Melissa Harris, Helen Hester, Sam Jacob, Andrés Jacque, Joanne McNeil, Ann Neumann, Nina Power, Anna Puigjaner, Karla Rothstein, Hilary Sample, Jen Schradie, SO-IL, Traumnovelle, and Sumayya Vally
Graphic design: Folder Studio

Co-published with Spector Books
Softcover, 350 pages

Book presentation: A Section of Now, book launch with Giovanna Borasi

Related exhibition: A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention