China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism

Jeffrey Johnson, Cressica Brazier, Tat Lam Superblocks are the basic unit of China's urban development, but they are also spatial instruments with social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications, operating between the scales of architecture and the city. These redefined "Megablocks" then become laboratories for the consequences, opportunities, and potential global proliferation of Chinese urban models, reconsidered through the filters of ecology, economics, and ethics. In The Guide to Megablock Urbanisms, the Columbia GSAPP China Lab aims to document a wider conversation on the policies and collective experiences of large-scale development and advances of China's urban future. With the contributions of Amale Andraos, David Bray, Eric Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Renee Y. Chow, Edward Denison, Duanfang Lu, Joris Fach, John Fitzgerald, Steven Holl, Michiel Hulshof, Jun Jiang, Clover Lee, Zhongjie Lin, Matthew Niederhauser, Xuefei Ren, Daan Roggeveen, André Schmidt, Grahame Shane, Jian Shi, Jiaming Zhu, Jianfei Zhu "The megablock, a self-contained spatial unit, can become an architectural and urban laboratory for experimenting with the future of the city. And, because the megablock in its ideal form is a microcosm of the city, it can provide a vision for a more sustainable urban future." Jeffrey Johnson EBOOK VERSION

WWW Drawing

Architectural Drawing: From Pencil to Pixel Janet Abrams, Mehrdad Hadighi, Daniel Cardoso Llach, Andrew Heumann, Jürg Lehni, Jane Nisselson, Seher Shah, Ann Tarantino, Michael Webb, Mark West, James Wines WWW Drawing explores architectural drawing in relation to technique and technology. What is the role of drawing for architecture, in a digital age? Articles have been written about the implicit value of hand drawing in comparison to computer-generated drawing; conferences and symposia on drawing have been held, even asking if drawing is dead! WWW Drawing -a project of Pennsylvania State University's Department of Architecture- explored the issues through events including a giant-scale drawing workshop and a symposium held at the Drawing Center, New York. WWW refers both to the World Wide Web, and the Three Ws: architects Michael Webb, Mark West and James Wines, who reflect on their individual approaches to hand drawing in this volume. Artists and architects of a younger generation -Daniel Cardoso Llach, Andrew Heumann, Jürg Lehni, Jane Nisselson, Seher Shah and Ann Tarantino- address various aspects of architectural drawing, both analog and digital. Together, their research and creative explorations- into contrasting ideologies of early computer-aided design; technology as expressive vocabulary; and drawing as live performance, whetever done by hand or robotic drawing machines - cast architectural drawing in a fresh light. "I want to voice my applause and appreciation for your masterful design of the WWW drawing book. The way you handled the visual content and its relation to the text is one of the best juxtapositions I have ever seen. I hope this publication reaches a giant readership; because it is both a fascinating book on the many conceptual and motivational possibilities of drawing; but also such a superior example of how words and visuals can integrate in the process of delivering messages. The architectural world needs to see accomplishments like yours." - James Wines EBOOK EDITION

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

Puro Espacio (SP ED.)

Transformaciones del Espacio Público en Asentamientos Espontáneos de América Latina 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 English Edition EBOOK EDITION

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