Teatro Móvil (SP ED.)

La Contracultura Arquitectónica a Escena Fernando Quesada Architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (1942) graduated in 1968 at Madrid School of Architecture. During the academic year 1970-1971 he travelled from Madrid to London thanks to a grant of the British Council to complete his postgraduate training at the Architectural Association. There he designed a building called Mobile Theater. It was a theatrical device composed of several 8 x 2,5 meters trucks carefully designed, which contained all the building elements needed to shape a space for the performing arts or other collective uses. The assembly time —estimated for four workers— was six and a half hours. This project was internationally showed and published between 1971 and 1975, but was never built. This book intends to release this project, largely ignored by canonical historiography, and to culturally place it in time and space: the agitated city of London in 1971. After the convulsions of May 1968, architectural counterculture rearmed on very different fronts, from the disciplinary rally to the guerilla positions. This architectural design accounts for these events, since it had a temporal development that goes beyond its mere conception as an artifact. The long and frustrated process for construction —1969 to 1976— calls for a particular intra-history, which this books will tell. With contributions of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga Buy English edition EBOOK EDITION

Mobile Theater (ENG ED.)

Architectural Counterculture on Stage Fernando Quesada Architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (1942) graduated in 1968 at Madrid School of Architecture. During the academic year 1970-1971 he travelled from Madrid to London thanks to a grant of the British Council to complete his postgraduate training at the Architectural Association. There he designed a building called Mobile Theater. It was a theatrical device composed of several 8 x 2,5 meters trucks carefully designed, which contained all the building elements needed to shape a space for the performing arts or other collective uses. The assembly time —estimated for four workers— was six and a half hours. This project was internationally showed and published between 1971 and 1975, but was never built. This book intends to release this project, largely ignored by canonical historiography, and to culturally place it in time and space: the agitated city of London in 1971. After the convulsions of May 1968, architectural counterculture rearmed on very different fronts, from the disciplinary rally to the guerilla positions. This architectural design accounts for these events, since it had a temporal development that goes beyond its mere conception as an artifact. The long and frustrated process for construction —1969 to 1976— calls for a particular intra-history, which this books will tell. With contributions of Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga Buy Spanish edition EBOOK EDITION

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

Requiem

For the City at the End of the Millennium Sanford Kwinter

In this small, but sharply-pointed book, renowned theorist Sanford Kwinter addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set into motion at the turn of the millennium. From the strange appearance of the 'Trojan Horse' that was the Centre Pompidou which served as the harbinger and template of the new idea of "Europe", through the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s, to the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers in New York, a new world came into being that design thinking has yet to fully take into account. The City is here seen not only as the last frontier of human history currently under threat of total eclipse, it is the indomitable form of collective experience upon which one can count as assuredly as one can on death and taxes. Requiem, to quote from Thomas Daniell's introduction, is first and foremost redemptive: "Kwinter's most negative assessments of the city are driven by a deep commitment to its sublime potentials--a desire to sacralize the most profane and fecund of human creations". 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

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

Urbanismo Disruptivo, Urbanidad Glocal (SP ED.)

J.ACEbillo From 52 propositions the book explores glocal urbanity as a new modernity derived from the Axial Age. It proposes to understand the city also as a socio-technological process. Integrate concepts such as Complexity, Urban Metabolism and Second Order Cybernetics into our disciplinary corpus. Urbanistically translate the new Glocal Transregionalism that emerges in step with the progressive dissolution of the Westphalian Nation-State, and definitely to promote a more disruptive urbanism formed by tangible values and intangible virtues that is capable of overcoming the demagogic-populist currents that today besiege us. Buy English edition

Disruptive Urbanism, Glocal Urbanity (ENG ED.)

Retrospecta 43

Rachel Tsai, Abraham Mora-Valle, Brian Orser, Claire Hicks 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 43 covers the activities of the Yale School of Architecture 2019-20 academic year.

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