Public Occasion Agency 1–22

Scrap Marshall, Jan Peter Nauta (eds.) POA 1–22 is part of the ongoing archive of activities conducted by the independent event bureau Public Occasion Agency (POA), founded by Jan Nauta and Scrap Marshall at the Architectural Association in 2009. The book is a collection of fragmented documents: previews, photographs, ephemera, reviews, reflections and opinions collated from the first twenty-two POA events. Critical and inquisitive, personal and probing contributions from a variety of authors from across fields and disciplines and with differing agendas here propose a withdrawal from idle commentary and encourage more productive forms of participation.

One Million Acres & No Zoning

Lars Lerup Routinely dismissed as 'mere sprawl', the suburban city is the black hole of recent urbanism, absorbing human energy and resources but seldom revealing the principles of its operation. For the past 20 years Lars Lerup has explored Houston as its prototype. In this book he broadly approaches this complex conurbation so as to develop a vocabulary to interpret its urban forms. Loved by its inhabitants, defined by huge potential and difficult problems, Lerup's Houston is a test-case for twenty-first-century urbanism and our understanding of unregulated cities everywhere.

O-14: Projection and Reception

Reiser Umemoto O-14: Projection and Reception explores the groundbreaking exo-skeleton office tower in Dubai by New York-based architects, Reiser Umemoto. This monograph will not only provide exhaustive documentation of O-14's design and construction but delves further into the complex interrelationships this architectural model weaves between technology, expression and politics in the context of the 'nowhere place' of the global city. The book is both an account of a design's realisation and a manifesto, and contains Jesse Reiser's explanatory and theoretical texts on the tower as well as a number of critical essays.

AA Agendas 11: Mediating Architecture

Theo Lorenz, Peter Staub (eds.) Given today's multitude of demands on the built environment, the role of the architect has extended from being a mere designer and builder to acting as a mediator within a much larger network of expertise. This mediation takes place on multiple levels –within the building industry, between public, clients and designers, and between public, clients and designers, and between the actual design and its environment. To achieve this, the field of work, the tools of design and the representation of architects needs to develop. The architect has to design the design process itself. Mediating Architecture demonstrates the extended role of the architect through the applied work of AA's Diploma Unit 14 within London's Thames Gateway over three consecutive years. A series of essays reflect this methodology from the multi-disciplinary perspectives of architecture, urban design, landscape design and philosophy.

Marseille Mix

William Firebrace Marseille Mix describes the city of Marseille, its culture, buildings, gastronomy, cinematic images, history, planning, language, music, detective stories, criminology. These aspects of the city interrelate and overlap, to create a complex ever shifting image. In seven chapters (in reference to the seven hills surrounding Marseille and the seven seas to the south) the book uses various forms of writing –essay, narrative, description, list, recipe, glossary, conversation– to examine the city and investigate its defining mix.

Manifest Destiny

A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing Jason Griffiths On 18 October 2002 Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out to explore the American suburbs. Over 178 days they drove 22,383 miles, made 134 suburban house calls and took 2,593 photographs. In Manifest Destiny, Griffiths reveals the results of this exploration. Structured through 58 short chapters, the anthology offers an architectural pattern book of suburban conditions all focused not on the unique or specific but the placeless. These chapters are complemented by an introduction by Griffiths and an afterword by Swiss architectural historian Martino Stierli.

AA Agendas 9:Making Pavilions

Martin Self , Charles Walker (eds.) Over the past six years the students of the Architectural Association's Intermediate Unit 2 have designed and built a series of experimental pavilions. Structured to follow a year in the life of the unit, this book presents the processes of the pavilions' design and production, from concept ideas to workshop fabrication. Essays by the unit's tutors, Charles Walker and Martin Self, explain the ambitions and pedagogic basis of the programme, rooted in the idea of experiential learning. Through the voices of students, tutors and anonymous critics, both the educational validity of this innovative design-build programme and its architectural output is explored.

MacLean 705

Joseph Grigely (ed.) MacLean 705 documents an exhibition in twelve parts, organised by artist Joseph Grigely between November 2011 and December 2012, within MacLean 705, a small office atrium at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Twelve collaborators took part in this incremental exhibition, with each successive contribution, consisting of one work, adding to existing work, thereby unfolding a set of intertextual relations with each new installation.

Inventory Arousal

James Hoff, Danny Snelson In February 2008, James Hoff delivered a lecture on minor history in Oslo, Norway. His lecture arranged rare publications, ephemeral artworks, and the history of concept in writing and the arts within a dense mesh of anecdotal relations. There was no set agenda or prefigured instructions for the material that would or wouldn't be used. Instead, the lecture responded to hundreds of images and hours of artists' curated video - improvising an anectodal narrative while browsing through digital artifacts. Explring the commingled archive or artwork, publication, and recording, Hoff arguies for the ways in which minor histories function as primary information while secondary information becomes the source material for primary history. Given the nature and content of this improvisational lecture, Danny Snelson mirrored the spoken performance with a coterminous transcription 5,220 miles away in Tokyo, Japan.

In Search of a Forgotten Architect

Lilly Dubowitz Stefan Sebök was a Hungarian-born architect who worked with Walter Gropius in Dessau and Berlin in the late 1920s. The book is the result of the research of Sebök's niece, Lilly Dubowitz, who has meticulously pieced together clues and details of her uncle's life. He went on to work with fellow Hungarian emigré László Moholy-Nagy on his famous Light Prop, and later still moved to the Soviet Union to work with the constructivist architects Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers and El Lissitzky. In between he carried out numerous projects of his own and found himself central to a key generation of emerging modern architects in Dresden, Berlin and Moscow. The book gives a compelling account of the gradual elucidation of a once forgotten architect. The text is accompanied not only by numerous illustrations of Sebök's design work, but by essays on the Hungarian and Soviet context by historians Eva Forgacs and Richard Anderson.

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