Sharing Tokyo

Artifice and the Social World Mohsen Mostafavi and Kayoko Ota (eds.) The book questions how “artifice” and the “social world” can be mutually and constructively integrated so that the contemporary urban space can be shared by all. Taking the example of Tokyo, it takes up the two major traits in urban transformation – the large-scale development model on the one hand, and the small-scale model of neighborhood development or preservation on the other – and instead seeks alternative ideas and new strategies. A variety of innovative practices are presented by a diverse group of contributors including renowned scholars, architects, urbanists, and photographers from Japan and the US, and the research team at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. While the discourses and architectural works presented deal with the specificity of Tokyo, they were carefully selected to formulate together a collection of insights, new perspectives, and speculative experiments in urbanism and architecture that can also be used in other contexts. With Contributions of: Mustafa K. Abadan, Shin Aiba, Homi K. Bhabha, Kenta Hasegawa, Kozo Kadowaki, Hiroto Kobayashi, Masami Kobayashi, Japan Research Initiative Team at Harvard GSD, Jouji Kurumado, Seiji M. Lippit, Mitsuyoshi Miyazaki, Mayumi Mori, Mohsen Mostafavi, Jo Nagasaka, Erika Nakagawa, Don O’keefe, Yoshihiko Oshima, Kayoko Ota, Jordan Sand, Yoshihiko Sone, Tsubame Architects, Riken Yamamoto, Shun Yoshie

AA Book 2022: On Location

Ryan Dillon, Anna Lisa Reynolds (eds.) The AA Book 2022: On Location highlights the agendas and practices that have intersected both physically and metaphorically throughout the Architectural Association (AA) during the 2021–22 academic year. The publication features hundreds of projects by students from every unit and programme within the school, which together document the plurality of agendas explored, interests developed, approaches tested and questions posed and addressed by our community this year. With Contributions of Students and staff of the Architectural Association (AA).

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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 plug-ins are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking design’s agency in the city – the main aim of Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab. With Contributions of Ruedi Baur, Julia Benini, Josep Bohigas, David Bravo, Adrià Carbonell, Tomás Díez, Danae Esparza, Ramon Faura, Tona Monjo, Salvador Rueda, Oscar Tomico, Lluís Torrens, Manuela Valtchanova EBOOK VERSION

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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 architecture, these essays put forth a strong argument for architectural thinking that emerges from intimate knowledge of its capacities, as well as an ability to maintain epistemological clarity and integrity when purporting to expand our horizons of understanding. EBOOK VERSION

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 devices of an architecture nourished by literature, art and political commitment for the foundation of an eloquent and activist project even more radical than the well-known Superstudio and Archizoom. The collaboration between Beatrice Lampariello, an architecture historian specialized in the 1960s and 1970s, and False Mirror Office, a group of historians and designers engaged in the rediscovery of UFO group, lead to a monograph focused on the UFO’s work and an evaluation of their legacy relative to contemporary architecture. The monograph is composed of four sections: 1) History, a first-ever study of UFO by False Mirror Office via analysis of all archival and bibliographic sources, as well as a series of interviews with UFO members and a collection of its writings (published and unpublished), for the first time translated into English; 2) Context, composed of essays by historians and architectural theorists (Beatrice Lampariello, Simon Sadler, Alessandra Acocella, Giovanni Galli, Jacopo Galimberti) intended to place UFO’s work in the context of the avant-garde that influenced its work, from the experience of Florentine Radical Architecture to Umberto Eco’s theories on semiotics and the American experiences between Pop Art, Video Art and Happening; 3) Legacy, articulated through graphic contribution and essays by young designers, as False Mirror Office, Parasite 2.0, Point Supreme, Jimenez Lai, Andrew Kovacs, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Traumnovelle, (ab)Normal and Peter Behrbohm, to investigate UFO’s legacy relative to the contemporary revival of the most distinguishing creative processes and obsessions that shaped the so-called Radical Architecture; 4) Anthology the first complete collection of UFO writings for the first time available in English. Granted by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Buy Italian edition EBOOK VERSION

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 open up and expand the operative realm of architecture. It combines research and projects involving policymakers, military engineers and officers, anthropologists, local inhabitants, activists, rebels, diplomats and ministers, architects and planners. BLUE offers examples of how entrenched institutional bureaucracies can be confronted by using more inclusive models of engagement, and it shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence. The book is part of FAST’s ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work. It builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. With Contributions of Mausa Ag Asarid, Pieter Chilson, Isabel Carrasco, Erella Grassiani, Arnon Grunberg, Marcel Rot, Debra Solomon, Joel van der Beek, Laura van Santen, Rob de Vos, Marion de Vos, Leah Zamore. EBOOK VERSION

Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens

Ioanna Theocharopoulou Athens’ most distinctive building type, polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens” questions this stereotype, reassessing the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type: the polykatoikía (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikía as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the postwar urban economy, triggering the city’s social mid-twentieth-century transformation. The interiors of the polykatoikía apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikía interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives and the shape of the postwar city. This revised edition of Theocharopoulou’s study draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon. Written in the light of Greece’s recent financial crisis, the book’s updated Postscript considers the role polykatoikía might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city. Foreword by Kenneth Frampton

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, together with Heinrich Altenmüller’s pairs of essentialized computer graphics, neither completely ‘explain’, nor exhaust each other’s suggestive capacities. Some of the pairs, such as Ribbon – Cluster, Ladder – Star, Fabric – Citadel, wide-span the history of the city, denoting quasi ubiquitous morphologies. Others, such as Monument – Icon, Street – Road, Hole – Void, address (the long) modernity, the second notion illuminating more recent developments. Flow – Shelter, Castle – Palace, tackle the city scale proper, while others, such as Network – Polynuclear Territory, Island – Archipelago, address the scale of the region, characterizing recent planning approaches, such as Landscape Urbanism or Infrastructure Urbanism. Finally, Destination – Morphology, Creator – Curator, Growth – Improvement, question processes and paradigms of making.” Cristina Purcar, Planning Perspectives, 2021, 36,6, “Marcel Smets’ lexicon of fundamentals offers an operative conceptual framework for urban design, a series of spatial elements, systems and approaches that become a starter tool-kit for the contemporary urbanist. It is an important contribution to the idea of a reflective yet pragmatic form of urbanism that maps the existing urban condition and at the same time rewrites it as a series of spatial figures for a possible or even desired urbanity”. Els Verbakel, UNESCO Chair in Urban Design and Conservation Studies, BEZALEL Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem “Yet, the most intriguing and fascinating in the structure of this book remains the fact that urban design is not portrayed as a transitory phase in the approach of urbanism, but as the core of the urbanistic discipline as an urban science.” Ed Taverne, Emeritus Professor, History of Architecture, RU Groningen Illustrations by Heinrich Altenmüller EBOOK VERSION

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