Alejandro de la Sota

An Architecture of Imperfection Alejandro de la Sota Alejandro de la Sota was born in 1913, and so belongs to the same generation as Jorn Utzon, Denys Lasdun, Aldo van Eyck and Jose Maria Coderch. But it is only in recent years that his work has become known outside Spain. It is an oeuvre of impressive consistency, combining a naked abstraction with a rigorous interest in the character of materials. While Sota clearly drew many lessons from the modern masters –from Mies in particular– he also defined a language with an internal momentum of its own. This publication traces de la Sota's influence on Spain's contemporary culture of architecture through essays and a visual presentation of his most significant projects, including the Maravillas Gymnasium in Madrid and the Civil Government building in Tarragona.

Ahali: An Anthology for Setting a Setting

Can Altay (ed.) Ahali: An Anthology for Setting a Setting is a collection of selected articles from current and previous contributions to Ahali, a journal by artist Can Altay. 'Ahali' in Turkish refers to a community defined through contingency without a defined or expressed commonality other than being together. The contents of each issue of the journal are composed of invited contributions. Titles include: Support, Control and Letting Go; Model making for the Socio-spatio-economic-political/On Propositions and Implementation; Co-habitation and Parasitical Practice; Locatedness (and Education?); Recycling and Reconfiguration/Sustainable Excess; Community and Contingency; Forecasting Broken Pasts; and Becoming Globe. With contributions of: Agency, Bik Van der Pol, Celine Condorelli, Claire Doherty, Chris Evans, Luca Frei, Nils Norman, Paul O'Neill and others.

AA Files 76

Maria Shéhérazade Giudici (ed.) AA Files 76 is structured as a glossary of terms relevant to contemporary debate in architecture. Each entry has been contributed by a different author, and represents a personal position as much as an attempt to frame the topic in a broader context; the issue therefore maps both a landscape of current concerns, interests, and ambitions, and also an overview of diverse positions and forms of practice. The authors of this glossary are practitioners, academics, students, lawyers, politicians, activists, and their contributions do not only seek to explore the potential of the themes put forward, but also to question the ways in which we can discuss space –as designers, as scholars, as citizens.

AA Files 75

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 75 features essays by Freya Wigzell, Kristina Jaspers, Claire Zimmerman, Laila Seewang, Roberta Marcaccio, Rebecca Siefert, Shantel Blakely, Francesco Zuddas, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Francisco González de Canales, Ross Anderson, Salomon Frausto, Theo Crosby, Marco Biraghi and Zoë Slutzky, together with a personal reminiscence by Nigel Coates and a conversation between Thomas Daniell and Shin Takamatsu.

AA Files 74

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 74 features essays by Peter Wilson, William Firebrace, Michael Hill, Dietrich Neumann, Dagmar Motycka Weston, Simona Ferrari & Wataru Sawada, Christophe Van Gerrewey, Charles Rice & Kenny Cupers, Tim Benton, Andrew Crompton, Davide Spina, Nicholas de Monchaux and Cynthia Davidson, a personal reminiscence by Joseph Rykwert, a recipe by Chris Behr, and two conversations, the first with Kate Macintosh, the second with Peter Eisenman.

AA Files 73

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 73 features contributions on Patrick Hodgkinson and essays and conversations by Matthew Mullane, Mariana Siracusa, Eva Branscome, Nicholas Olsberg, Mike Dempsey, Helen Thomas, Thomas Weaver, Jonathan Sergison, Alberto Ponis, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, Fabrizio Ballabio & Alessandro Conti, Marrikka Trotter, Hans Frei, Gabriela García de Cortázar, Ida Jager, Alex Schweder & Ward Shelley

AA Files 72

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 72 features contributions by Davide Spina, Thomas Daniell, Itsuko Hasegawa, Mario Tedeschini-Lalli, Laurent Stalder & Moritz Gleich, Colin Rowe, Daniel Naegele, Irénée Scalbert, Peter St John, Silvia Micheli & Léa-Catherine Szacka, Paulo Berdini, Daniel Sherer, Hubert Damisch, Nicolas Kemper, Thomas Weaver, Alexander Brodsky, Emma Letizia Jones, Henrik Schoenefeldt and Max Moya.

AA Files 71

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 71 features essays on Brunelleschi, by Pier Vittorio Aureli, on the Museum Insel Hombroich, by William Firebrace, on Louis Bonnier, possibly the most boring architect in nineteenth-century France, by Andri Gerber, on the relationship between the artist Joseph Beuys, the architect Hans Hollein and the curator Johannes Cladders, by Eva Branscome, and two conversations, the first with Irish-American architect Kevin Roche, and the second with the Japanese architect Hiroshi Hara.

AA Files 70

Tom Weaver (ed.) AA Files 70 features contributions by Joseph Bedford, Jesús Vassallo, Andrew Leach, Jean-Louis Cohen, Susan Holden, Enrique Walker, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, Dietrich Neumann, Juergen Schulz, Goswin Schwendinger, Gavin Stamp, Sam Jacob, David Jenkins, Paul Vermeulen, Diego Inglez de Souza, Irina Davidovici, Mark Swenarton, Thomas Weaver, Will McLean, Andrew Higgott, Nicolas Grospierre, Diane Ghirardo and Paul Mason.

AA Agendas 12: Drawings that Count

Mary Beard, Noam Andrews, David Edgerton This collection of 60 large drawings produced over five years by AA Diploma 15 addresses the construction of context by architecture for its own very particular purposes. No architectural category is more fickle or more artificial than 'context'. A self-declared 'render-free zone', the unit's interrogations of architecture's seminal sites (antiquity, technology, the future and its proxies) examine the role of figuration and the exclusion of indeterminacy in the always already mediated question of context. Through the quiet business of counting, these line drawings –against the double ascendancy of parametricisation and the glossy rendered perspective– question architecture's ambivalent relations to the artifice it installs between itself and the outside world.

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