Foundations of Urban Design
Marcel Smets
The book is structured into twenty-nine essays, each dedicated to a pair of urbanistic concepts. Discussing historical and contemporary, interpretive and designerly approaches to urbanity, the notions composing the 29 pairs relate dialectically, as theses-and-antitheses. Still, we are warned, ‘the presented antagonisms are not a priori in opposition, but rather complementary.
“With this book, Marcel Smets not only offers an inspiring vocabulary to describe the spatial features of the city but, above all, a unique dictionnaire raisonné to discuss past and future interventions in our largest man-made artefact.”
Tom Avermaete, Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zürich.
Smets’ fundaments may be likened to emblems. A Renaissance genre, proliferating before the Industrial Age, emblems are complex knowledge repositories, their meaning emerging at the intersection – but not as ‘sum’ of – a title, a text and an image. The paired titles, the written analysis, alternating abstractions and historic references,
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Geospaces
Continuities Between Humans, Spaces, and the Earth
Alper Derinboğaz
Architectural history is a fragment of the long evolution of forms of habitat. The shape of the lands and the way we inhabit them are at the root of all architectural endeavours. However, our established conception of architecture is based on a hierarchy between nature and culture. Modernity and its break from the vernacular has led to a crisis of connections which we are experiencing the effects of. To move towards an architecture more in tune with earth, we need to think in continuities, looking at the emergence of natural forms, the history of human inhabitation and the future of fabrication technologies. What if we see buildings as iterations of nature rather than artificial objects?
This book is an extended visual essay of ideas, images, drawings and projects that follows the work of Alper Derinbogaz over the past decade, framing an approach based on
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Iaac Bits 10: Learning cities
Collective Intelligence in Urban Design
Areti Markopoulou
The digital intelligence that is inevitably starting to penetrate every aspect of our previously analogue systems of living, working or social interacting calls for new models of designing our city and opens new territories of experimentation in the processes related to urban design. While the idea of intelligent machines that simulate “cognitive functions” such as “learning” or “problem solving” is not new, its extensive use, in recent years, in the urban design discipline opens up a series of new possibilities – as well as plenty of cultural, ethical or even aesthetic hesitations and risks.
How do our cities learn? Can machines design and what?
Is crowd intelligence appropriately harvested in our evolutionary and generative design processes? And has our current big data analysis approach reached the limit of human and computational intelligence?
Learning Cities explores the “intelligence” applied in the processes and outcomes of designing our urban environments.
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Spatial Infrastructure
Essays on Architectural Thinking as a Form of Knowledge
José Aragüez
José Aragüez's second book revolves around a new concept in architecture, spatial infrastructure, that operates both as a design tool capable of projecting architectural thinking forward, and as an analytical category that shifts our understanding of the history of the field and contemporary production. Taken together, the collection of essays presented here investigates some of the most intractable issues pertaining to architectural discourse, while also examining scientific, critical, and cultural dimensions where relevant. Key subjects include a building’s discursive building, engineering patents and spatial disposition in architecture, typological invention and sponge surfaces, “the organic” at the intersection of architecture and philosophy, imageability in the context of an evolving market economy, language vis-à-vis self-determinacy in creative practices, a building’s spatial kernel, and the possibility of architectural metacriticality. Building upon each other to engender a coherent and distinct outlook on twentieth-century and contemporary
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Plug-ins
Ezio Manzini, Albert Fuster, Roger Paez
This book showcases some of the projects developed by Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab, a research institute that investigates the role of design in the material and social construction of our habitats, focusing on spatiality, temporality, interactions, meaning, citizen engagement and social impact. Projects by students, professors and researchers, in collaboration with multiple partners including the public administration, NGOs, industry and academy, articulate the concept of design as plug-ins as the core idea of this book. This notion of plug-ins results from a renewed approach to how design can be a key agent in city making. Given that the city is a system of relationships, design for city making means understanding, reinforcing and articulating this network. We posit plug-ins as situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities. This book’s central argument is that
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Design for Biocities
Global Contest to Rethink Our Habitat from the Body to the City.
Vicente Guallart, Laia Piferré
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) calls its 9th Advanced Architecture Contest as a global reflection to rethink human settlements at a time when our natural environments and the human habitats are more clearly intertwined. The planet is immersed in a fast process of urbanization while we are simultaneously facing a serious climate crisis that must be addressed. We look to the model of Biocities, cities that follow the principles of ecological principles in order to promote life and biodiversity, to provide us with potential design solutions. How can we reimagine our cities as Biocities, capable of creating an ecologically attuned and reciprocal relationship with nature? This year’s competition challenges students and professionals from all over the world to propose how to design urban spaces, cities, buildings, objects, or solutions of any scale, directed
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE (ENG ED.)
UFO’s Experiments between Political Activism and the Artistic Avant-garde
Beatrice Lampariello, Andrea Anselmo, Boris Hamzeian (eds.)
The contemporary context is defined by a unique conjuncture. On one hand, we witness the revival of the Radical Architecture that from the avant-garde experiments of the origins recovers creative processes and iconographic fragments while nullifying the original ideological and political values.
On the other hand, we see social protests in defense of fundamental rights of democracy, as in 1968. With these premises, Architecture is now reinvestigating those ephemeral experiments that have endured half a century as new “stone monuments” capable of indicating new perspectives for both research and design. Placing UFO group, one of the authors of those still poorly known “monuments”, at the core of the contemporary debate means investigating their formal and seductive aspects, but also the ideological, political and social values with which objects, installations and happenings have been innervated, transforming them into
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Blue
Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions
Malkit Shoshan
UN peace missions operate today inside hundreds of cities across the world. Planned and engineered with the logic of security regimes, using single-purpose infrastructure, and dependent on extractive global supply chains, these ‘Islands of Blue’ generate a massive carbon footprint, profoundly impact local livelihoods, and leave mostly waste after decommissioning. Focusing on two missions and four cities in Liberia and Mali, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions charts and uncovers spatial realities produced by the UN in mission areas. It traces the complex processes and mechanisms behind the conduct of missions and the various spatial tools and architectural technologies that make them possible. BLUE questions the international, spatial, and cultural structures we put in place to support communities across the world in times of crisis.
At the intersection of architecture, urban planning, international relations and activism, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions seeks not only to change UN missions but also to
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Climax Change!
How architecture must transform in the age of ecological emergency
Pedro Gadanho
Climax Change! offers an overview of how the current environmental emergency will impact the practice of architecture. At a crossroads in which the construction sector and built environment produce nearly 40% of greenhouse gases accountable for global warming, architects are just starting to acknowledge their complicity in an impending disaster.
In need of a paradigm shift similar to that of the Modern Movement, architecture desperately requires clear guidelines and targets so as to operate its inevitable transformation towards an ecologically-friendly design logic. From historical analyses of ecocide or the environmental avant-gardes, to topics such as decarbonization, degrowth, the Great Transition and the aspirations of Green New Deals, this book features ten essays around today's climate change debates, bringing them home to architectural thinking.
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Supertight
Models for Living and Making Culture in Dense Urban Environments
Graham Crist & John Doyle
The rapidly growing large cities of Asia are critical to understanding our future footprint. Asian cities provide insights into new ways of being densely urbanised. The by-product of this unprecedented metropolitan convergence will be the emergence of new urbanisms and new architectures, new models for living and making culture.
The Supertight refers to the small, intense, robust and hyper-condensed spaces that emerge as a by-product of extreme levels of urban density. Tightness arises as consequence of density, but tightness itself is not density. Tightness is a series of social, economic and cultural practices that have developed in cities as a response to the rapid growth and consolidation of cities. While architectural models of density have been heavily explored, this project investigates the culture of tightness that has emerged in Asian cities over the past thirty years, and the
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Out of the Ordinary
The Work of John Ronan Architects
John Ronan
In previous decades, architectural production was constrained by the limits of technology; architects pushed on the boundaries imposed by technology and it gave them common purpose. Those limits are gone. Over the preceding two decades it has been demonstrated that with enough technology (and money) anything is possible. What does an architect do when anything is possible?
This is the question which confronts architects today, who now operate within a professional landscape where all is possible, but little has meaning. The “anything goes” mentality which currently prevails has resulted in innumerable self-referential “object” buildings which engage only with their architect’s ego, often resulting in an urban fabric of autonomous formal objects comprised of arbitrarily-applied design tropes which celebrate formal invention for its own sake. But what do architects leave society once the novelty of form has worn off?
In this architectural age of arbitrary shape-making, devoid
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Ambiguous Territory
Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural
Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon, Kathy Velikov (eds.)
The writers and designers in this collection are among the most thoughtful architects, artists, landscape architects, and theorists working today. The editors organized these essays and works of art and design around three territories: the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic. Each cluster of essays is further framed by forewords and afterwords, which draw individual points of view into a larger articulation of what an ambiguous territory might be and how it operates. Ambiguous Territory emerged from a symposium and exhibition held at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017, and exhibitions at the University of Virginia and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018, and at Ithaca College in 2019. The conversations that arise in this book are inquisitive and critically engaged. They pressure assumptions we routinely make about what constitutes meaningful and principled perspectives in architecture,
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Inventing Greenland
Designing an Arctic Nation
Bert De Jonghe
Through the lens of urbanization, Inventing Greenland provides a broad understanding of a unique island undergoing intense transformation while drawing attention to its historical and current challenges and emerging opportunities. Geared towards architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, this book examines the local cultural, social, and environmental realities with a distinct spatial sensitivity, recognizing the diverse array of relationships that the built environment both supports and produces. By exploring Greenland as a complex and interconnected cultural and geographical space, Inventing Greenland reveals and anticipates transitional moments in the region’s highly intertwined urbanized, militarized, and touristic landscapes.
With Contributions of
Bert De Jonghe (author)
Charles Waldheim (foreword)
Mia M. Bennett (co-author chapter 1) + (copy editor)
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Outdoor Domesticity (ENG ED.)
On the Relationships between Trees, Architecture, and Inhabitants
Ricardo Devesa
The first part of this publication is to present a collection of exemplary five houses that evinced explicit relationships with preexisting trees. The five twentieth century projects are: La Casa (B. Rudofsky, 1969), Cottage Caesar (M. Breuer, 1951), Ville La Roche (Le Corbusier & P. Jeanneret, 1923), Villa Pepa (J. Navarro Baldeweg, 1994) and Hexenhaus (A. & P. Smithson, 1984-2002). The second part of the book is to contribute with three theoretical concerns for the contemporary project, those ones which are established in the process, with respect to time, place and outdoor domesticity in modern western housing.
One of these theoretical contributions establishes that any house located on a site finds a significant place in conjunction with the preexisting trees. The second contribution describes the effects in terms of time, in addition to spatial considerations, which trees can contribute to the architectural project.
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Systems Upgrade
(Re)fabricating Tectonic Prototypes
Leire Asensio Villoria & David Mah
Systems Upgrade offers a design research approach that leverages the embodied knowledge latent within the material legacies of design history for direct applicability in creative practice. This long-spanning research into the construction of links between the deep study of precedent and future practice has been advanced through a simultaneous engagement with digital archeology and the new tools of creative practice. Invested in the belief of a need to open design and its material legacies to a multiverse, this research has yielded a collection of methods, techniques and novel outcomes grounded in history yet openly speculative in outlook.
Systems Upgrade extensively illustrates an engagement with some of the most notable works of the Austrian American sculptor and designer Erwin Hauer. This book highlights several important phases of this specific design research project to provide a detailed view of how a series of bridges between analysis
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Green Obsession
Trees Towards Cities, Humans Towards Forests
Stefano Boeri Architetti
Cities have contributed for centuries to the promotion of some of humanity’s greatest ideas, we must now urgently include them as among the principal players in the environmental debate and at the forefront of any policy tackling climate change. Nevertheless, even today one of the most significant technologies capable of absorbing CO2 and restoring our environment is photosynthesis. Planting trees, in addition to protecting, restoring and managing existing natural areas and biodiversity, together with de-carbonization, renewable energies, digitalization, smart mobility and the circular economy could be the set of tools necessary to counter the climate crisis.
Today the effects of the Anthropocene age are ever more visible, changing our environment and affecting every species that lives within it. Green Obsession offers a path to be taken, a hard but still necessary paradigm shift –even for architecture and urbanism– that aims to give a voice to this much needed ecological transition. This book aims to unveil the processes and the complexity involved in the search for a new kind of
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Designing Resilience in Asia
Thinking the Unpredictable, Designing with Uncertainty
Oscar Carracedo García-Villalba et al.
This publication, leaded by the National University of Singapore School of Design and Environment, presents the research by design results of four consecutive years in four different countries (China, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand) responding to the current challenge of building more resilient cities in front of impacts of climate change, such as coastal and river flooding, water and air pollution, water scarcity, urban heat island effect, aquifer depletion or subsidence. The book brings together the work of highly-reputed academics, professionals and scholars from 20 universities worldwide with the aim of serving as a guide for mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change, and more specifically to reinstating the environmental qualities of our cities through carbon-neutral or carbon net-positive urban designs and plans.
The book demonstrates ‘seven inspirations’ – seven ideas –and 80 design interventions that contribute to the debate on
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Vacant Spaces NY
Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, MOS
This project began by walking around our neighborhood noticing empty storefronts. Once we saw them, they were everywhere. They followed us, appearing quietly throughout New York City. Many with no signage, no “for rent,” no “coming soon.” Usually empty, sometimes dusty, sometimes with brown paper covering the glass. Now, vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Throughout a pandemic. The quantity of vacant spaces is anyone’s best guess. It’s only partially documented. They hide in plain sight.
Vacant Spaces NY is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as case studies that imagine some possibilities for transforming current vacant spaces into housing or social services. There is also a
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Behavioral Formation.
Volatile Design Processes and the Emergence of a Strange Specificity
Roland Snooks
Emergent processes of formation create intensive, volatile, intricate, complex phenomena. These processes have come to define our contemporary understanding of the nature of becoming, which stands in contrast to established notions of architectural design and authorship.
The design research of Roland Snooks is a speculation on the relationship between emergent processes of formation and architectural design intention, and explores the strange specificity of an architecture that is drawn out of this interaction. This research operates within a larger architectural and cultural concern for complex systems and their role in algorithmic design processes.
The original methodological territory carved out from this larger milieu is the articulation of a design process in which architectural intention is embedded within emergent processes.
Roland Snooks is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT.
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Golconde
The Introduction of Modernism in India
Pankaj Vir Gupta, Christine Mueller, Cyrus Samii
Golconde is an astonishing architectural accomplishment. With technical finesse and extraordinary craft, it offers a living testament to the original modernist credo - architecture as the manifest union of technology, aesthetics, and social reform. Here exists an undiluted view of a wholly triumphant tropical Modernism, built during the tumultuous years of the second world war.
Mira Nakashima, George Nakashima’s daughter, contributes with a new 800 word introduction essay for this new edition.
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Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things
Archi-Tectonics
Winka Dubbeldam/ Archi-Tectonics
A manual for a non-standard approach to research and design in architecture. For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than the usual representational
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Lewerentz Fragments
Jonathan Foote, Hansjörg Göritz, Matthew Hall, Nathan Matteson
Through new essays, recently discovered archival material, photography, and drawings, the publication Lewerentz Fragments explores the architect’s body of work spanning three-quarters of the twentieth century. Comprising writings from all the major scholars on Lewerentz’ work, along with several new voices, this publication offers new insight into the context surrounding this architect’s work. Rather than focusing on a single thesis, the book offers a diversity of insight from multiple cultural and professional perspectives. In addition, previously unpublished translations of interviews and dialogs among the architect and his contemporaries offer a voice to the ‘silent architect’ altering the traditional interpretations of the work and digging past the surface of what might be considered his philosophy of building. Rather than serving as an introduction to the architect’s work, this volume provides detailed fragments as a deep and diverse dive into one of the most mysterious
X!? 2010-2020 TEN YEARS OODA (ENG ED.)
João Rapagão
OODA is a Portuguese architecture collective, now celebrating 10 years of practice. Based in Porto with experience gained internationally in notable offices, such as OMA-Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid Architects, the collective aims to expand internationally, namely New York, São Paulo and Shanghai.
With a wide range of work (whether idea or built, new or rehabilitation) and participation in international competitions in Africa, America, Asia, Middle East and Europe, their work includes partnerships with Kengo Kuma and the Pritzker prize Souto de Moura.
More than presenting and dissecting the work of the practice, this book is an adventure in technical and artistic exchanges. It is divided into three parts; the appraisal of the first ten years, hence the X mark - X - in the title of the book and also predictions for the next ten; a presentation of case studies and projects according to six criteria and knowledge approaches –
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Residentialism
A Suburban Archipelago
Lina Malfona
This book tells the story of the making of a community, which occurred hand-in-hand with the building of an archipelago of suburban residences, which reaffirm the value of the countryside within a technological and digital society. From 2010 onwards, Lina Malfona together with Petrini Architects and thanks to the support of the structural engineer Tommaso Malfona has been designing and building this archipelago of villas in the countryside north of Rome, which is also where their home-studio is located. This experimental residence has become a point of reference for the design of an innovative housing typology, an ‘ultra-residential’ villa as a place to experience private as well as public life.
With Contributions of
Pippo Ciorra (introduction); Kenneth Frampton, Stan Allen (blurbs)
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Portals
Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture’s Future Imaginary (RISD 2020)
Amy Catania Kulper, Kevin Crouse, Jennifer Liese (eds.)
This book documents an interregnum, a pause, a moment of self-reflection in which architects, imperiled by the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the forms of inequity that this global crisis surfaced, confronted remote architectural pedagogy and practice as a critical threshold for the future imaginary of the discipline. The renowned group of architects, educators, theorists, critics, and curators assembled in this volume provide critical insights into the future of architectural pedagogy, utilizing the thesis and design research projects of the RISD Architecture class of 2020 as exemplars of the transformations currently taking place in the field. This volume considers the forms that architectural activism and advocacy take in a moment when architects are critically reexamining the conventions of their practice and the question of which constituencies they serve.
With Contributions of
RISD B.Arch & M.Arch students with
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States of Entanglement
Data in the Irish Landscape
ANNEX / Sven Anderson, Alan Butler, David Capener, Donal Lally, Clare Lyster & Fiona McDermott
As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world's first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world's first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today,
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Pan-Arab Modernism 1968-2018
The History of Architectural Practice in The Middle East
Ricardo Camacho, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Sara Saragoça Soares
Following two publications in 2016 and 2017 on Modern Architecture of Kuwait, this new publication expands on the growing interest for the building and urban practice exchange between territories throughout the Middle Eastern region which remains at the threshold of architectural theory, postcolonial critique, and visual cultures studies. This book format exposes relevant and critical material on the individual's education and experiences as well as the architecture practice and influence in the Middle East.
Using Kuwait as a case study and Pan Arab Modernism as a lens, this book comes to fill two voids in the literature on Middle Eastern architecture: one is in practice and the other is in history. The current practice of architecture in Kuwait, the Gulf and the larger Middle East, is typically a-contextual and lacking any understanding of the local context.
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Another Kind
A Survey of the Possible City
David Leventhal, Lee Polisano, PLP Architecture
The last decade has seen an accelerated evolution of typologies. Today's cities are marked by a growing digital presence and the emergence of a global sharing economy; shared spaces have increased our social and sustainable focus, drastically altered our understanding of ownership and responsibility, and redefined our experience of public and private domains. Such changes have in turn rewritten the demands on architecture, the role of the designer, and the power of the profession.
In Another Kind, PLP Architecture presents ten projects as case studies to examine the emergence of a new typological fluidity. These projects serve as anchors to survey the cultural landscape of the past ten years. Projects can no longer be traditionally codified and instead present themselves as assemblages of exterior influences, new cultural interests, and 21st century social habits. In Another Kind, projects are intertwined with essays
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Responsive Environments
An Interdisciplinary Manifesto on Design, Technology and the Human Experience
Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani, Matteo Kalchschmidt
What makes an environment "responsive"? This book provides some key concepts in the form of a design manifesto. Critically articulated from the perspective of leading experts, scholars and professionals, the ideas explored are unpacked through speculative urban visions and design projects at different timeframes, contexts and scales ranging from interactive artifacts to augmented cities. Drawing from a multiyear research at the REAL Lab at Harvard GSD and design work by INVIVIA and other innovative practices, the book unfolds the experiential facets of our technologically-mediated relationship with space in the fields of architecture and urbanism, design and art.
With the collaboration of
the Harvard REAL Lab.
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Design for Living
Global Contest to Rethink Our Habitat from the Body to the City. 8th Advanced Architecture Contest
Vicente Guallart
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia calls its 8th Advanced Architecture Contest titled "Design for Living." This effort offers the opportunity for a global reflection to rethink human habitats, at a time when the fight for life and climate allows us to consider how we would like to live in the coming decades. We like to think that each person's life begins at home, which is the center of their universe and the origin of their social interactions. During the pandemic, we had been confined to our homes and they have become microcities where we live, work and rest, connected to the world through information networks.So, after this experience, how do we imagine the future for our living environment?
The contest encourages participants to propose a design related to their way of life, at
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MIAS Architects at Centre Pompidou
Josep Miàs
Tracing through the pieces being published, you sense that Josep Mias is essentially a man who takes strips and edges and develops them into meshes, and then maybe combs, and then maybe honeycombs with a conspicuously boyish delight in making the sketch, the linear diagram, the scale model and the built building.
Underlying the apparently fearless is a sense of what can fly, swing, lurch, lean or rest: in other words the composite that makes something possible to be as it is in space.
With contributions of Peter Cook
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Geometric Taxonomy (ENG ED.)
Carlos Ferrater, OAB
Geometric Taxonomy gets closer to the geometries of Carlos Ferrater and OAB that are present in timeless architecture, those that are explicit in the great treatises, those that dazzled us with "the correct and magnificent wise play of forms under the light", the elemental forms that inspired modernity a hundred years ago. __ Ignacio Paricio
Buy Spanish edition
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InnovatiON-Architecture
Design, Sustainability, Emotion, and Technology
Eduardo Gutiérrez, Jordi Fernández, Ricardo Devesa, ON-A Laboratorio de Arquitectura.
InnovatiON-Architecture compiles ON-A work philosophy: a constant search for innovative ad hoc solutions for each project, using the most updated technologies and design research at the service of ideas, with criteria based on their professional career, but always going beyond the conventional.
The contents of the book have been organized illustrating the four conversations held between Eduardo Gutiérrez and Jordi Fernández (ON-A founders and principals) and Ricardo Devesa (editor).
With the aim of understanding the different degrees of innovation on how they operate in ON-A, the book is organized into these four blocks. First one is routed on Design as a starting point to attend the control of the geometry (inspired on mineral, arboreal, and organic shapes) and encoding the information (using parametric design, BIM, and coding techniques). That methodology allows them to visualize and interact with the continuum
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RCR at Centre Pompidou
Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta
Recognition of RCR's work in France with an exhibition including a selection of 7 projects, ranging from the first competition they won at the Punta Aldea Lighthouse to the last works still to be built in Paris, Île Seguin and the Vide Pavilion. The journey through the space was made through a sensory experience -with sound, lighting and video-, extended with the artistic collaboration of the duo CaboSanRoque. The trajectory of RCR Arquitectes has been especially recognized in France: named Chevalier and Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2008 and 2014 respectively, the Académie d'Architecture awarded the Gold Medal to Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta the 2015, two years before receiving the Pritzker Prize.
There is no doubt that the buildings produced by RCR Arquitectes encourage experience: to cross, to land, to take the time, to observe, to feel. Everyone at their
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Mute Icons
& Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture
Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich with Constance Vale/ P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S
Interrogating historical, contemporary, and — more importantly— speculative images, ‘Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture’ aims to construct a viable alternative to the icon’s cliché and exhausted form of communication, positing one that is decidedly introverted and withdrawn. Developing a language and a sensibility for discovering simultaneous, contradictory, and even unexpected readings of architectural form, Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich / PATTERNS’s new book Mute Icons, aims to carve out a niche in contemporary culture and history by suggesting that far from being a crowd-pleaser, architecture can persist within society as a constructive cultural and social irritant.
No longer concerned with narrative excesses or with the "shock and awe" of sensation making; the mute icon becomes intriguing in its deceptive indifference towards context, perplexing in its unmitigated apathy towards the body. Object
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The Ecologies of the Building Envelope
A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jeffrey S. Anderson
While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes), which are deployed on the building's surface. In contrast to this, our material and environmental theory of the envelope proposes that the exponential development of building technologies since the mid-19th century, coupled with new techniques of management and regulation, have diminished the compositional and ornamental capacities of the envelope in favor of material, quantitative, and technical performances. Rather than producing a stylistic analysis of the façade, we investigate the historical lineages of the performances, components, assembly types, and material entanglements that constitute the contemporary building envelope.
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Mobile Theater (ENG ED.)
Architectural Counterculture on Stage
Fernando Quesada
Architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (1942) graduated in 1968 at Madrid School of Architecture. During the academic year 1970-1971 he travelled from Madrid to London thanks to a grant of the British Council to complete his postgraduate training at the Architectural Association. There he designed a building called Mobile Theater. It was a theatrical device composed of several 8 x 2,5 meters trucks carefully designed, which contained all the building elements needed to shape a space for the performing arts or other collective uses. The assembly time —estimated for four workers— was six and a half hours. This project was internationally showed and published between 1971 and 1975, but was never built.
This book intends to release this project, largely ignored by canonical historiography, and to culturally place it in time and space: the agitated city of London in 1971. After the convulsions of May 1968,
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The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion
A book about accessibility in the built environment in the United States
Tobias Armborst, Daniel D'Oca, Georgeen Theodore / Interboro
Who gets to be where? The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion examines some of the policies, practices, and physical artifacts that have been used by planners, policymakers, developers, real estate brokers, community activists, and other urban actors in the United States to draw, erase, or redraw the lines that divide. The Arsenal inventories these weapons of exclusion and inclusion, describes how they have been used, and speculates about how they might be deployed (or retired) for the sake of more open cities in which more people have access to more places. With contributions from over fifty architects, planners, geographers, historians, and journalists, The Arsenal offers a wide-ranging view of the forces that shape our cities.
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Terra-Sorta-Firma
Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient
Fadi Masoud
For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds;"reclaiming" land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy. The five parts of the book question urbanism's political, economic, and physical binary relationship to wet and dry grounds in search of a new understanding of land in a state of permanent flux.
This book challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient
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The Threefold Logic of Advanced Architecture
Conformative, Distributive and Expansive Protocols for an Informational Practice: 1990-2020
Manuel Gausa, Jordi Vivaldi
This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Western experimental areas of knowledge and practice since the end of the last century. A transformative process constituted by a constellation of transdisciplinary manifestations, accelerations, turns, shortcuts and clusterizations that by no means can be read under one single epistemological umbrella. In this sense, rather than approaching the practice of architecture focusing on its disciplinary inner specificity, this book approaches the research of experimental architecture focusing on its extra-disciplinary entanglements. It argues that a vast multiplicity of fields of knowledge participates in a cultural endeavour modulated through three protocols -forms of action- that singularize three decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000),
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Unless
The Seagram Building Construction Ecology
Kiel Moe
This book presents a terrestrial description of the Seagram Building. It aims to describe how humans and nature interact with the thin crust of the planet. Architecture reorganizes nature and society in particular ways that today demand overt attention and new methods of description.
The immense material, energy and labor involved in building require a fresh interpretation that better situates the ecological and social potential of design. Architecture and society would benefit from alternative descriptions of building and architecture as terrestrial activities that help imagine how to maximize the impact of architecture on its environment. I argue that the enhancement of a particular building should be inextricable from the enhancement of its world-system and construction ecology. A "beautiful" building engendered through the vulgarity of uneven exchanges and processes of underdevelopment is no longer a tenable conceit in such a framework. Design can and should evince the inherent
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Projective Ecologies
Ecology, Research, and Design in the Climate Age
Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister (eds.)
The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity of contemporary ecological research and theory— embracing Felix Guattari's broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential— and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are
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China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism
Jeffrey Johnson, Cressica Brazier, Tat Lam
Superblocks are the basic unit of China's urban development, but they are also spatial instruments with social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications, operating between the scales of architecture and the city. These redefined "Megablocks" then become laboratories for the consequences, opportunities, and potential global proliferation of Chinese urban models, reconsidered through the filters of ecology, economics, and ethics.
In The Guide to Megablock Urbanisms, the Columbia GSAPP China Lab aims to document a wider conversation on the policies and collective experiences of large-scale development and advances of China's urban future.
With the contributions of
Amale Andraos, David Bray, Eric Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Renee Y. Chow, Edward Denison, Duanfang Lu, Joris Fach, John Fitzgerald, Steven Holl, Michiel Hulshof, Jun Jiang, Clover Lee, Zhongjie Lin, Matthew Niederhauser, Xuefei Ren, Daan Roggeveen, André Schmidt, Grahame Shane, Jian Shi, Jiaming Zhu, Jianfei Zhu
"The megablock, a self-contained spatial unit, can become an
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Houston Genetic City
Peter Zweig, Matthew Johnson, Jason Logan
No city in the United States is synonymous with unbridled growth and land speculation as the sprawling Texas city of Houston. Though Houston is described as a city, its massive size makes it regional or even megaregional in scale—including a patchwork of satellite downtowns and suburbs, a vast floodplain of bayous and coastal prairie, as well as a long stretch of Gulf Coast. This fragile landscape is increasingly beset by global problems, from flooding to rampant growth to congestion. Its lack of zoning means ad hoc developments scatter across the landscape with little formal planning, where urban developments are always provisional and negotiable.
Houston Genetic City is a collaborative and speculative book about Houston’s future, and by extension the future of urbanism in unplanned cities globally. Using maps, photographs, timelines, and collages, the book lays out the conditions for new urbanization in this fragile landscape. We
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Pure Space (ENG ED.)
Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements
Elisa Silva
The publication is not intended to serve only as a catalogue, guide, or manual on how to produce public space in spontaneous settlements. Rather, it goes beyond the aims of an index of best practices. It is intended, instead, as an empirical base for a critical and theoretical engagement with the problematic of development, social inclusion, public investment, (in)formal settlement, civil society and the public sphere. The publication achieves its final function at this third level, by providing a compelling argument to expand the agency of architects and urban designers and creatively find ways of justifying, financing, and building public spaces in communities —spaces that have a catalytic effectiveness in achieving significant urban and social transformation.
Graham Foundation Grant and CAF Development Bank of Latin America
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Design with Life
Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities
Mitchell Joachim, Maria Aiolova / Terreform ONE
In the challenging context of accelerating climate dynamics, the core discipline of architectural design is evolving and embracing new forms of action. New York-based nonprofit Terreform ONE has established a distinctive design tactic that investigates projects through the regenerative use of natural materials, science, and the emergent field of socio-ecological design. This kind of design approach uses actual living matter (not abstracted imitations of nature) to create new functional elements and spaces. These future-based actions are not only grounded in social justice, but are also far-reaching in their application of digital manufacturing and maker culture. Terreform ONE tackles urgent environmental and urban social concerns through the integrated use of living materials and organisms.
Mitchell Joachim and Maria Aiolova, founders of Terreform ONE, describe their practice through various projects and prolific research that has made significant impact to what is increasingly recognized as socio-ecological design. Together they achieve an abundant
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Empire, State & Building
Kiel Moe
Whence the accumulation of raw matter and energy of building in New York City?
This book considers the material basis of building as a key impetus of both urbanization and the energetics of urban life. The otherwise externalized material geographies and thermodynamics of building’s material basis reveal much about the dynamics and efficacy of how we build. This book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan—the parcel of land under the Empire State Building—over the past two hundred years. Through rich illustrations, it tracks all the building material that have passed through this parcel or remain it in geographic and ecological dynamics: spatially (in terms of their geographic material footprints and industrial processes) and quantitatively (in terms of embodied energy, embodied carbon, and emergy flow). In successive chapters, the book articulates the empire and states that are inherent to building, but remain unconsidered—abstract and
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Landscape as Territory
A Cartographic Design Project
Clara Olóriz Sanjuán
Landscape as Territory is a cartographic book project that critically addresses the agency of architects in the so-called 'Urban Age,' understanding the notion of 'territory' as a field of design praxis through which interconnected landscapes are produced. Territory, understood as a 'political technology,' has the capacity to involve architects and designers into complex social, political, technical, legal, strategic and economic processes that are both historical and geographical engines of contemporary urbanization. Territorial praxis is interrogated in a collection of threaded theory and design contributions where essays pose key questions that are addressed through projective cartographies, unfolding arguments related to three sections: (1) territory, (2) critical cartographies and (3) agency.
This material intends to raise awareness about the consequential production of landscapes through territorial processes and urges a critical re-appropriation of cartographic tools, accomplice in the production of territories, and to question and expand the architect's agency.
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Blueprint for a Hack
Leveraging Informal Building Practices
Vikram Bhatt, David Harlander, Susane Havelka
Over five days, some 60 residents of a northern village teamed with designers from southern Quebec to conceive and build an outdoor community pavilion that activates a central recreational area. "Blueprint for a Hack" aims to reimagine community spaces. Faced with extreme housing shortages, physical isolation, and a challenging climate, outdoor public spaces in northern communities remain largely undesigned and underused. These "in-between" spaces are strewn with stuff: plywood crates, tires, sea-cans, palettes, diesel fuel drums, etc.
Most housing and civic buildings in the communities emerge from and stand like physical markers of Euro-Canadian values. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada has begun a discourse on design in northern Canadian communities, but discussions continue to dwell on housing and civic buildings. A strong need exists to open conversations about design and the public realm in northern villages, which this project tries to address,
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WWW Drawing
Architectural Drawing: From Pencil to Pixel
Janet Abrams, Mehrdad Hadighi, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Andrew Heumann, Jürg Lehni, Jane Nisselson, Seher Shah, Ann Tarantino, Michael Webb, Mark West, James Wines
WWW Drawing explores architectural drawing in relation to technique and technology. What is the role of drawing for architecture, in a digital age? Articles have been written about the implicit value of hand drawing in comparison to computer-generated drawing; conferences and symposia on drawing have been held, even asking if drawing is dead!
WWW Drawing -a project of Pennsylvania State University's Department of Architecture- explored the issues through events including a giant-scale drawing workshop and a symposium held at the Drawing Center, New York. WWW refers both to the World Wide Web, and the Three Ws: architects Michael Webb, Mark West and James Wines, who reflect on their individual approaches to hand drawing in this volume. Artists and architects of a younger generation -Daniel
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Open City
Re-thinking the post-Industrial City / Re-pensando la ciudad postindustrial
Almudena Ribot, Enrique Espinosa, Diego García-Setién, Begoña de Abajo, Gaizka Altuna / CoLaboratorio
Currently 55% of the world's population lives in cities, predictably reaching 70% in 2050. Cities are organisms in continuous transformation: growth, change, but also shrinking or collapse. Open City explores and speculates from contemporaneity about the future of the post-industrial city, where industrial archipelagoes (S), frames (XL) and obsolete or deprogrammed singularities (M/L) represent critical contexts but also opportunities for a new Open City.
Open Systems have been the research focus of CoLab. This book collects some relevant and engagingly contemporary insights, including contributions by Andrés Jaque, Juan Herreros, Philipp Oswalt, Momojo Kaijima (Atelier Bow-Wow), Langarita Navarro or Cedric Price, among others.
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The Empty Room
Fragmented Thoughts on Space
Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD)
Part aphorism and part manifesto, this book by Canadian architect Reza Aliabadi (RZLBD) references his ideas and thoughts about space. He suggests 'the empty room' as the very essence of architecture, and 'the spatial experience' as its highest mandate. Reza revisits architecture —not as the walls that enclose the space— but rather the space in-between the walls. What he calls an "anti-architecture" of invisible voids.
Today architecture has fallen short as a discipline and has instead converted into an industry, part of the commercial establishment. Accordingly it has given up its capacity to offer contributions and has been reduced to being a service. It has become all about a form-making exercise and dressing it up with a fashionable skin. What matters most, is the look of it, and the contest to keep that look relevant in the media— as long as possible. It submits itself to
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Floppy Logic
Experimenting in the Territory between Architecture, Fashion and Textile
Leanne Zilka
Floppy Logic is an exploration into the 'architecture' of fashion and textiles, and how the concepts, aesthetics, techniques and construction of this architecture might be understood and used to design and fabricate objects and space differently. These seemingly diverse disciplines can be used to traverse from the scale of material and garment to that of rooms and buildings. By working with fashion and textile techniques on form and material simultaneously, ideas for architecture can also be revealed opening new ways of approaching the design and fabrication of architecture.
A key concept here is the Floppy, defined as a quality in material that requires extraneous support to produce architecture. Floppy generally refers to fabric but can also refer to any material that fails when there is not enough support, as is the case with sheet materials when the span between supports exceeds a
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The Function of Style
Farshid Moussavi
This book interrogates further the formfunction relationship of its projects. It focuses particularly on the history of drawing techniques of describing different concepts of function. All is shown through drawings that describe amongst other criteria the structural function [arrangement of activities or materials], the physical function [such as acoustics, traffic, lighting], the psychological function or the social function of built forms.
During the 19th and most of the 20th century, discussions of style revolved around pure formalism or pure functionalism. Style, as the way of assembling forms, was trapped in producing consistency and sameness across architectural forms. This publication is the third in a series at the GSD focused at researching a contemporary idea of style in architecture.
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The Function of Ornament (ENG ED.)
Farshid Moussavi
A graphic guide to ornaments of 20th century building envelopes.
Rigorous drawings of iconic projects unveil the function of ornament as the agent for specific affects, dismantling the idea that ornament is applied to buildings as a discrete or non-essential entity. Each case exploits specific synergies between the exterior and the interior, constructing an internal order between ornament and material. These internal orders produce contemporary expressions whose affects are resilient in time.
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The Generic Sublime
Organizational Models for Global Architecture
Ciro Najle
Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, high-rise housing, mixed-use developments, luxury condominiums, airport hubs, suburban office enclaves, industrial and technology parks, hotel complexes and resorts, conference and financial centers, entertainment venues, gated communities, theme parks, branded cities, new central districts, and satellite cities: extra-large architectural typologies dominate the contemporary built environment worldwide. Despite the ubiquity of these building forms, their development has been largely restricted by a reliance on outmoded traditions of urbanism and the strict separation of disciplinary domains within current architectural practice. The Generic Sublime investigates how the modern concept of the generic––once assumed to achieve universality by means of organizational homogeneity, formal neutrality, programmatic blankness, lack of identity, and insipidness of character––holds the potential to become its very opposite: the singular, the irreducible, and the extraordinary.
Directing the work of students of the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design at the
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Interdisciplinary Design
Architecture and engineering are changing. But what about the relationship between architects and engineers?
Hanif Kara, Andreas Georgoulias
The subject of this experimental course held at Harvard GSD, with the students of Harvard and MIT, is to see the potential of interaction between the two disciplines from these two schools. Hanif Kara of AKT, leads the class, insisting on the importance of each professional field but trying to erode the borders and boundaries between them.
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Conversations and Allusions: Enric Miralles
Catherine Spellman
Enric Miralles (1955-2000) remains one of the most prominent architects of his generation. The significance of his architectural design lies in his seamless integration of site and building and his use of space to serve the everyday conditions of life.
Practicing for less than twenty-five years Miralles designed over 150 projects, many are now built including: the Scottish Parliament Buildings, Santa Caterina Market, Vigo University, Diagonal Mar Park, Alicante Gymnastic Center, and Igualada Cemetry.The book Conversations and Allusions, Enric Miralles brings together previously unpublished essays and lectures by his former collaborators and friends. Each contributor in this timely publication offers unique insight on Miralles' practice of architecture as a way of creating positive change in the world.
With contributions by
Benedetta Tagliabue, Elias Torres, Peter Buchanan, Josep Quetglas, Sir Peter Cook, Juan Jose Lahuerta, Carles Muro, Elena Cánovas, Manuel Bailo, Teresa Galí-Izard, Maurici Pla, Eva Prats, Elena Rocchi.
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Álvaro Siza Vieira: A Pool in the Sea
In conversation with Kenneth Frampton. Photography by Vincent Mentzel
Kenneth Frampton, Vincent Mentzel
This book documents a unique experience of a journey by Alvaro Siza Vieira, Vincent Mentzel and Kenneth Frampton to the early work of Siza in Porto. The book includes a conversation between Kenneth Frampton and Alvaro Siza and photos by Vincent Mentzel.
DAM Deutsches Architekturmuseum International Architecture Book Award 2020
One of the 50 Best Books and Covers for 2018 by the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Designers)Â in partnership with the Design Observer
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Imminent Commons: Urban Questions
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Hyungmin Pai, urbanNext (eds.)
Imminent Commons, first book from the Seoul Biennale 2017, will present an imminent urban cosmology that is crucially mediated by the technologies and institutions that feed us, move us, condition our environments, recycle our refuse, make our clothes, and connect us into communities.
The cities of the world stand at a crossroads. Amidst radical social, economic, and technological transformations, will the city become a driving force of creativity, diversity, and sustainability, or will it be a mechanism of inequality, despair, and environmental decay? At this critical moment, where do the stakes lie and what are the agents of change? From the time of its birth, the city has been held together by the commons.
The first publication of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, proposes a framework where set basic commons —an evolving network of agencies, resources and technologies—
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Imminent Commons: The Expanded City
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jeffrey S. Anderson
As the second book of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, it presents contemporary urbanism thoughts on nine imminent commons, which engage collective ecological and technological resources relevant to all cities and even extra-urban territories.
Recent years have seen greatly increased political opposition between urban and rural areas, bordering on crisis. In order to avoid further aggravating this urban/rural polarization, we need to cultivate a discourse on urbanism that focuses on the interdependencies between cities and the greater ecologies of resources, technologies, and natural processes in which they are situated. The way we think about cities needs to expand significantly to incorporate their effects on global natural cycles, how they metabolize resources from rural areas, and their impact on both local and regional economies.
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Imminent Commons: Commoning Cities
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017
Hyungmin Pai, Helen Hejung Choi
The third book from the Seoul Biennale 2017 explores the value and meaning of cities as commons, which is embedded and operate in various governance mechanisms of cities in the world.
Imminent Commons: Commoning Cities presents questions and answers concerning the current state and near future of cities of the world through the lens of public initiatives, projects, and urban narratives. Cities are searching for new possibilities that will help them survive and thrive within new systems of municipal governance. The strategies of cities with regard to rapid urbanization, scarcity of public resources, and privatization of commons will be examined through the diverse spectrum of focused projects. It also discusses the present and future of cities as commons in the 21st century through examining various ways the cities use to deliberate, operate, imagine and execute their policies for the city.
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Buildings and Almost Buildings
Eric Bunge, Mimi Hoang / nARCHITECTS
Buildings and Almost Buildings explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture.
Is architecture inherently complete? Or is it a state of incompletion and seeming inadequacy that incites us to imagine architecture as an armature for an ever-changing daily life? Buildings and Almost Buildings explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture. Structured around a variety of modes of representation specially prepared for the book, Buildings and Almost Buildings reveals the ways in which the celebrated New York office led by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang addresses contemporary issues of a world in flux. Across a range of buildings, public spaces, and ephemeral installations, nARCHITECTS argues for the formal and social potential of an architecture that
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By Practice, by Invitation
Design Practice Research in Architecture and Design at Rmit, 1986-2011
Leon Van Schaik, Anna Johnson (eds.)
Design Practice Research at RMIT University is a longstanding program of research into what venturous designers actually do when they design. It is probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. This first Pink Book documents some of its past achievements. Probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. It is a growing force in the world, with a burgeoning program of research in Asia, Oceania and Europe.
This book documents some of its past achievements. Two kinds of knowledge are created by the research. One concerns the ways in which designers marshal their intelligence, especially their spatial intelligence, to construct the mental space within which they practice design. The other reveals how
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The Social Imperative
Architecture and the City in China
H. Koon Wee
This book contains multiple short critiques, reflections and manifestos, affording each contributing architect and intellectual the time and space to imagine new social paradigms in China. Emerging from a tumultuous history of high culture and complex territorial conditions, there is nothing straightforward about the social development of China. The complexity of the social practices developed by architects and shapers of the built environment can be explained in part by the last three decades of an intensified adoption of the market economy by the Communist Party of China, after an equally short three decades of closed-door communist control. There is no political meltdown like the democratization of the former Communist Bloc, but there is a constant managing of discontent and resistance across China. At the apex of the many creative and intellectual forces in China, architects harbor and give form to many tactics of
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[UN]Precedented Pyongyang
Dongwoo Yim
[UN]Precedented Pyongyang" is an urban research on how Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was reconstructed from the Korean War based on the idea of socialist urbanism and how those socialist urban spaces will transform when it adopts the new market-economy system.
Despite the notorious fact of it being one of the most veiled countries in modern history, North Korea recently has started to get engaged with the rest of the world, and now we can easily witness various socio-economic changes of the nation which was seen in the 1990s in other post-socialist countries. And as the capital of the nation, Pyongyang has already entered into fast transformation stage with numbers of developments both in public and private sectors since the new regime of Kim Jung Un.
However, we sometimes overlook the fact that the city was built based on the goal to be an ideal socialist city. After the three
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America Recovered
Chad Ress, Jordan H. Carver, Miriam Paeslack
America Recovered reveals the point where abstract political processes manifest themselves in the physical world, thus providing an alternate means of experiencing the contemporary American landscape. Collectively, the images and essays show what aspects of our everyday lives are being assigned value in the promise of a recovered America.
In 2009 President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act known as the stimulus bill. Along with the bill, the administration launched Recovery.gov , a website to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of covered funds.
America Recovered collects forty images that mark one of the only efforts to document the breadth of projects funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unlike the New Deal and other programs designed for employment and infrastructural development, the Recovery Act was passed without any funds dedicated for photographic documentation. Using an official government website as
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Architecture and Dystopia
Dario Donetti, Marco De Michelis, Oliver Elser, Dominique Rouillard, Marco Biraghi, Marie Theres Stauffer, Maddalena Scimemi, Simon Sadler, Massimiliano Savorra, Anthony Vidler
As a response to the profound crisis of Western culture the emerged in the 1960s, radical artists from Italy, Austria, England and Japan called into question the foundations of modernist utopias. They transmuted the difficulties of capitalism into a repertory of startling images that revealed the disturbing realities of consumer society, even in those places still resistant to the penetration of modern architecture, such as Superstudio and Archizoom’s Florence. Their model, though exhausted in the space of experimentation, went on to inspire a generation of architects, from the High Tech movement to Rem Koolhaas, who sought to employ the paradigm of dystopia as both a visionary and a constructive method, one which could operate on the architecture of late capitalism and generate unexpected possibilities for urban planning.
In the light
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Un-Conscious-City
Wiel Arets
No one demands that people move to cities; people tend to do so, on their own. People choose to move to cities for opportunity. Such choices are often made unconsciously, as they are based on rules, traditions, and local communities–or a combination of all three. Un-Conscious-City explores and unravels Dutch architect Wiel Arets’ kaleidoscopic viewpoints on the ways the collective, unconscious decisions taken by the world’s citizens throughout time–a process that remains invisible to the naked eye–are now working to transform and shift the physical, sensory, and emotional experiences of human beings, as they navigate and live in today’s metropolises as well as the countryside.
People tend to only belong to one religion, one society, or one club–which completely defines their existence. One day most human beings will live in a globalnomadic-urban-condition; this will soon be amplified to unknown heights. Un-Conscious-City raises questions, predicaments, and ideals regarding the future of our cities, while recognizing their limitations. Wiel Arets–renowned architect, writer, and thinker–identifies this condition
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Gran Mediterraneo
Project, Process, Progress
David Tajchman
David Tajchman's first book about a self-initiated architectural research for a White City-specific High-Rise: the Gran Mediterraneo. Gathering working documents, sketches and rare pictures in an object specifically designed by graphic designer and art director Sara Jassim.
In 2016, architect David Tajchman made public a self-initiated high-rise proposal on which he worked in secret during a few months. He decided to propose a new typology of skyscraper, more city-specific for Tel Aviv. Based on his previous observations that a new skyline is appearing in the White City, which according to his experience of the city and his knowledge of the local architectural history, does not take enough into account the 1930s and later Brutalist legacies. His yet unbuilt (but surely to get built) skyscraper is a spontaneous proposal from a foreign architect to the local decision makers, to open their eyes and their mind to other visions, for
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Geographies of Trash
Rania Ghosn & El Hadi Jazairy/ DESIGN EARTH
In the Age of Environment, the scale waste management is geographic all while often relegating such undesired matter to invisibility as matter out of place. Geographies of Trash reclaims the role of forms, technologies, economies and logistics of the waste system in the production of new aesthetics and politics of urbanism. Honored with a 2014 ACSA Faculty Design Award, the book charts the geographies of trash in Michigan across scales to propose five speculative projects that bring to visibility disciplinary controversies on the relations of technology, space and politics.
The book reclaims the materiality and spatiality of municipal solid waste systems. The research-design methodology and book structure adopt a threefold approach, 1) to conceptualize the spatial issues; 2) to chart relations of trash and space in Michigan across different scales; 3) to speculate on alternative strategies, rituals and imaginaries that reclaim trash as matter in
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The Self-Sufficient City
Internet has changed our lives but it hasn't changed our cities, yet
Vicente Guallart
The Barcelona Architect in Chief peals the axes in which the cities must be sustained to adapt them to the new information age, and to generate its own resources.
Internet has changed our lives but it has not yet changed our cities. Any technological revolution takes paired radical transformations in the life styles. If the age of the car and the oil shaped the cities of the 20th century, the society of the information will form those of the 21st century. It is an unstoppable evolution that, nevertheless, it is necessary to be able to lead with criterion. It is a question of taking advantage of the urban experiences accumulated for centuries by the human beings and having present that the growth cannot be unlimited and the energetic resources that our planet offers have expiry date. Vicente Guallart exposes
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General Theory of Urbanization 1867
Ildefons Cerdà
First translation into English on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the General Theory of Urbanization by Ildefons Cerdà, an essential work on urban development.
In 1867 Ildefons Cerdà published his “Teoria general de la urbanització.” In this text, the “science of building cities”, understood as a phenomenon, became a new discipline with a broad economic, social and cultural impact on the life of the people of the city. Coinciding with 150 years since its publication, its first translation into English is being presented along with the publishing online urbanization.org with the statistics transformed into interactive graphics and open data, with the aim of expanding the knowledge of Cerdà’s work and encouraging debate on the process of “urbanization” in the future.
Co-published with the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in collaboration with the Diputació de Barcelona, the Generalitat de Catalunya through Incasòl. Bloomberg Philanthropies contributed as
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Natured – IROJE, Seung H-Sang
Seung H-Sang
This publication wants to transmit the constant values of the Seung H-Sang's architecture, which has been routed on principles and ideals driven by sensuous and essences of raw materials, echoing the extemporal features of the culture where buildings are placed, discovering the prettiness of scarcity of resources.
IROJE's buildings, landscapes and urban proposals have been always looking for the equilibrium between endurance of the past essence of each place and the freshness of the new life experiences generated by the architecture.
The book proposes to compile the best architectural IROJE's works employing the magnificence of black and white pictures, creative sketches, and elementary plans and drawings to illustrate the permanent values of Seung H-Sang.
With contributions of
Hyungmin Pai
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Layered Landscapes Lofoten
Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change
Magdalena Haggärde & Gisle Løkken / 70°N arkitektur
This book discusses approaches towards landscapes under pressure and transformation, and the importance of unprejudiced and experimental investigations to reveal its natural and cultural complexity.
Layered Landscapes Lofoten, Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change aims to challenge internalized concepts about how landscapes are considered and investigated, to open for alternative research, and legitimize subjective, singular and experimental approaches as valid and appreciated as a foundation for an informed process. These approaches take into consideration both the landscape and the practices taking place in the landscape, that are consistently full of individual and collective stories and experiences —the complexity created in both time and space, which influences our societies not only as traces of historical events, but as present realities and even expectations and what is to become. Under the concepts of complexity, imbrication, vulnerability, fieldwork, flexibility and reorientation ideas are developed, all
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Scarcity in Excess
The Built Environment and The Economic Crisis in Iceland
Arna Mathiesen & Thomas Forget
A guiding model that seeks to address the relationship between the economic meltdown and the built environment in Iceland using ecological approaches. New solutions that aspiere a long-term balance between economic objectives and ecological issues.
This publication derives from a case study on the built environment in the Reykjavik capital area in the light of the financial meltdown in October 2008. It is the work of the participants in the case study and a number of invited contributors from different fields; researchers, artists and activists that offer different perspectives on the case. The case study is a part of a larger European project, Scarcity and Creativity in the built Environment (SCIBE), funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). The work presented suggests a new spirit of development applicable to various cultures and climates beyond Iceland.
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Many Norths
Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory
Lola Sheppard & Mason White / Lateral Office
Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory charts the unique spatial realities of Canada’s Arctic region, an immense territory populated with small, dispersed communities. The region has undergone dramatic transformations in the name of sovereignty, aboriginal affairs management, resources, and trade, among others. For most of the Arctic’s modern history, architecture, infrastructure, and settlements have been the tools of colonialism. Today, tradition and modernity are intertwined.
Northerners have demonstrated remarkable adaptation and resilience as powerful climatic, social, and economic pressures collide. This unprecedented book documents—through the themes of urbanism, architecture, mobility, monitoring, and resources—the multiplicity of norths that appear and the spatial practices employed to negotiate it. Using innovative drawings, maps, timelines, as well as essays and interviews, Many Norths reveals a distinct northern vernacular.
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Yamuna River Project
New Delhi Urban Ecolgy
Iñaki Alday & Pankaj Vir Gupta
This publication presents the results of more than five consecutive years of focused research initiatives and designs from The University of Virginia School of Architecture towards the revitalization of New Delhi, India's water bodies.
In collaboration with the Delhi Jal Board, The University of Virginia's Yamuna River Project is an inter-disciplinary research program, proposing to revitalize the ecology of the Yamuna River in Delhi and creating vital urban links with the Yamuna River as it flows through India's capital city. Through the research, methodologies, and designs contained within this publication, this project aims to serve as a catalyst for the urgent recovery of the Yamuna River and its tributaries, building a publically accessible body of information and expertise resulting in visions of what an alternative future would be. Only by addressing human equality and the complexity of Delhi's urban phenomenon can the social and
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Echos
University of Cincinnati School of Architecture and Interior Design
Mara Marcu
The publication captures the work done at the University of Cincinnati School of Architecture and Interior Design while showcasing student work, faculty research, co-op stories, study abroad programs, and snapshots from the many events happening at our school.
ECHOS is a platform for simultaneous conversations with shared ethos at UC SAID. Various constellations begin to surface and map our diverse milieu of academic and social interactions that revolve around the following five main themes: anxiety, praxis, trope, chreod, and utopia. Introduced by a series of analytical diagrams which are paired up with essays by lead figures in the discipline, the themes expand on the issues of theoretical anxiety, architectural discourse, practice, typology, self-made analogies, ad hoc morphologies inherent to research, flux and reflux - that return each disruption to a steady trajectory - similar to the natural cycle of compression and release
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Superhumanity
Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity
Chin Jungkown, Common Accounts (Igor Bragado & Miles Gertler), Arisa Ema, Hong Sungook, Yuk Hui, Kim Jaehee, Catherine Malabou, Hannah Proctor, Erik Rietveld, Mark Wasiuta
Focused on post-labor, psychopathology, and plasticity of human mind and body, this book introduces insight, critiques, and propositions in the area of âself-design,â ranging from design and architecture to science, media, history, philosophy, and contemporary art.
The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Faced with the fourth industrial revolution, this book shed light on the necessity to recognize that manmade, artificial objects are continuously reshaping our daily lives, and thus to rethink the intimate and fundamental relationship between design and what
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Clip, Stamp, Fold
The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X to 197X
Beatriz Colomina, Craig Buckley
An explosion of little architectural magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture, as the magazines acted as a site of innovation and debate. Clip, Stamp, Fold takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period that were published in over a dozen cities.
Part of the 125 Best Architecture Books of ArchDaily
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KERB 23
Digital Landscapes
Georgia Aldous, Sophia Horomidis, Rebecca Pike & Robert Williamson
Originating as a RMIT university pamphlet in 1989 for the purpose of discussing landscape architecture. The journal now boasts a diverse selection of contributors, focusing on contemporary landscape architecture themes. The journal is edited by a group of students, who select the articles pertinent of each edition. Kerb seeks to set the agenda for designers and architects, establishing a platform for new ideas and contemporary design theory. Kerb Journal is now featured on university reading lists around the world.
It is the identification and manipulation of matter that has the potential to inform, change, align, and drive a physical interaction and making with the world. Kerb 23 examines ways in which ‘Digital Landscape’ discourse can be applied to landscape architecture. Through exploring Simulation, Fabrication, Augmentation and emerging theories of ‘Digital Ecologies’ we can navigate new horizons of what is made ‘possible’ within
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Unfinished
Ideas, Images, and Projects from the Spanish Pavilion at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale
Iñaqui Carnicero, Carlos Quintáns, Santiago de Molina, Jacobo García-Germán, Alfonso Batalla, Amale Andraos, et alt.
The book displays the work of seven photographers and fifty five projects of architecture, presenting the problem through the unfinished constructions strewn across different points of Spain ́s geography, as well as five critic essays and eleven interviews with prestigious professors from the international academia.
The dictionary definition of “unfinished” presents the following synonyms: unadorned, crude, formless, imperfect, raw, rough, under construction, unfashioned, unperfected, unpolished, unrefined. All of these adjectives conjure in the imagination of designers a new type of architectural intervention that perceives the existing built environment as a constraint upon which we can leave an important but impermanent mark. In this way, architects become a link in the chain of a structure’s life. Through the concept of the “unfinished,” we may understand the desirability of a perpetual state of evolution of the
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MCM–Milan Capital of the Modern (ENG ED.)
Lorenzo Degli Esposti
Modern architecture articulated itself in specific centers of propulsion, revision and critique during the 20th century. The case of Milan is exemplary: Terragni and Razionalismo, the reconstruction (Ponti, Rogers, Moretti, Viganò, etc.), the Tendenza of Rossi, product design, up to the current research. MCM traces this history from several contributors’ points of view.
MCM - Milano Capital of the Modern, edited by Lorenzo Degli Esposti, is made up of texts and images from over 300 contributors from Europe and the US, across three generations, involved in the activities of the Padiglione Architettura in EXPO Belle Arti of Vittorio Sgarbi, a programme by the Regione Lombardia hosted in the Grattacielo Pirelli during the EXPO 2015. They investigate the relationships between modern architecture, the city of Milan (Razionalismo, reconstruction, Tendenza, Radical Design, up to current research) and the city in general, between single and specific works and the large scale of the urban territory, in the contradictions between architecture autonomy
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Public Catalyst
Manuel Bailo
This work, which understands that the city, now and ever, has had and must have public spaces of intensity, proposes the urban catalysts as agents capable of activating a place that was previously indifferent. The comparative work of historical and recent cases, developed by research and drawings work, has allowed us to discover that the vivid public spaces of identity and reference have been formed due to the urban effect caused by these agents that we call “catalysts”.
Manuel Bailo’s work includes a wide range of projects, moving from urban scale to interiorism. It has been fully published and awarded. Some examples are: GardenHouse 0.96; Hotel Ciutat d’Igualada, and Façade-Steps Landscape of Manresa Town Hall, shown at On Site: New Spanish Architecture, MoMA Museum of New York in 2006, and won in 2010 the prestigious international Contracworld Award. They have also received the First “Annual Commercial Space Award” in China 2011. And they have received the prestigious Spanish Award FAD twice.
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Public Space Acupuncture
Acupuncture strategies to renovate infrastructure, landscape elements and public space in cities.
Helena Casanova, Jesús Hernández
As the financial crisis deepens in many European countries and the construction sector remains in a slump, many plans for urban regeneration have been shelved. Cities are cutting their spending on large public works, so the time is ripe for low-cost strategies that have a positive impact on the urban habitat. One such strategy is Public Space Acupuncture, in which independent but coordinated small interventions help regenerate urban public space and city life. It is based on Zygmunt Bauman's characterization of the current era as Liquid Modernity.
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Crown Hall Dean’s Dialogues 2012-2017
Kazuyo Sejima, William Baker, Wiel Arets, Junya Ishigami, Stefano Boeri, Peter Eisenman, Ben van Berkel, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Phyllis Lambert, Riken Yamamoto, Herman Hertzberger, Armand Mevis, David Adjaye, Erwin Olaf, Dominique Perrault, Stan Allen, Bernard Khoury, Agata Siemionow
This title collects the voices of 18 esteemed architects, designers, educators and theorists in dialogue with students from the Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. Voices ranging from Phyllis Lambert to David Adjaye to Rafael Vinoly expound and express their thoughts freely, digging deeply into essential themes that drive their work, study and process. This title provides intimate insight directly from leading architectural and design practitioners, who in the process of being interviewed, further the academic discourse conducted at IIT College of Architecture.
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Time for Play
Why architecture should take happiness seriously
AZC – Atelier Zündel Cristea
Over the last 15 years AZC’s architectural work has developed through a diverse range of experiences. This book, Time for Play, presents exhibition pavilions, temporary installations, and ideas competitions – a mix of built and un-built projects.
“Today’s situation promotes innovation, supports creativity and enriches projects, calling on our intelligence. We are forced to take a new look at practices and uses, to consider different ways of doing things, to think about the humanity of a place; and all this when we still find it so hard to understand community needs, and even more so to keep up with changing society. Faced with a changing world, they propose solutions that are novel in their shape, use, cost and temporality. This project is realistic and realisable. The architects put their intelligence and skill not into regurgitating conventional solutions but into inventing new ones. They
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Traces
LAN (Local Architecture Network)
Umberto Napolitano, Benoit Jallon
Undertaken at the occasion of LAN’s 10th anniversary, Traces recalls the journey of Umberto Napolitano and Benoit Jallon through their projects and their travel impressions.
The city is the point of departure and arrival for the “architectural experience”. It is, therefore, a palpable, external fact as well as a product of the mind, an abstraction. This book attempts to recreate this trajectory and to describe this exchange between the mind and the world through the traces it has produced. Two separate moments lie at the heart of this book’s very structure and shape: one when the city is the site of an experience and of reflection and the other, when architects modify this site through a new project.
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Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam
One Glass Tower by Wiel Arets & Nine Situations by Katrien Van den Brande
John Bezold
Colliding modern architecture, theatrically informed photography, and surreal poetry and prose; this carefully-crafted collaboration between artist Ellen Kooi, architect Wiel Arets, and artist Katrien Van den Brande documents five sets of highly-staged visual ‘scenarios’, and nine textual ‘situations’, of numerous imaginary guests, who simultaneously inhabit the B’ Tower–a high-rise in the center of Rotterdam. Each scenario was dreamt up, created, and captured on camera by Kooi; each of Van den Brande’s situations were written while staying at the tower, in the guise of the many other, ‘unseen’, temporary tower guests.
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Calme Bloc
Avenier Cornejo, Chartier Dalix
Architects, authors, and photographers’ different viewpoints on a dense and complex building in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. Photographer Myr Muratet, who spent several weeks living there, offers us an authentic reportage of the building’s appropriation by its new inhabitants.
Located just above the city’s eight-lane ring road, this calm block was recently completed by Parisian architecture firms Chartier Dalix and Avenier Cornejo, which combines a kindergarten with 240 studio apartments for young workers in a rapidly changing neighbourhood. Its users’ behaviour, habits, and adaptations confirm or subvert the designers’ intentions. As the building weighs anchor in its neighbourhood, not only does the alchemy of this process resonate in the immediate surroundings, but also further afield, in the wake of individual users’ destinies. Inquisitive visitor Sébastien Marot sets sail on an urban and architectural cruise, exploring the physical, social, and historical flux that is the undercurrent of this built reality.
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Good Vibrations
Clichy Batignolles: Lot E8 & Parc 1
Gausa+Raveau actarchitecture, Avenier-Cornejo Architectes
The Clichy-Batignolles stands as a new urban landscape liaison element, an essential urban portal along the peripheric territorial arc, just by the historic city.The site thus becomes an important urban platform, a place of exchange in the relational-spaces web organization of Paris. It shall serve as connection point for the various territorial, urban, environmental, social and cultural scales.
The aim of the book comes from the relations that are given between both buildings done on the sustainable Clichy-Batignolles neighborhood in Paris built by Gausa-Raveau actarchitecture & Avenier-Cornejo Architectes. The concept and material display of the book arises because of the visual quakes that present the materiality of the two towers.Finally, the idea of vibration is given between the buildings and the environment.
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Critical Prison Design (ENG ED.)
Mas d’Enric Penitentiary by AiB arquitectes + Estudi PSP Arquitectura
Roger Paez
The newly built Mas d’Enric penitentiary sparks a series of reflections on architecture’s role in the problematic subject of prison design.
The prison is an uncomfortable institution and its architecture is often subjugated to technocratic criteria. This servility forces the prison out of the socio-cultural realm where it belongs, thus erasing it from public discourse. “Mas d’Enric” is a new penitentiary that overturns preconceptions and posits architecture as a medium to critically rethink contemporary prison buildings. The discussion is enriched by contributions from a number of influential architects and architectural theorists, and is complemented by original work in film, photography, literature, sculpture and visual arts.
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Díaz Llanos, Saavedra
Juan Antonio González Pérez
The architects Saavedra and Díaz -Llanos have produced a fantastic adaptation of architecture and environment' style without committing to its essence.
The events' chronicle of the architecture of our time, including its history, is usually written from the present, thus manifesting our current concerns towards the past, so that, according to the sentiment of some historians, the beginning of the account of the initial works it is presented as a final representation.
This publication is a synthesis of many years of work as architects of Javier Díaz-Llanos and Vicente Saavedra: it is not their history, and even less the chronicle of their professional work. This history will prevail the feeling of these works of architecture and urbanism invaded by good work in the office of architect and, above all, it will be inscribed in the chapter of human relations' rationalism.
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Tiny Taxonomy
Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture
Rosetta S. Elkin
Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture.
Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony.
Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants.
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Water Index
Design Strategies for Drought, Flooding and Contamination
Seth McDowell
A book that highlights critical design projects from around the world those radically engage the fragile issues of drought, flooding, and contamination, revealing opportunistic, adaptive design strategies in response to the mounting global crisis.
In the wake of an escalating global crisis with water, Water Index is the first critical inventory and analysis of innovative architecture, landscape architecture and design solutions to address the rising, disappearing, and contamination of water. As an ecological disaster complex ferments in contemporary architectural discourse, design competition briefs, conference topics and journal themes optimistically call for designers to reconcile or reimagine the relationship between water, architecture and city. Anxiety is elevated by the onslaught of extreme weather in the form of super-storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, and droughts whose frequencies and intensities continue to increase. Couple the ever-present exposure to disaster with scientific data that suggests a future characterized
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XXL-XS
New Directions in Ecological Design
Mitchell Joachim , Mike Silver
XXL-XS represents the emerging discipline of ecological design by assembling a wide range of innovators with diverse interests. Geo-engineering, synthetic biology, construction site co-robotics, low-energy fabrication, up-cycling waste, minimally invasive design, living materials, and molecular self-assembly are just a few of the important advances explored in the book.
At one extreme are massive public works, at the other, micro to nano-sized interventions that can have equally profound impacts on our world. From terraforming to bio-manufacturing, a whole new generation of designers is proposing unique ways of confronting the difficult challenges ahead. In this way design becomes a totality of relationships that affects all disciplines, which can no-longer be thought of as self-contained fields, each handled separately by narrowly focused specialists. Globalization demands a restructuring of the profession, as we know it. This requires a new breed of generalists who can work across fields
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Landscape Tunings (ENG ED.)
An Urban Park at the Danube
Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler / OFICINAA
Landscape Tunings maintains that landscape is more than ecology and technical performance; it is also an environment of paramount importance to one’s dispositions and wellbeing—an emotional space of social relevance, tuned with and for its communities. In this book, OFICINAA examines the design potentials of the Danube River as a civic anchor, a bioclimatic medium, and a space for collective imagination in the city of Ingolstadt, Germany.
Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube explores the city’s littoral landscapes with video-essays, drawings, walks, public installations, and exhibitions—each spotlighting the sensate-space where the city meets the Danube’s edge. It then showcases the bottom-up and tactical design approaches of the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project, which aims to foster the spatial embodiment with the riverine environments facing the present challenges of the anthropogenic era. With contributions by Günther Vogt, Andres Lepik, and
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Making it Modern
The History of Modernism in Architecture and Design
Aaron Betsky
This book traces the astonishing opening up of a brave new world of open empty space, the arrival of the beauty and terror of the machine into daily life, and the attempts to represent them in the construction of a modernist world.
At its root, modernism is that fundamental. It is a question of having something to represent that is of the moment. In the most radical interpretation, modernism always comes too late. The modern is that which is always new, which is to say, always changing and already old by the time it has appeared. Modernism is always a retrospective act, one of documenting or trying to catch what has already appeared –an attempt to fix life as it is being lived. Modernity is just the very fact that we as human beings are continually remaking the world around us through our
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Suprarural (SP ED.)
Atlas Arquitectónico de Protocolos Rurales del Medio Oeste Estadounidense y la Pampa Argentina
Ciro Najle, Lluís Ortega
The Atlas of rural protocols in the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas is structured along eight systems of organization: transport and infrastructure, land subdivision, agricultural production, water management, storage and maintenance, human habitation, animal management, land management. Each of these systems possesses a number of organizational types, material components, normative relationships, and spectra of performance, which become available through a manual of instructions for a Suprarural architectural environment. The research is based on a realistic-overriding ethics towards design that operates by abstracting and intensifying unexplored territorial phenomena.
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Total Latin American Architecture
Libretto of Modern Reflections & Contemporary Works
Ana de Brea
This book is not about a folk or typical Latin American architecture. Latin America is not some faraway, isolated region, rather a huge and universal laboratory. It shows a different Latin America through its recent architecture, which flourishes in our time of global communications. It does have roots in the past; but does not appeal to nostalgia. Architecture thought for the present and designed for the near future. Total Latin American Architecture intends to communicate a targeted objective, to circumscribe a segment, a series of observations and actions in architecture.
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Ábalos + Sentkiewicz ( ENG ED. )
Essays on Thermodynamics, Architecture and Beauty
Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz
A compendium of essays and projects, that creates a projective document able to set up new scenarios for the architecture of the next decade.
This is a book that unfolds arguments and designs around the concept of "thermodynamic beauty". This new aesthetic category opens up new and unexpected directions to the architect's work, connecting architecture and thermodynamics without giving up the tectonic tradition. The compendium is developed through the concepts of Somatisms, Verticalism, Thermodynamic Materialism, Monsters Assemblage, and, summarizing design strategies and opening new territories at the scales of building, public space and landscape.
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MCHAP The Americas 1
The Americas
Fabrizio Gallanti (ed.)
MCHAP: The Americas brings together leading architects and academics in a dialogue exploring the current state of architecture throughout the Americas and explores themes raised by the seven finalist projects (designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Steven Holl Architects, OMA/ LMN – Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, Smiljan Radic, Cristián Undurraga, Rafael Iglesia) from the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize cycle recognizing the best built work in the Amercas from 2000 through 2013.
As part of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MHCAP) program, established by Dean Wiel Arets at IIT Architecture Chicago, recognizing the best built work in the Americas from 2000 through 2013, MCHAP is publishing MCHAP BOOK ONE, as well as publications by the authors of MCHAP 2000-2008 winner, Álvaro Siza, the MCHAP 2009-2013 winner, Herzog & de Meuron, and the MCHAP.emerge 2000-2013 winner, Pezo von Ellrichshausen. Within this editorial program, MCHAP
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Bracket 2: Goes Soft
Neeraj Bhatia, Lola Sheppard
This publication critically positions and defines soft systems through 27 projects and 12 articles.
An in-depth study of soft systems in design Bracket 2 examines physical and virtual soft systems, as they pertain to infrastructure, ecologies, landscapes, environments, and networks. In an era of declared crises—economic, ecological and climatic, amongst others—the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems.
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Bracket 3: At Extremes
Lola Sheppard & Maya Przybylski
This publication includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states.
We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive? Bracket [at extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?
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The Sniper’s Log
Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
An insight into the theoretical discourse that shapes and expands the architect's practice.
This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo's professional life. The book is like a sniper's log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth.
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Beyond Environment
Emanuele Piccardo, Amit Wolf
This publication presents the potent interchange between architecture, Land Art and Performance Art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena's idealized collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s.
Earlier in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pettena's experiments in material transformations helped create some of the architect's most iconic works. Staged in an abandoned school and in a non-descriptive suburban house, and titled Ice House I and II, Pettena would pour water into the mold works he created around the buildings' perimeter walls. Curing during the winter night to a coat of ice, the houses resonated with their conceptual predecessor, Kaprowâ's Fluids of 1967, as well as with an incomparable contemporary architectural sensibly concerned with the effects of variedly compounded, highly eidetic architectural surfaces.
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Beyond Patronage
Reconsidering Models of Practice
Joyce Hwang, Martha Bohm, Gabrielle Printz
This book explores contemporary architectural practices and design agendas that are being shaped or enabled by news forms of "patronage"
Essays, projects, and interviews will examine emerging forms of sponsorship, new forms of connectivity –technological or social– that produce innovative modes of collaboration, and strategies for cultivating relationships that allow us to rethink typical hierarchies between those in power and those in service. One could argue that the profession of architecture has traditionally been characterized by patronage. Throughout the twentieth century, private clients have enabled architects to develop and realize their most significant work. Today, the landscape of patronage is shifting. While the role of private clients is still central to the survival of the profession, an increasing number of architects and design practitioners are actively cultivating partnerships with not-for-profits, granting agencies, educational institutions, and other public organizations. How are these broader relationships
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[Re] Stitch Tampa
Shannon Basset
[Re] Stitch Tampa, an international design ideas competition, challenged designers to consider innovative design ideas and strategies, employing connective urban landscapes and ecological infrastructure as an underlying framework for the post-war coastal city. The competition brief posited that this framework might operate as a catalyst for the economic redevelopment, as well as the landscape and urban recovery of Tampa, Florida. These strategies might physically reconnect a fragmented city, its urban fabric punctured with urban vacancies and significantly impacted by foreclosures during the financial crash, as well as earlier suburban expansion and urban renewal agendas. The Obama administration's announcement in 2010 of 1.25 billion dollars of federal stimulus package monies earmarked for a high-speed rail connection between Orlando and Tampa, to be the first in the United States, was the initial catalyst for the large scale infrastructural re-thinking of the city. While the high-speed rail was not implemented in the
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Oxymoron & Pleonasm
Conversations on American Critical and Projective Theory of Architecture
Monika Mitášová
12 interviews focusing on the problem of critical and projective approach to architectural thinking and design discussed by current American theorists, historians and practitioners.
Monika Mitášová interviewed an influential group of current American theorists, historians and practitioners proposing critical and projective architecture, respectively, which forms the first book that brings those perspectives together to show the state of current critical and projective theory, practice and new alternative actions of designing architecture.
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Re-Living the City
UABB 2015 Catalogue
Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, Doreen Heng Liu
This richly illustrated book presents the exhibits and curatorial visions of the 2015 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB), organized around the theme, Re-Living the City. It highlights the contributions of dozens of international architects, designers and artists, and offers 12 probing, original essays.
The projects and essays of UABB 2015, Re-Living the City, criticize the status quo of architecture and urbanism, but they also resist the false dream of designing a perfect city from scratch. Instead, they portray the city as the incremental product of its inhabitants and designers, who provisionally make and remake its fabric through various means at their disposal. Urbanization in the world’s fastest growing regions today has a dual character: officially-sanctioned, large-scale development shadowed by unregulated or ‘informal’ spaces built by disenfranchised migrants. UABB 2015 operates between these poles, seeking alternative paradigms to generate a
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The Petropolis of Tomorrow
Neeraj Bhatia, Mary Casper
The Petropolis of Tomorrow examines the role of resource extraction infrastructure in the production of new forms of urbanism.
In recent years, Brazil has discovered vast quantities of petroleum deep within its territorial waters, inciting the construction of a series of cities along its coast and in the ocean. We could term these developments as Petropolises, or cities formed from resource extraction. The Petropolis of Tomorrow is a design and research project, originally undertaken at Rice University that examines the relationship between resource extraction and urban development in order to extract new templates for sustainable urbanism. Organized into three sections: Archipelago Urbanism, Harvesting Urbanism, and Logistical Urbanism, which consist of theoretical, technical, and photo articles as well as design proposals, The Petropolis of Tomorrow elucidates not only a vision for water-based urbanism of the floating frontier city, it also speculates on new methodologies for integrating infrastructure, landscape, urbanism and architecture within the larger spheres of economics, politics, and culture that implicate these disciplines.
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Uncharted
The New Landscape of Tourism
Juan Elvira, David Goodman, Pablo Oriol, Roger Paez, Fernando Rodríguez, Lina Toro
An IE University Undergraduate School academic experiment emphasizing the importance of architectural design strategies in the process of reformulating the tourist offering within the framework of an open debate about new models for development.
The book has a two-fold objective: to explore new avenues of thought in design teaching, and to do so through research that deals with new architectural landscapes that are linked to tourism. Publishing the Undergraduate Final Projects from IE University’s Undergraduate Architecture program responds to the desire to highlight the importance of design strategies in the process of reformulating the tourist offering within the framework of an open debate about new models for development. The infrastructural nature of architectural design imbues the architect’s creative capacity with the healthy ambition of transforming the territory into new landscapes for touristic opportunities.
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Experiments With Life Itself (ENG ED.)
Radical Domestic Architectures between 1937 and 1959
Francisco González de Canales
Five experiments made by prestigious architects on their own homes during the dark days of the Second World War.
In most books or manuals on the history of modern architecture we found a large number of pages devoted to the avant-garde movement that took place in-between wars and to the reconstruction and expansion after World War II. Therebetween, as a misunderstanding or an agreed silence, is a big gap of dark years, wars and exiles of which you can hardly speak about. It is precisely in those dark years when the most experimental and inspiring projects had place. Architects and artists relegated to the margins of civil reality began to present a picture of reactions to a cultural situation unsustainable. Francisco González de Canales analyzes a constellation of scattered cases between late thirties and late fifties of the twentieth century he calls
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Phylogenesis (ENG ED.)
Foreign Office Architects
Through a series of competitions, speculative commissions, and built work, FOA's first monograph is structured to reflect the development of their specific attitude and as a compendium of the technical arsenal that they use to within their practice. With the spirit of scientific classification, the genesis of an architectural project is identified within a series of phylum, actualized and simultaneously virtualized, in their specific application to the unique conditions of a project's location. Phylogenesis also includes a collection of texts from several critics who investigate related topics that touch upon different aspects of FOA's discourse.
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MA YANSONG
From (Global) Modernity to (Local) Tradition / Entre la modernidad (global) y la tradicion (local)
Menene Gras
MAD works in forward-looking environments developing futuristic architecture based on a contemporary interpretation of the eastern spirit of nature. All of MAD's projects - from residential complexes or offices to cultural centres - desire to protect a sense of community and orientation toward nature, offering people the freedom to develop their own experience. Founded in 2004 by Ma Yansong, the office first earned worldwide attention in 2006 by winning an international competition to design a residential tower near Toronto, expected to be completed in the summer of 2012. MAD has been commissioned by clients of all backgrounds, leading to an intriguing combination of diverse project designs. MAD's ongoing projects include two major cultural projects in Harbin: the China Wood Sculpture Museum and Harbin Culture Island, an opera house and cultural center that will retain the original wetlands as an urban park between the old and new city.
MAD is led by Ma Yansong, Dang Qun
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Fundamental Particles
EA774 at Cern
Francesco Soppelsa, Octavi Mestre
This book is centered on the design and construction of the most important building – in both architectural and representational terms – built at CERN in recent years.
This book describes the construction of building 774 at CERN. The building is unique in terms of its architectural value and its location. Located next to the CCC (CERN Control Center), it is the gateway to CERN for the more than 100,000 visitors it receives each year.
The building houses the offices and laboratories where the computer programs for the Control Center are created, the management headquarters for the French side, in addition to a public-access area equipped with a conference hall, a cafeteria, and a VIP restaurant, to support the frequent visits by heads of state and Nobel prize winning scientists who tour the CERN facilities.
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Create! (ENG ED.)
Eduardo Arroyo
This book shapes a thick network of experiences and crossed interests opened throughout last twenty-five years in the office NO.MAD and its founder Eduardo Arroyo. In its pages there are mixed reflections, anecdotes and creations that shape an exciting cocktail between living, thinking and creating.
In some time of our physiological life something inside each one gets lost and the mind fills with doubts. In spite of the inertia of the long crossed distance, to stop and to look behind with exploratory smell can help us to enter with courage in the unknown days. Topics like the origin and the memory, the soul and the precision, the random and the instability, the empathy, the instants and the choice, the hybridization and the blurry systems, the cloning, the invisible orders and the essential complexity turn out to be here interlaced. The trip across these invisible paths demonstrates a critical vision of the world and the voluntary obligation to try to transform it from the creative independence,
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Trans Structures
Fluid Architecture and Liquid Engineering
Matyas Gutai
The book introduces water as a building material to build unique, responsive-able structures and define a new paradigm for architecture and sustainable design.
It is comprised of three main parts: the first part explains the theoretical framework of trans-structures and is also accompanied by photos and diagrams of the laboratory tests; the second part shows realized related projects accompanied by interviews with key designers of the buildings; the final part introduces a built Trans-structure: Water House experimental pavilion, which utilizes water as building material. Water gives unique aesthetics and structural characteristics to the building with real response ability based on the properties of water, thus allowing liquid engineering to provide a new solution for contemporary sustainable design.
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Ant Farm
LIVING ARCHIVE 7
Felicity D Scott
Felicity D. Scott revisits the architectural, art, video, and intermedia practices of the experimental collective Ant Farm, self-described ¨super-radical activist environmentalists.¨ Drawing together archival material on their extended fields of practice, Ant Farm features the first full-color publication of the complete Ant Farm Timeline, as well as Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout (1969) and an archival dossier on Ant Farm's Truckstop Network (1970-1972). The Ant Farm architects produced experimental works on the "fringe of architecture" (1968-1978) and were influential video artists. Felicity D. Scott is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University and a founding editor of Grey Room.
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Agenda: JDS Architects
Can We Sustain Our Ability to Crisis?
Julien De Smedt, Jesse Seegers
AGENDA is a catalog of 365 days, like a diary or journal: a collective narrative, personal and subjective. It documents the work and thinking of JDS Architects over a specific year marked by crisis, beginning on September 15th, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The form of the book exploits the double meaning of its title, presenting the absurdities of day-to-day architectural practice while also staking our intent. Rather than a definitive direction, our agenda is a definitive attitude - of eagerness, enthusiasm, and optimism, of criticality and concern, of fun and inquiry. It is a directive, a motivation to act, at times without clear knowledge of where our agenda will lead. "Change," the buzzword of the last U.S. presidential campaign, is the order of the day, and the task of AGENDA is to explore what kind
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Yona Friedman / Pro Domo ( ENG ED. )
Yona Friedman
In 1958 Yona Friedman published his first manifesto on "mobile architecture" and founded GEAM (Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile), which proposed different strategies and actions geared to the adaptation of architectural creation to modern user requirements for social and physical mobility. In this initial manifesto, Friedman claims that architectural knowledge cannot be the exclusive property of professionals and specialists, and suggests writing guides or manuals, which explain topics related to architecture and urban planning in clear and simple terms. Pro Domo is "a collection of fragments of scattered topics," a set of "milestones" selected by the author himself, a personal selection chosen "according to sentimental value", spanning 50 years of production.
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From Control to Design
Michael Meredith, AGU, Mutsuro Sasaki, P .ART, Designtoproduction and Aranda/Lash
Parametric and algorithmic design are two of the fastest emerging, most radical technologies reshaping architecture today. This book presents six independent practices that explore current applications of parametric and algorithmic design techniques in architectural production. If the first generation of digital modeling programs allowed designers to conceive new forms and processes, a new breed of digital techniques is being discussed to control and realize these forms. How are these techniques affecting architectural practice and what potentials do they offer ? This is a compilation of projects from leading practitioners across the fields of parametric and algorithmic design. A compelling, multi-perspective debate on the future of design. Featuring: Mutsuro Sasaki, AGU (Arup), Aranda-Lasch, Michael Meredith (mos), P.art (AKT), Designtoproduction, with a conversation between Sanford Kwinter and Jason Payne.
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Fuksas Object
Objects, pieces of furniture, scenographies, interior design... another dimension in the work of Fuksas architects.
Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas
This companion book to Fuksas Buildings features the works by the studio focused on product design, interior design, scenographies, furniture and jewelery. Perhaps the less known aspect of Fuksas work, their product design emphasizes a natural condition in changing scales, materials and uses. Research is also very present behind every piece. Richly illustrated projects such as the Armani stores, the Alessi collection and the furniture for Haworth Castelli, among many others.
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Verb Crisis ( ENG ED. )
Mario Ballesteros
Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.It presents innovative projects and research through original photos, essays, and exclusive interviews with key figures from architecture and urban planning to environmental, economic, and global affairs. Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance.
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Global Housing Projects
25 buildings since 1980
Josep Lluis Mateo
The world is merging into one global system of goods, people and information. This book explores the social, cultural, and economic phenomena of globalization through housing. The Chair of Architecture and Design at the ETH in Zurich examines the last 25 years of housing development. This book is a historical criticism with the built projects as protagonists. Housing typologies have been chosen as contemporary architectural prototypes. The selection of housing projects reflects the most innovative and influential built housing projects to propose new important guidelines in housing.
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Chiharu Shiota (SP ED.)
Las líneas de la mano
Chiharu Shiota
Casa Asia presents the contents of the first exhibition by Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972) in Barcelona, showing installations integrated in a unique project at its headquarters.
Shiota’s installations produce their own spaces, where hundreds of invisible threads that bond us to things can be seen. In these domestic scenarios she proposes, threads become bridges between a bride’s dress and the absent subject, a piano, suitcases and a mirror. In her work, these threads are veins with tears, fear for abyss, life and death; threads that are plots of particular and universal stories, interweaving like the inverted roots of a tree, just like a rhizome through multiple branches that hold up the relationship between she and the world.
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Soupergreen!
Souped-Up Green Architecture
Doug Jackson
SOUPERgreen! features projects and essays that offer a long overdue critique of the current approach to "green" architecture and, in turn, demonstrate a more appropriate way for architects to address the challenges posed by the environmental crisis. In sharp contrast to contemporary examples of "green" or "sustainable" architecture —which primarily rely upon the invisible agency of unremarkable technologies and materials to reduce resource consumption, but which do so without producing a necessary shift in the public's perception of the environment or behavior towards it —SOUPERgreen! demonstrates how green technology can not only perform from a measurable standpoint, but can also produce engaging experiences that profoundly alter, enhance, and transform the public's understanding of the environment. By leveraging the inherently expressive nature of technology in order to dramatize the constantly negotiated relationship between humanity and the natural world, the "souped-up" green architecture featured in SOUPERgreen! transforms "greenness" from
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Popular Lies* About Graphic Design
Craig Ward
An attempt to debunk various misconceptions, half truths and, in some cases, outright lies which permeate the industry of design.
Written both passionately and irreverently, Ward pulls from his ten years of experience to tackle lighter subjects such as design fetishists, Helvetica’s neutrality and urgent briefs, alongside the validity of design education, the supposed death of print, client relationships and pitch planning. In addition, the book includes contributions from more than a dozen renowned professionals such as Milton Glaser, Stefan Sagmeister, Christoph Niemann y David Carson.
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Open Enclosed: Donald Judd
Gillermo Zuaznabar
In this brilliant essay, Gillermo Zuaznabar sets out to describe Donald Judd as if he were an unknown figure, a great pioneer.
Taking "Specific," the seminal text written by Judd in the mid-sixties, as the central theme, the author analyzes the artist's main concepts and his whole career from a new perspective: "... what one seeks is an object that speaks of the world in which it is moving or of the world from which it is moving away. One searches for a boundary work, a frontier, that says, simultaneously, where it is coming from and where it is going, a work in which interests overlap. A work that will function as a mark or a crossroads, locating this work is the first exercise...".
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Treacherous Transparencies (ENG ED.)
Thoughts and Observations Triggered by a Visit to Farnsworth House
Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron
Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists.
The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. The architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day.
Published in the context of the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP). Launch of the publication series by the inaugural MCHAP award winners
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Requiem
For the City at the End of the Millennium
Sanford Kwinter
In this small, but sharply-pointed book, renowned theorist Sanford Kwinter addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set into motion at the turn of the millennium. From the strange appearance of the 'Trojan Horse' that was the Centre Pompidou which served as the harbinger and template of the new idea of "Europe", through the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, to the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers in New York, a new world came into being that design thinking has yet to fully take into account. The City is here seen not only as the last frontier of human history currently under threat of total eclipse, it is the indomitable form of collective experience upon which one can count as assuredly as one can on death and taxes. Requiem, to quote from Thomas Daniell's
Bracket 1: On Farming
Mason White, Maya Przybylski
Bracket is a new book series that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. It is a collaboration between InfraNet Lab and Archinect. Seeking new voices and design talent, Bracket is structured around an open call for entries. Conceived as an almanac, the series looks at emerging thematics in our global age that are shaping the built environment in radically significant, yet often unexpected ways. The series will chart the emergence of this current design generation. A generation raised when the internet was commonplace, when environmental issues reached a critical 'inconvenient truth,' and when the cultural capital of architecture was in need of new vision. The Bracket series will address the complex impacts of globalization on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Bracket 1 is titled On Farming and looks at the capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes
Made Up
Design’s Fictions
Tim Durfee, Mimi Zeiger (eds.)
At a time when “fake news” is part of our daily cultural lexicon, Made Up: Design’s Fictions explores lies, fantasies, and other un-real scenarios as tools of design.Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”—a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: Design’s Fictions advances contemporary analysis and enactment of narrative and speculation as an important part of practice today.
Essays, interviews, and narratives by:
Julian Bleecker, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Stuart Candy, Fiona Raby, Tim Durfee, Sam Jacob, Norman M. Klein, Peter Lunenfeld, Geoff Manaugh, Tom Marble, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, China Miéville, Keith Mitnick, MOS, Susanna Schouweiler, Bruce Sterling, Mimi Zeig
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Third Coast Atlas
Prelude to a Plan
Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, Mason White
Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region. It assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This thick description encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts. Postponing diagnosis, let alone treatment of these conditions, Third Coast Atlas aspires to simply describe. It proposes a new geographic gestalt for urban analysis. Superimposed upon the North American continent, and with easily recognizable yet divergent political and geological borders, this megaregion traverses portions of eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the world's largest collection of surficial fresh water. Third Coast Atlas characterizes the littoral edge as a distinct field of urbanization, and constructs a
Naïve Intention
Pezo von Ellrichshausen
This title is a resulting work of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) emerge, given to the firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen for their Poli House.
Introduced by an essay about the vague contradiction between intentionality and chance, necessity and accident, reason and futility, authorship and anonymity, the book presents a selection of images that inform Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s cross production between art, architecture and academia. Each page contains a single picture and a brief caption describing it. Beyond a comprehensive depiction of the individual works, the monograph underlines transversal notions of inventory, format, scale, regulation and value within the pictorial representation. In the fashion of a personal album, each drawing, painting, photograph, model or building, evokes the mental world behind the couple’s production. This volume could be read both as a collection of ideas, one after another, or as the same one that persists over time.
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Thermodynamic Interactions
Architectural Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres
Javier Garcia-German
An Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres. Energy and sustainability is a complex topic that needs to address simultaneously core disciplinary values and ideas that come from other fields of knowledge.
The interconnection between the environment and its climate, its built structures and the human body requires overlying architecture with other disciplines such as meteorology, thermodynamics or physiology to engage them in a holistic way. The book is structured in three blocks—Territorial Atmospheres, Material Atmospheres and Physiological Atmospheres—which present three distinct and successive realms at which thermodynamic exchanges are taking place. Territorial Atmospheres deals with the thermodynamic interaction between the environment and its built structures. Material Atmospheres focuses on the interaction between a building and the climate it generates. And lastly, Physiological Atmospheres centers on the interaction between indoor ambient and the physiologi-cal and psychological effects on human beings. Each of the
Landscape Futures
Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions
Geoff Manaugh
A speculative look into the future of our built environment.
This publication explores how landscapes, and our perceptions of them, can be utterly transformed by technology and design. It travels the shifting terrains of architectural invention, where new spatial devices on a variety of scales â from the handheld to the inhabitable reveal previously overlooked dimensions of the built and natural environments.
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