On Surface and Place

<p><em>On Surface and Place</em> is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces which foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Adopting weaving as its overarching metaphor it departs from Gottfried Semper’s discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles and emerges from the reading of photographs a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall façade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of connected ideas and questions combining many different themes writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and innovative rethinkings on a number of fundamental relationships including correlations between body and building word and image and between the rural and the metropolitan and the hand-crafted and the mass-reproduced. In doing so it seeks to foreground the very interrelationship of surface and place as it makes a claim for the relational nature of the world in which we live.</p>