New Titles
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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Mute Icons
& Other Dichotomies on the Real in Architecture
Marcelo Spina, Georgina Huljich / 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alternative to the icon’s cliché and exhausted form of communication, positing one that is decidedly introverted and withdrawn.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 and building, absolute
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The Ecologies of the Building Envelope
A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces
Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Jeffrey 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.
ePub version
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Terra-Sorta-Firma
Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient
Fadi Masoud
For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds; âreclaimingâ 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 urbanismâs 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
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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 âbeautifulâ 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 solidarity
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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
Spanish Edition
ePub version available
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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, creating
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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.
ePub version available
24,00€
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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 âthe empty roomâ as the very essence of architecture, and âthe spatial experienceâ as its highest mandate. Reza revisits architecture ânot as the walls that enclose the spaceâ but rather the space in-between the walls. What he calls an âanti-architectureâ 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 â as long as possible. It submits itself
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Floppy Logic
Experimenting in the Territory between Architecture, Fashion and Textile
Leanne Zilka
Floppy Logic is an exploration into the âarchitectureâ 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
32,00€
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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 IROJEâs 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
ePub version available
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