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 It also includes new unpublished interviews and articles with international participants leading players in this field.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

Les voltes de Guastavino (CAT ED.)

John Ochsendorf Cada any, milions de persones passen sota les voltes de maó de pla de Guastavino en espais històrics de tots els Estats Units, des de la Sala de Registre d’Ellis Island (1917) fins al Biltmore Estate a les muntanyes de Carolina del Nord (1895), i des del Capitoli de l’Estat de Nebraska (1932), a Lincoln, fins als edificis del campus de la Universitat de Carnegie Mellon de Pittsburgh (1912). De tota manera, hi ha pocs visitants que apreciïn l’aportació de la família valenciana Guastavino a l’arquitectura nord-americana i les condicions que van afavorir que les voltes de maó de pla de Guastavino fossin un dels sistemes estructurals d’elecció durant dècades. Buy Spanish edition

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

Pure Space (ENG ED.)

Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements Elisa Silva

Future Tempos

Conversations on Architecture Across Time and Media Lluís Ortega

In the continuous effort to make architecture public, technology plays a fundamental role. While in pre-typographical times authors limited the publication of their work to autographed documents, with the appearance of the printing press publications became the main vehicle for disseminating the practice and associated discourses. However, in recent times, with the emergence of the digital era, these original channels have multiplied. The recent proliferation of architecture biennials and prizes, architecture exhibitions, the exhaustive and continuous publication of material online, the reshaping of traditional publishing houses specializing in architecture, and new online forums for discussing and circulating ideas all reveal a radical shift in how architecture becomes public. This new scenario is rife with opportunities, but it also poses important challenges. Traditional notions of singular authorship, canons of credibility and the legitimacy of knowledge, patterns of visibility and readability, the identification of categories of quality and originality are all topics that require reflection and, in some cases, the reformulation of traditional standards.

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

Superground / Underground

Seoul New Groundscapes

Manuel Gausa & Young Joon Kim The concept of n-ground or multi-ground (Superground and Underground) applied to Seoul recalls a new qualitative development which responds to the possibility to superimpose a new dense floor (container and articulator at the same time) in the old infrastructures. Seoul new qualitative development does not intend to "continue" or "recreate" the traditional city. Nor impose or positionate, transforming it, built machines or objects (re-objectualizing the urban plot), but superimpose a new dense floor (container and articulator at the same time) in the old obsolete infrastructures; that becomes a new Re-Cyting Topos on, inside, in, where and through which develop new/old programs, uses and activities of life and relationship. A new floor able to maintain a programmatic thickness and also become a new type of relief, platform that reveals in length and height, horizontally and vertically at the same time: a new floor capable of merging landscapes, infrastructure and building in a new type of systems/devices variable and adaptable to the current urban and environmental conditions. Obviously the opportunity areas of the old infrastructures (some in operation, others obsolete or in disuse) are revealed as the ideal spaces to support these new floors, real and virtual at the same time. Nowadays the economic, climatic and environmental crises (increasingly amplified by the media) coexist with the acceleration of a virtual/digital space that already fully affects our real space/time and transforms it, and directs it. Those who we thought - at the turn of the Century - that the new informational revolution was going to foster (and multiply) human interactions (which could entail tolerance, taste for diversity, uniqueness and sensitivity) had to accept the manifestations of almost post-human interactions (more endogenously and synchronously hyper-connected). However, it is the quality of our surroundings, landscapes, atmospheres, urbanities or civilities (in the broad sense of both terms) that give us back joy and civic/social confidence. Creatively reinventing our own environments to enhance them is our mission as architects. Seoul Super-ground /Under-ground contribute to this: it demonstrates how, even in highly built metropolises, the recovery and recycling of old, deficient structures or infrastructures as new soils for innovative, playful-social or relational habitats, it's still possible and it's what allows us, today, to keep appreciating and enjoying old/new environments of life and physical interaction, beyond the purely mediatic or telematics. _Manuel Gausa (23/04/2020)

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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Seoul New Groundscapes