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

Cornell Journal of Architecture 12

After Val Warke, Hallie Black, Todd Petrie It seems that—with increased urgency—we are more frequently finding ourselves grasping for an "after," especially as we face futures with apprehension. "After" exists at different scales of time and context: there’s after an instant, after a day, after an era. And each after contains both a conclusion and a beginning. This volume of the Cornell Journal of Architecture looks at a vast range of the "afters" we architects find ourselves confronting, and offers not just warnings, but solutions; not just reminders, but projections. Because, while we humans are obliged to stand squarely within the present, as architects we’re equally obliged to cast our work into a hereafter that can be only loosely understood. And then we can hope that, in the aftermath, our intentions bear some resemblance to their consequences. With Contributions of A vast selection of architects, artists, designers, historians, and geoscientists, including Peter van Assche, James Biber, Olalekan Jeyifous, Michael Murphy with Jha D Williams, Felix Heisel, Jacques Ferrier, Common Accounts, Meredith Miller and T+E+A+M, and many others, representing an extensive diversity of approaches for identifying techniques of transcending pasts and presents.

GSD Platform 2

Felipe Correa Platform 2 provides a sampling of the most salient research and design explorations undertaken at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) during the 2008–2009 academic year. Organized thematically, the publication identiﬁes underlying congruencies among studio work, theses, research, lectures, conferences, and writings to unfold some of the many critical ideas and interests currently being explored in the School. Ranging in scope from detailed material fabrication to large-scale territorial and infrastructural strategies, the work spans a broad and diverse set of geographies and scenarios. In documenting this work, the publication archives and disseminates the rich intellectual momentum of the GSD.

Retrospecta 44

Saba Salkefard, Christopher Pin, Bobby Chun, Claudia Ansorena Retrospecta catalogs activity at the Yale School of Architecture. Each volume is a snapshot of evolving architectural and graphic design trends. The book demarcates events such as lectures, publication releases, and outstanding circumstances that have uniquely impacted the academic, social, and political environment at the school. Volume 44 covers the activities of the Yale School of Architecture 2020-21 academic year. This year’s vicissitudes of curricular hybridity forced upon us a necessary reorientation of the medium we communicate and design with, and a renegotiation of the space we inhabit while we work. Our methods and our material worlds were pushed through the lens of remoteness, and so too were the ideas that followed. As a publication that stands to react and reflect upon the beats of the previous year, two moves were absolutely critical in order to address this fulcrum of architectural education: a virtual extension of Retrospecta, increasing the autonomy and authorship of the student work in a year where projects were developed through incredibly diverse and idiosyncratic means; and a smaller book size that emphasizes a reappraisal of the physical act of reading, a more critical format lending to internal cross-content dialogue, and an heightened importance of the book as an artifact. This volume of Retrospecta sets out to reclaim the solace of solitude by renewing a lost intimacy between story, student, and school, revisiting the reader’s relationship to the book as a physical object.

Reimagining the Civic

Luis Callejas, Fernanda Canales, Stella Betts Reimagining the Civic investigates and describes the design challenges of three studios led by the three Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors at Yale School of Architecture: architect Fernanda Canales, of Mexico City, assisted by David Turturo, critic in architecture; Luis Callejas and Charlotte Hansson, directors of LCLA office, based in Oslo and Medellín, assisted by Marta Caldeira lecturer; and Stella Betts, of LEVENBETTS, in New York. Each studio focused on different environments and social contexts while scrutinizing age-old questions pertinent to the architectural discipline’s understanding of civic space.

Post DomestiCity + Open City

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. Post DomestiCity: Re-thinking urban obsolescence Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot / CoLaboratorio PostDomestiCity is an inquiry and speculative exercise into the conditions of obsolescence in the post-industrial city, from a contemporary perspective. Working with three paradigmatic cases that were conceived from industrial logics—the Packard plant in Detroit, Lima’s PREVI neighbourhood, and theGrand’Mare complex in Rouen—, we explore alternative ways of reusing, reprogramming, and redensifying the built environment as alternatives to demolition. Relevant voices in the field of architecture share their approaches and visions of the future for the pre-existing city, helping us imagine post-domesticity in the current climate crisis and socio-technological context. PostDomestiCity, along with Open Building 2.0 (CoLab, 2018) and OpenCity (Actar, 2020), forms another trilogy by CoLaboratorio, approaching and understanding architecture as a resilient support with enormous transformative potential over time. With Contributions of Anne Lacaton, Marina Otero, Ippolito Pestellini, Duplex Architects, Lacol, Antonio Vázquez de Castro, Carmen Espegel, Luis Takahashi, Lys Villalba, O.F. architects, DABG, Patricia Lucas, Ramón Araujo, Paulo Dam, Renato Manrique, CoLaboratorio (Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot).

Post DomestiCity

Re-thinking urban obsolescence Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot / CoLaboratorio PostDomestiCity is an inquiry and speculative exercise into the conditions of obsolescence in the post-industrial city, from a contemporary perspective. Working with three paradigmatic cases that were conceived from industrial logics—the Packard plant in Detroit, Lima’s PREVI neighbourhood, and theGrand’Mare complex in Rouen—, we explore alternative ways of reusing, reprogramming, and redensifying the built environment as alternatives to demolition. Relevant voices in the field of architecture share their approaches and visions of the future for the pre-existing city, helping us imagine post-domesticity in the current climate crisis and socio-technological context. PostDomestiCity, along with Open Building 2.0 (CoLab, 2018) and OpenCity (Actar, 2020), forms another trilogy by CoLaboratorio, approaching and understanding architecture as a resilient support with enormous transformative potential over time. With Contributions of Anne Lacaton, Marina Otero, Ippolito Pestellini, Duplex Architects, Lacol, Antonio Vázquez de Castro, Carmen Espegel, Luis Takahashi, Lys Villalba, O.F. architects, DABG, Patricia Lucas, Ramón Araujo, Paulo Dam, Renato Manrique, CoLaboratorio (Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot). EBOOK VERSION

Trajets (FR ED.)

Comment la mobilité des fruits, des idées et des architectures recompose notre environnement. Giovanna Borasi Exploring the subject of migrations and their impact on the built environment, the publication includes 16 stories written in a narrative form similar to historical fiction. The stories featured highlight key concepts critical to understanding the movement of people, animals, objects and ideas and explore the physical impact of this movement on the built environment. The book brings together different authors, subjects and historical periods in a cohesive way, allowing it to maintain a consistent narrative feel throughout. The authors, experts within their research field, come from various disciplines. Their different backgrounds contribute to the book's diverse and sometimes even witty content. Each story is accompanied by a specially commissioned illustration. A section in the book is also dedicated to photographs and images that visually represent the themes explored in the stories. Buy English version

MCHAP The Americas Pack (VOL 1 & 2)

The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), directed by Dirk Denison from within the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), promotes an academic award that is given to the best architecture built in the American continent during a specific period.

"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. “MCHAP The Americas 2, Territory & Expeditions,” is inspired on the discussions held during the second cycle of the prize, which took place in 2016. Based on the selection of the finalist projects—Weekend House by SPBR, New Campus for the UTEC by Grafton Architects, Pachacamac Museum by Llosa Cortegana Architects, Tower 41 by Alberto Kalach, Star Apartmens by Michael Maltzan Architecture, and Grace Farms by SANAA—, the jury conversations and “discoveries” were very much conditioned by the ideas of nature and its intimate relation to architecture and landscape.

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