Katie Swenson

"Whether you’re sunbathing at the beach, killing time waiting for the subway, or flying abroad for summer vacation, AN editors have compiled new architecture and design titles for you." — The Architect's Newspaper Environmental Activism by Design, a monograph by architects and educators Coleman Coker and Sarah Gamble, challenges designers to actively engage the environmental crisis through their work, while articulating an optimistic, tangible means to pursue community good and environmental justice through design activism and engagement. The authors assert that in addition to greener buildings, cheaper housing, and technological fixes, we must rethink pedagogy and praxis so that every single architecture graduate can define equity and transform the profession. Environmental Activism by Design centres on the award-winning Gulf Coast DesignLab at the University of Texas, which works directly with clients and stakeholders to produce spaces for the public to learn and researchers to undertake their environmental work. Environmental Activism by Design asks readers to challenge themselves, as agents of social equity, environmental justice, and climate action, to pursue operative practices and transformation rather than mere keywords and consensus.

A memoir of love and loss that inspires us to be our best selves. The day her fiancé died suddenly of a heart attack, Katie Swenson retreated to “Bohemia,” the third-floor loft that the couple had renovated in their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and began to write. A visceral account of grief and the profound kindness that resonates around it, this is also the story of her hundred-year-old house, named the “Scarab” after the Egyptian symbol for rebirth, and the two courageous women who built it a century earlier—Wellesley College professors Katharine Lee Bates, author of “America the Beautiful,” and her partner Katharine Coman. Parallel lives unfold in the magical Bohemia, where Coman died, where Bates mourned, and where Swenson wrote and wrote through that first searing year, held up by their spirits. Told with rare emotional power, In Bohemia is a meditation on love, family, and community, and inspires us to be our best selves.