AA Files 77

Maria Sheherazade Giudici AA Files is the Architectural Association's journal of record and offers a platform for exchange connecting the research produced by the AA community to a larger architectural debate globally. Organised in a series of thematic sections that emerged from the AA Files Issue 76 Glossary, each 'file' contains two or more contributions that explore a common keyword constructing a dialogue between a heterogeneous set of authors with the aim to reframe architecture as a critical point of entry through which the most urgent social and environmental questions of today can be addressed. In Issue 77, the themes are Body, Care, Economy, Environment, Labour, Project and Resistance. A special feature 'file' on Home gathers ten perspectives on domestic living during lockdown from Mexico City to Teheran, while ARÓ (Allies Against Discrimination and Disparity) writes on four keywords that have beed added to our AA Files Glossary: Afrofuturism, Exile, Third Space and Transience. With contributions by ARÓ, Panos Dragonas and Lydia Kallipoliti, Cooking Sections, Andrea Bagnato, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, Leonard Ma, Brittany Utting and Daniel Jacobs, James Westcott and Federico Martelli, Ludovico Centis and Ed Ruscha, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Elena Palacios Carral, Neeraj Bhatia, Pietro Bonomi and Nicoló Ornaghi, Christophe van Gerrewey, Hugh Strange, Alejandra Celedón Forster, Hamed Khosravi, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Alessandro Bava, Fernanda Canales, Brendon Carlin, Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli, Dan Handel, Harriet Harriss, Peer Illner, Kaveh Rashidzadeh, Charles Rice, Francesca Romana Dell'Aglio, Gabrielle Eglen, Jeremy Lecomte, Oli Surel and Max Turnheim.

Traversées (FR ED.)

Dominique Coulon & Associés Dominique Coulon

The writing of Dominique Coulon & Associés, nominated twice for the Mies van der Rohe award, reflects the agency's work in connection with different contextual postures and the construction of complex spatial relationships. In circumstances that are often difficult, buildings add value to their locations, transforming them. This book explores the public dimension of architecture taking a new look at the eclectic work of Dominique Coulon; his production of public buildings illustrates the complexity of his architectural approach. Dominique Coulon plays with context, light, and materiality to produce public places that are detailed and welcoming. The areas he proposes affect and accompany the body. His architecture is part of a dynamic relationship, mobilising the senses to propose a specific universe, which may be cheerful, or dramatic. These spaces serve the public dimension of his architecture.

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Blueprint for a Hack

Leveraging Informal Building Practices Vikram Bhatt, David Harlander, Susane Havelka Over five days, some 60 residents of a northern village teamed with designers from southern Quebec to conceive and build an outdoor community pavilion that activates a central recreational area. "Blueprint for a Hack" aims to reimagine community spaces. Faced with extreme housing shortages, physical isolation, and a challenging climate, outdoor public spaces in northern communities remain largely undesigned and underused. These "in-between" spaces are strewn with stuff: plywood crates, tires, sea-cans, palettes, diesel fuel drums, etc. Most housing and civic buildings in the communities emerge from and stand like physical markers of Euro-Canadian values. The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada has begun a discourse on design in northern Canadian communities, but discussions continue to dwell on housing and civic buildings. A strong need exists to open conversations about design and the public realm in northern villages, which this project tries to address, creating a unique experience in which northern and southern groups could apply a "hacking mindset" to reimagine community spaces. "Hacks" respond to institutionalized inadequacy and are found in every culture. They have shown that the reuse and recycling of discarded materials and existing technologies can radically transform everyday life. Hence, hacking is relevant to designing in northern villages where the DIY up-cycling culture is widely practiced. The book celebrates this innovative achievement and showcases its relevance to open shared conversations about the built environment and the need to build on local capabilities, reduce waste and rethink consumption patterns. EBOOK EDITION

Tales from the Dark Side-Col. (6 Vol.)

Unknown Fields is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness its technology and culture set in motion. Tales from the Dark Side of the City is a book series that forms an atlas to the territories and stories of a city that stretches across the entire planet, a city that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of dislocated sites, of drone footage and hidden-camera investigations, of interviews and speculative narratives, of toxic objects and distributed matter from distant grounds. They are a collection of tales from the constellation of elsewheres that are conjured into being by the city's wants and needs, fears and dreams. The series includes stories developed from expeditions through Bolivia and the Atacama Desert, the Western Australian Outback, the South China Sea and Inner Mongolia, the gemfields of Madagascar, Far North Alaska and the black sites of the United States. TITLES INCLUDED 9781907896897 HIGH STRANGE - Roswell to Area 51 9781907896859 NEVER NEVER LANDS - Western Australian Outback 9781907896880 SHOWING IN THE SUPERCOMPUTER - Far North Alaska 9781907896842 THE BREASTMILK OF THE VOLCANO - Bolivia and the Atacama Desert 9781907896873 TREASURED ISLANDS - Madagascar 9781907896866 A WORLD ADRIFT - South China Sea and Inner Mongolia Expedition

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.

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