The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion

Interboro, The Arsenal of Exlusion & Inclusion (ACTAR Publishers), 2017.

"In architecture, what you exclude is often just as important as what you build. That becomes abundantly clear in the wonderful new compendium of techniques to keep things and especially people out, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion (Actar Publishers, 2017), by the New York City–based Interboro (Tobias Armborst, Daniel D’Oca, and Georgeen Theodore, AIA). The book is a dictionary of terms for arranging space and access to space through legal and financial means. These range from zoning and redlining to classical music―piped into convenience store parking lots to deter loiterers―and skywalks, which keep shoppers and office workers safe from the elements and panhandlers. The Arsenal is also a guide to modes of resistance, and thus an implied manifesto about how we can address architecture’s complicity with social exclusion. The book is as important for architects to have on their desks as any building code―whose mechanisms it reveals along the way." --Aaron Betsky, Architect Magazine