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. The architectural history, on the other hand, ignores the larger context of the Middle East and the influence of Pan Arabism is not configured into many analyses. Thus, this project seeks to tackle both. By providing a [re]contextualizing of the architectural history of Kuwait and bringing forgotten protagonists back into the dialogue, a nuanced reading of Pan Arab Modern architecture emerges. This book intents to be both a guide for practitioners and a document of analysis. The authors and editors envision the stories of our protagonists as a model for the coming generation to emulate and in doing so, hoping to create an importance of the local. In doing so, the book will inspire a new generation of local imprinters that will allow Kuwait locally, and the Gulf regionally, to break from the over-reliance on foreigners shaping how their cities look and operate. It aims to create a "knowledge generation" which can [re]define how a local generation is being influence on the ground. With a symbiosis between the "facts on the ground" and the "ideas in the air." Thus, this publication is a first step towards documenting and analyzing the realties on the ground. With contributions of: Prof. Michael Kubo (Univ. of Houston, Texas) on the relationship between The Architects Collaborative (TAC) and the local Kuwaiti firm Pan Arab Consulting Engineers (now PACE); Caecilia L. Pieri ( Associate Researcher - Institut Français du Proche-Orient) on the influence of Iraq modernisation in Kuwait; Prof. Iain Jackson (Univ. of Liverpool) on the influence of British Architects on the Middle East (tropical architecture, expertise); Prof. Hyun-Tae Jung (Lehigh University) on the relationship between Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and PACE and the photographic work of the artist Antje Hanebeck commission by PACE for this project. EBOOK VERSION

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 and urbanisms. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labour, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harnesses the efficiency of collectivity and community. Whether cultivating land, harvesting resources, extracting energy or delegating labor, farming reveals the interdependencies of our globalized world. Simultaneously, farming represents the local gesture, the productive landscape, and the alternative economy. The processes of farming are mutable, parametric, and efficient. Farming is the modification of infrastructure, urbanisms, architectures, and landscapes toward a privileging of production. The issue collects original design projects, installations, and essays which interrogate new typologies, forms, and formats of the built environment. With almost 40 design proposals and 12 essays, On Farming collects emerging designers and thinkers internationally. EBOOK VERSION

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. EBOOK EDITION

Natural Metaphor

An Anthology of Essays on Architecture and Nature Josep Lluís Mateo Written by cross-disciplinary authors across Europe, Asia and America, this is a compilation of articles and images on using forms in nature for diverse design approaches and perspectives. Nature has rendered poetic potential to stimulate, as a metaphor, the design process. From formal, conceptual, geometrical to literal engagements, the scope of potential correlations between nature and design is as far reaching as the human imagination. The Eth Zurich is a renowned European architecture institute. This is the third book in their acclaimed series.

NESS.docs 2

Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas Florencia Rodriguez, Mercedes Peralta, Jeannette Sordi The second issue of our monographic series reflects on the project of Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas, lead by Charles Waldheim and the Office for Urbanization at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Curated together with Mercedes Peralta and Jeannette Sordi, NESS.docs 2 explores the potentials for landscape as a medium for urban intervention in the specific contexts of Latin-American cities. More than twenty Latin American practices are shown and grouped in five different themes: Biological Environments, Resilient Grounds, Performative Systems, Revealed Protocols, and Assembled Natures. Finally, a conversation between Charles Waldheim, Florencia Rodriguez, and Luis Callejas deepens the discussion of our academic curricula, drawing as representation, political spaces, and the general sensitivity around landscape. With Contributions of Ana Elvira Vélez Villa & Lorenzo Castro Jaramillo / Ana María Durán Calisto / Beals Lyon Arquitectos / Bulla / Camilo Restrepo / CAPA / Ciro Najle / Enlace Arquitectura / Fábrica de Paisaje / Francisco Walker Martínez / FUPAM / LUME, H F Arquitetos / Metrópole Arquitetos & UNA Arquitetos / Gaeta Springall Arquitectos / Groundlab, LyonBosch Martic, Idom & Sergio Chiquetto / Guillermo Hevia García & Nicolás Urzúa / Husos / Iñaki Echeverría Gutiérrez / Jeannette Sordi / José Alfredo Ramírez / Juan David Hoyos & Sebastián Monsalve / LCLA O ce / Luis Callejas / Manuel Gausa / Mercedes Peralta / Metro Arquitetos Associados / Opera Publica / Plan Común / Plan:B Arquitectos & JPRCR Arquitectos / RDR Arquitectos / Sérgio Bernardes / Tatiana Bilbao Estudio / Teresa Moller Landscape Studio Part of the Ness Collection

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 by cultural observers both within and outside of the discipline. Through this multi-layered infrastructure and pluralistic dissection, Another Kind cracks the surface and explores the contents of architecture today. Marking this moment in time, PLP examines how we have evolved and speculates on what we can learn for the years that lie ahead. With Contributions of: Saskia Sassen, Andrew Blum, Carlo Ratti, John McMorrough, Jeffrey Inaba, Darran Anderson, Lauren Sandler, Carl Benedikt Frey, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Richard Powers, Vicky Richardson and Thomas Sevcik EBOOK VERSION

Cornell Journal of Architecture 11

Fear Val Warke Anthropologists tell us that fear is an innate trait among most primate species, a principal aspect of learning-to-survive. At the same time, most of us primates seem equally adept at learning new fears, fears that are perhaps irrational and non- productive, and frequently enflamed by manipulative parties among our own species. Oddly, despite our theme, this may prove to be the most optimistic Cornell Journal of all. An awareness of fear has been known to inspire invention, imagination, and substantial change. Is the opposite of fearful —fearlessness perhaps?— a form of belligerence or ignorance, or is it found in determination or courage? —or is it perhaps a type of calm?— or of knowledge? Herein are some attempts at dispelling some of these fears

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 of inundation. Foreword by Brent D. Ryan With Contributions of Vince Beiser (Wired / NYTimes / The World in A Grain of Sand); Nadine Sterk and Lonny van Ryswyck (Atelier NL); Xiaoxuan Lu (University of Hong Kong) ; Adam Grydehøj ( Island Dynamics); Ben Mendelson (University of Pennsylvania); Kian Goh (UCLA); Luna Khirfan (University of Waterloo); Michael T. Wilson (RAND) EBOOK EDITION

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), Distributive Protocols (2000-2010) and Expansive Protocols (2010-2020). These three periods shouldn'nt be read as three hermetic and concatenated monades, but as three different modulations of the same narrative, that is, as three overlapping and coexisting systems whose peaks of intensity occur in three different decades. However, the main purpose of this book is not limited to unveiling the ethos of these three conjugations. It also aims at using this framework as a "time-field" , a narrative map that moves from the classificatory to the cartographical in order to vectorize the last 30 years of experimental architecture. In this sense, this book argues that this threefold set of protocols represents the progressive attempt to constitute critical interiorities "looking for" and "produced through" interactions that are increasingly more intimate and whose agents are increasingly more diverse. A tendency oriented towards the consolidation of an "intimacy between strangers" that highly resonates with the cultural and technological landscape in which experimental architecture operates. EBOOK EDITION

African Fabbers Atlas

Manual of Synthetic Vernacular Architecture Paolo Cascone Based on almost ten years of applied research of Paolo Cascone and his CODESIGNLAB practice in Africa, the book investigates the potential role of indigenous and spontaneous architecture in the contemporary debate on sustainability in architectural design. How to respond to climatic changes reconciling nature with tekné? What is the social role of technology? How architects would reconsider their practices supporting community-oriented projects? These questions are discussed through a number of paradigmatic projects and conversations between the author and a panel of experts from different backgrounds in order to shape an interdisciplinary approach that bridges different knowledges. The theoretical assumption for this investigation is based on the observation of cause-effect relations, between different urban and architectural configurations and their performances: social, environmental, structural etc. in both pre-colonial and informal cultures around Africa. The diachronic approach intends to generate, after many years of post-colonial studies, an operative agenda of possible strategies, which is in accordance with different conditions starting from the anthropological and the climatic ones. Such an agenda responds to a global cultural need for an ecological shift in the contemporary design and manufacturing processes, which should bridge high and low-tech cultures. Therefore, the book is conceived also as a sort of manual that is articulated around emergent principles inspired by traditional and informal African practices and architectures: self-similarity and diversified typologies, material optimisation and circular economy, self-sufficiency and responsive dwellings. Each principle is confronted also with the work of pioneers such as Hassan Fathy, Fabrizio Carola etc. with the aim of sharing and evolving such tremendous heritage by introducing the case studies realized in the frame of the [AF] African Fabbers project over the last decade. The [AF] project has been developed in the last decade as a research platform and an itinerant school for training programmes and community-oriented initiatives that bridges digital and traditional manufacturing for sustainable living. This approach responds to the lack of schools of architecture in the region, despite the economic growth of these countries and their need for social housing and basic infrastructures. For this reason, the book aims at declining such on-site experience and its theoretical background into a decolonised approach to architectural education. This drives to the conclusion that we should probably start to take into serious consideration African solutions for global problems. With Contributions ofÂ Chirstian Benimana -MASS (Architect / Rwanda) ; Cheick Diallo (Designer /Mali) ; Ron Eglash (Professor of ethnomathematics -University of Michigan /USA) ; Ugo La Pietra (Designer / Italy) ; Vincent Kitio (UN-Habitat /Kenya) ; Françoise N'Thepe (Architect / France – Cameroon) ; Giancarlo Mazzanti -El Equipo Mazzanti (Architect /Adjunct Associate Professor - Columbia University / Colombia) ; Ronald Rael - Rael San Fratello (Architect /Professor - Berkeley College of Environmental Design / USA) ; Massimo Moretti (founder of WASP / Italy) , AbdouMaliq Simone (Professor of sociology –University of Sheffield / UK)

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