The Generic Sublime

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 Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Ciro Najle examines the organizational protocols of building collectives and develops architectural models for encompassing the unprecedented potential of the extra-extra-large. The book includes essays by Ciro Najle, Mohsen Mostafavi, Iñaki Abalos, Charles Waldheim, George L. Legendre, David Salomon, Paul Andersen, Lluís Ortega, Leire Asensio Villoria, David Mah, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Alberto Delorenzini, Marcia Krygier, Julián Varas, Erika Naginski, Hiromi Hosoya, Farshid Moussavi, and Anna Font. EBOOK EDITION
The Joy Of Sharing

The Joy of Sharing

Twenty-Five Writers Inspired by Videos Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation over the Past Twenty-Five Years Han Nefkens, Kyung-sook Shin, Marjorie Evasco, Nazli Ghassemi, Amanda Lee Koe, An Yu, Cristina Morales, Prabda Yoon, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Wu Ming-Yi, Carol Bensimon, Faisal Tehrani, Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, Tomoka Shibasaki, Tsotne Tskhvediani, Manuel Forcano, Gaspar Peñaloza, Nguyen Thuy Hang, Inez Tan, Najwan Darwish, Matías Candeira, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Shalim M Hussain, Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Kyla Pasha Many of the artists the Han Nefkens Foundation works with have been inspired by literature, but with this book the Foundation has turned it around. To celebrate the twenty-five years Han Nefkens has been an activist in the art world, the Foundation has invited twenty-five international writers and poets to write a piece inspired by one of the videos the Foundation has produced. Many of these writers had not looked at video art before and some were not familiar with art from cultures other than their own. Yet, all have written intriguing, often unexpected pieces which shows how moving images can spark imagination.
The Biopolitical Garden

The Biopolitical Garden

Space, Lives and Transition Paola Viganò In all the new research on the future of urban space, the renewed interest in life, tragically affected by health, ecological and socio-political crises, raises a crucial theoretical and projective question: what role can space play in maintaining and promoting life in the broader sense of bíos? This book is based on the conviction that there is an urgent need to revisit the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics - free, however, from the privilege given to the goal of control - to rethink the project of the city and territory in transition in an affirmative and emancipatory way. The 'biopolitical garden' designates both the mental place and the set of concrete spaces in which the critical thinking developed in this book takes place. Profound and original, it starts from a consideration of the modern and contemporary project as one committed to the maintenance and emancipation of a population. Re-reading a series of paradigmatic projects from the twentieth century, Paola Viganò acknowledges the long-term validity of the three fundamental concepts of functional space, natural space, and social space. She then proposes a theoretical renewal that considers the value of space as an agent subject endowed with its own vitality. Finally, the projects developed by the author in recent years provide a laboratory for 'situating' her thinking within a perspective of spatial, social, and environmental justice. 
Lines Of Development

Lines of Development

Analysis, Geometry, Architecture Cameron Wu Much attention has been paid to developable surfaces in building technology recently, especially in the area of digital geometric consultancy. The advent of complex forms in contemporary architecture has necessitated the use of developable surfaces to post-rationalize geometries of double curvature for economy and constructability. In lieu of such remedial measures, these forms might serve as the a priori buildings blocks of a new spatial and tectonic language. These surfaces require specific knowledge of their curvature and isometry for successful deployment. They offer productive resistance in terms of how they permute, generating geometric grammars and legible syntaxes—attributes necessary to bring their virtues into a discursive frame. Lines Of Development traces the history of ruled surface geometries and their relationship to architectural design and practice. Theoretical writings describe the intractable presence and mathematical significance of ruled surfaces throughout the history of architecture leading up to contemporary practice. A collection of case studies with analytical drawings and descriptions show how ruled surfaces are used in historical and current precedents. A geometric primer exhibits various combinatory techniques used to produce formal architectural idioms. Finally, a collection of architectural projects exhibits these geometric design techniques.
We Have Never Been Private

We Have Never Been Private

The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe Ioanna Piniara The publication puts forward the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. It proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatisation not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organisation of housing. Against the neoliberal idea of the institutional autonomy of the private, the thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Methodologically, the thesis deploys a typological study to demystify this pedagogy through selected urban housing schemes in London, Berlin and Athens, marking a geographical and chronological vector of neoliberal advance: from anticipation to severe crisis. 
Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics

Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics

Design Futures for the More than Human Franca Trubiano, Susan Kolber, Marta Llor, Maria Jose Fuentes, Amber Farrow B/M/T/S articulates future ready visions for a field that is increasingly called upon to participate in ever more complex aesthetic, ethical, environmental and socio-political contexts by redefining the very origins, principles, and values of design. Despite the propensity of contemporary discourse to favor the search for a hegemonic theory, this collaborative project convenes the work of twenty-eight women, all of whom interrogate the origins, methods, and tactics of their respective disciplines. Collectively, B/M/T/S challenges the common place nature of ideas founded in parametricism, object-oriented ontology, parafictional realism, post-digital representations, and corporate functionalism. In exchange, it seeks the confluence of critical, aesthetic, and ethical thought in future speculations on the biological, the material, the technological, and their synthesis. The twenty-three papers and five editorials collected in this volume speak to subjects of bio-design, speculative biology, green walls and pavers, design by decay, soilless soil, sentient materials, photogrammetrees, robotics, nanotechnology, thermal architecture and alliesthesia, digital weaving, chemical droplets, and even Frankenstein. Individually and collaboratively, the essays in B/M/T/S question well-established disciplinary methods in favor of new ways for actualizing previously marginalized ideas, values, and practices. Committed to an ethics of synthesis, B/M/T/S explores the limits and potential of designing with multiplicity, metamorphosis, and hybridization. The book’s authors demonstrate a variety of reconciliatory practices for cross-pollinating ideas, materials, and technologies in their drive to design a future world that is always more than human, materially constituted, artificially charged, and synthetically embedded.
Viviendas Para El Patronato De Casas Militares / Dwellings For The Military Housing Trust

Viviendas para el Patronato de Casas Militares / Dwellings for the Military Housing Trust

Fernando Higueras, Antonio Miró, Madrid 1966-1974 Javier García-Germán, Ricardo Sánchez Lampreave and Alejandro Valdivieso Being the first book series dedicated to vindicating and disseminating Madrid’s 20th century architectural heritage both among the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid (COAM) members themselves —and, in particular, among the youngest ones— as well as among the citizens of Madrid, the 'Libros de Arquitectura' Series will dedicate its first volume to Housing. As a secondary objective, by offering the books in a bilingual Spanish-English edition, the possibility of distributing them outside Spain is raised, positioning, in addition to the work of the COAM’s Special Collections Archive, the work of the architects and the architecture from Madrid; updating it based on the paradigms proposed for each of the forthcoming issues of the magazine Arquitectura (territory, climate, inclusion, body, beauty and practice).  Motivated by the absence of a document that critically determines its value and validity —by updating the views on the subject (Housing) and on a specific architecture—, the chosen building was that one built by Fernando Higueras and Antonio Miró from 1966 to 1974 by order of the Patronato de Casas Militares [Spanish Military Housing Trust]. The book traces the history of the building, from the demolition of the former Hospital de la Princesa, the first attempts to build a housing complex for military personnel (preliminary studies and restricted competition) to the commission made to Fernando Higueras and the development of the project together with Antonio Miró and, finally, its subsequent construction. However, the book does not stop there, by complementing the reproduction of all those documents that determine its history (reports, studies, records, drawings, plans and images) with a new visual essay and several essays that critically review the building from different contemporary paradigms, including that which refers to the critical conservation of modern heritage. With the Contributions of Elena Almagro, Lola Botia, Silvia Colmenares, Enrique Encabo and Inmaculada Esteban Maluenda, Javier García-Germán, Ricardo Sánchez Lampreave, Alberto Sanz and Alejandro Valdivieso.
Il Diritto Alla Natura (ITA ED.)

Il diritto alla Natura (ITA ED.)

Per un nuovo paesaggio urbano Emanuele Bortolotti, Paolo Palmulli with Alessandro Frigerio Il diritto alla Natura è un nuovo capitolo di riflessione e lavoro di AG&P greenscape, incentrato sul rapporto attuale e rinnovato tra l'uomo e la natura, e sulla conseguente trasformazione delle nostre città attraverso nuove modalità di vivere, abitare e lavorare, con la natura e il paesaggio come protagonisti, in ogni ambito e a tutte le scale del progetto, come equilibratori sociali e attivatori di una nuova socialità urbana. Il rapporto tra l'uomo e la natura oggi è una questione urgente nel dibattito sulla città contemporanea, ma deve ancora essere veramente esplorato, definito e costruito. Attraverso sette temi principali – Infrastrutture verdi e blu, Rigenerazione, Spazio pubblico, Abitare, Welfare verde, Patrimonio e Cura – il libro esplora le questioni contemporanee del paesaggio urbano alle diverse scale del progetto, alla luce del rapporto tra essere umano e natura. Il concetto viene esplorato attraverso esempi, riflessioni e progetti ideati da AG&P greenscape. In dialogo con altri architetti e comitati – tra cui Renzo Piano Building Workshop, BIG Bjarke Ingels Group, Stefano Boeri Architetti, Crédit Agricole, Fondazione Riccardo Catella –, il libro sottolinea l'importanza di una qualità condivisa del paesaggio urbano quotidiano come una qualità chiave delle nostre città contemporanee. Sguardo
AG&P greenscape ha sempre adottato un punto di vista che mira ad abbattere le barriere tra paesaggio, architettura, tecnologia, cultura ed ecologia, nella convinzione che la qualità dell'ambiente costruito e naturale possa essere raggiunta solo attraverso un rigoroso e approfondito processo di ricerca, progettazione e realizzazione, alla luce di un approccio multidisciplinare e multiscalare.
Buy English Edition
The Right To Nature (ENG ED.)

The Right to Nature (ENG ED.)

For a new urban landscape Emanuele Bortolotti, Paolo Palmulli with Alessandro Frigerio The Right to Nature is a new chapter of reflection and work of the AG&P greenscape, centered on the current and renewed relationship between man and nature, and the consequent transformation of our cities through new ways of living, inhabiting, working with nature and the landscape as the protagonist, in every area, at all project scales, as a social balancer and activator of a new urban sociality. The relationship between man and nature today is an urgent issue in the debate on the contemporary city, but it still has to be truly explored, defined, and built. Throughout seven main topics – Green and blue infrastructures, Regeneration, Public space, Dwelling, Green welfare, Heritage, and Care –, the book explores contemporary urban landscape issues at the different scales of the project, in the light of the relationship between human beings and nature.  The concept is explored through examples, reflections, and projects designed by AG&P greenscape. In dialogue with other architects and committees – among others, Renzo Piano Building Workshop, BIG Bjarke Ingels Group, Stefano Boeri Architetti, Credite Agricole, Fondazione Riccardo Catella –, the book underlines the importance of a shared quality of the daily urban landscape as a key quality of our contemporary cities. Glimpse AG&P greenscape has always adopted a point of view that aims to break down the barriers between landscape, architecture, technology, culture and ecology, in the belief that quality of the built and natural environment can only be attained through a rigorous and thorough process of research, design and realization, in the light of a multidisciplinary and multiscalar approach.  Buy Italian Edition
Felix Candela From Mexico City To Chicago

Felix Candela From Mexico City to Chicago

Rise and Fall of Experimentation in Concrete Alexander Eisenschmidt Candela’s move from Mexico City to Chicago, despite his professional success, is rarely discussed. This book investigates the political and economic conditions that influenced his work and motivated his departure, offering a more nuanced understanding of his contributions to mid-20th-century architecture. Unlike existing literature, it examines Candela’s work in both Mexico and the US, highlighting his role as an architect who shaped new architectural spaces with smooth curves and rough concrete. Combining historical research, oral histories, contemporary theories, construction photographs, essays, interviews, and translations of Candela’s writings, this book reveals his unique position in Latin-American and US architecture. It explores the conditions in both countries, such as Mexico's low wages and cheap timber fostering concrete experimentation in the 1950s, and how the 1968 student demonstrations in Mexico City and Chicago's architectural legacy influenced Candela. The book also delves into Candela’s "Chicago period" through essays based on archival research and interviews with his colleagues and students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, presenting new findings to illuminate the complex factors shaping his work during the 1970s. With Contributions of  Alexander Eisenschmidt, Juan Ignacio del Cueto, Nader Tehrani, Kathryn O’Rourke, Jonathan Miller, George F. Flaherty, Stuart Cohen, Geoff Goldberg, Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, William Baker, Bob Bruegmann, Elisa María Teresa Drago Quaglia, Stanley Tigerman (in the order of appearance).
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