The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field presents architecture and anthropology as mutually transformative disciplines, arguing that the built environment must be understood not merely as designed form, technical object or aesthetic product, but as a lived, negotiated and continuously changing field of social relations, material processes, bodily practices and environmental entanglements. The handbook’s central proposition is that contemporary architectural research requires critical proximity: an anthropologically informed mode of inquiry that abandons abstract, panoramic and overdetermined explanations in favour of close attention to how buildings, infrastructures, neighbourhoods and domestic spaces are actually inhabited, modified, contested and made meaningful. Rather than treating users as passive recipients of architectural intention, the volume foregrounds inhabitants, designers, materials, drawings, ruins, climates, regulations, waste, plants, animals, kinship structures and everyday routines as active participants in the production of space. Its cross-disciplinary agenda emerges from parallel shifts in both fields: anthropology’s spatial, material and nonhuman turns have intensified its concern with transforming worlds rather than simply interpreting them, while architecture has increasingly moved beyond the design of static structures towards processes of use, adaptation, afterlife, participation and socio-ecological responsibility. Albena Yaneva’s foreword crystallises this methodological reorientation by contrasting critical distance with critical proximity, insisting that architecture can no longer be adequately studied from above, through grand theoretical frames, but must be followed on the ground through offices, corridors, neighbourhoods, fieldnotes, drawings, conversations, maintenance practices and embodied encounters. This position is reflected across the handbook’s five thematic sections—methods, processes, uses, environments and flows—which collectively demonstrate how architectural anthropology can investigate welfare-state housing, migrant dwellings, socialist-modernist estates, social housing renovation, autoconstruction, demolition, Indigenous building practices, precarious housing, boundary-making, open-plan schools, retrofits, circular construction, material salvage, vegetation, settler colonial construction and transnational infrastructure. The book’s contribution lies in showing that architectural meaning is never fixed at the moment of design; it unfolds through inhabitation, repair, conflict, appropriation, memory, regulation, environmental pressure and social imagination. Its visual and ethnographic methods—relevé, sketching, comics, graphic anthropology, fieldnotes, comparative observation and participatory narratives—also challenge the primacy of conventional architectural representation by making visible the ordinary, minor and often overlooked practices through which space becomes socially consequential. A key case synthesis may be drawn from the handbook’s recurrent concern with housing: whether examining renovation in Brussels, migrant neighbourhoods in Norway, open domestic boundaries in Copenhagen or adaptive mass housing in New Belgrade, the chapters reveal that homes and collective environments are never simply containers of life, but ongoing negotiations between design intention, social belonging, privacy, inequality and everyday improvisation. Ultimately, the handbook argues that architecture and anthropology should not remain parallel disciplines occasionally borrowing from one another; they must form a shared critical practice capable of addressing ecological crisis, housing precarity, urban transformation and political turbulence through situated, material and ethically attentive knowledge.