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 imagine Houston beyond its current petro-economy, beyond its laissez-faire land uses, and beyond its notorious sprawl. The work was developed over the course of a year by faculty and students of the University of Houston’s Gerald D Hines College of Architecture and Design. Thom Mayne and Eui-Sung Yi of Morphosis acted as collaborators and critics. Its central premise is that Houston represents an evolving city type. No longer formal, axial, or planned, it is instead based on heuristics, on trial-and-error, on ad hoc strategies. "Houston is unusual: one of the most dispersed and unplanned cities in the United States. This project looks at Houston as a prototype for similar places elsewhere in the world- in social, cultural, infrastructural, economic, ecological terms." Thom Mayne EBOOK EDITION

Within or Without

Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors 09 Florencia Pita, Jackilin Bloom, Omar Gandhi, Scott Ruff Scott Ruff's studio, "Gullah/Geechee Institute," investigated architecture's role as a cultural signifier in the African-American Gullah-Geechee community off the South Carolina coast. It challenged students to translate cultural ideas into tectonic and spatial strategies for a monument, museum, and memorial that serves as a gateway to the Gullah-Geechee corridor, incorporating public interpretive and historical programs. In Florencia Pita and Jackilin Bloom's studio, "Easy Office," students experimented with ways of generating new spatial, formal, material, and narrative ideas through the processes of collecting, collaging, and casting everyday objects. The studio considered notions of the creative office and the workplace based on the unexpected space, form, and materiality that emerged from these processes. Students in Omar Gandhiâ's studio, "Where the Wild Things Are" designed a campus of creatures for Rabbit Snare Gorge on the north coast of Cape Breton Island. They focused on a series of interventions that used vernacular approaches to produce specific functions, develop a process or ideology, and frame sensory experience. The students explored how Nova Scotia's regional architecture takes advantage of phenomenological opportunities available on the site and inspires new responses to climate and geography.

Buscando a Mies (SP ED.)

Ricardo Daza A historical photograph shows a room in a steel and glass building and a man which is evidently the architect Mies van der Rohe. Only the name of the photographer is known. In a manner more usually found in detective novels, the author has painstakingly researched the events surrounding its taking making deductions and gradually revealing in which room the architect is standing, in which building it is to be found, what the architect is looking at, what his stance and his gaze tell us about his person, his work. Step by step, the author systematically investigates the photograph, drawing fascinating conclusions and making astonishing revelations about the architecture, the man and his character from this one photograph. His hypothesis is illustrated by a short and compelling text and supported by further visual material. Buy English edition

Kind of Boring

Canonical Work and Other Visible Things Meant to be Viewed as Architecture Paul Preissner

Being boring (or boringness) has been one of the qualities of architecture an architect desperately tries to avoid. Not to provoke (or at least try to provoke) some reaction from one's audience is to admit to a lack of ideas or an absence of creativity. In Kind of Boring, Paul Preissner rejects the idea that architecture should demand anything from its audience. The "boring and dumb" architecture documented in this book leaves us alone. In this way, the work of Paul Preissner Architects produces a conceptual space, a meaning independent of our relationship to the work; we can only understand (or misunderstand) it. Kind of Boring looks at the origin of architectural ideas behind a work and the theoretical and practical consequences resulting from an architecture that prioritizes class politics through experimentation with formal practice. The book presents an alternative to contemporary architecture through a kind of work which embraces normalcy, and weird deviations from such, making a kind of architecture which explores basic form, anonymous history, and the effects of indifference and inattention to make the normal weird. The book composes source material for the ideas behind the projects mixed with the projects themselves to present architecture in the same way it is understood (or misunderstood) in the world; within visual contexts. The projects are then offered for deeper review through their drawings and contributed essays, inquiring into an architecture which resists genre categorization, appreciates sloppiness in a field committed to precision, and makes room for intuition and less formal precedent. Through a lot of drawings, some essays, and many pictures, this book documents what happens when architecture stops begging for our attention and instead makes space for reflection.

AA Publications Catalog 19-20

Founded as a means of examining influential contemporary projects and opening up ideas to debate, Architectural Association School of Architecture London Publications has a long tradition of publishing architects, artists and theorists early in their careers. AA publishes titles that explore developments in architecture, engineering, landscape and urbanism, as well as the fields that touch on them –philosophy, history, art and photography. Since fall 2019 season, ACTAR D is honored to distribute the titles of this prestigious School of Architecture in London.

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Being the Mountain

Productora Carlos Bedoya, Wonne Ickx, Victor Jaime, Abel Perles / PRODUCTORA

The result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology, Being the Mountain examines the relationship between architecture and the ground it occupies, an interaction so obvious -a building must touch the ground- that it often remains underexplored. Richly illustrated contributions by Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, and Jesús Vassallo revisit significant moments in architectural history that cast new light on the techniques and legacies of modernism, especially in settings like Mexico and California, where architects such as Ricardo Legorreta and John Lautner incorporated dramatic natural topography in their agendas. Additional essays investigate the role of the ground in the thought of Kenneth Frampton in the 1980s and Luis Moreno Mansilla in the 1990s, as well as point to important parallels between premodern land practices, twentieth-century art, and today's architecture. Together, these episodes call into question our received assumptions and present new possibilities for the connection between a building and its site. A portfolio of related projects by PRODUCTORA concludes the book, further drawing out the idea of architecture as a form of constructed ground. Open Systems have been the research focus of CoLab since 2013. This book collects some relevant and engagingly contemporary insights. It also includes new unpublished interviews and articles with international participants leading players in this field. Visit urbanNext for exclusive on-line content about this book

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. EBOOK EDITION

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 Buy Spanish Edition EBOOK EDITION

Floppy Logic

Experimenting in the Territory between Architecture, Fashion and Textile Leanne Zilka

Floppy Logic is an exploration into the 'architecture' 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 certain length. Floppy Logic uses a material palette that has been selected for its aesthetic and tactile nature. These materials are typically used superficially and do not have structural qualities to allow them to be applied to the scale of buildings. By exploring form through material play, as fashion designers do with draping fabric over a body, this book expands on approaches to architecture that consider form, structure, skin and enclosure as separate steps. Here, rather than taking a condition to the material, this approach looks for the condition in the material. EBOOK EDITION

Geometry, Simplicity, Play

Exhibiting Vico Magistretti Mauro Baracco & Louise Wright Following and extending from the Vico Magistretti-Travelling Archive exhibition at the Melbourne Design Week 2019, the book Geometry, Simplicity, Play: Exhibiting Vico Magistretti relates this exhibition to Magistretti's design approach and theoretical thought through texts and illustrations that discuss the above exhibition installation and projects by Magistretti, from both industrial design and architecture fields. The book focused in particular to the sense of 'conceptual simplicity', playfulness and geometry that inform Magistretti's work, is also part of the extended discourse that is undertaken internationally in 2020 over the centenary year of Magistretti's birth date (1920-2006).

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