The World of Madelon Vriesendorp

This book from AA Publications accompanied the exhibition curated by AACP director Shumon Basar and architect/theorist Stephan Trüby, and designed by Kasia Korczak. The World of Madelon Vriesendorp reveals for the first time a significant, and nearly secret, corpus of work notable for its wild diversity. Though Vriesendorp is best known for her seminal cycle of anthropomorphic architectural paintings, her extensive 'art of generosity' embraces bad taste, pop, 'playground surrealism' and the touching beauty of culture's failed objects. Here, enlightenment emerges from distraction while seriousness must surrender to the non-serious. It includes an introduction by critic and collaborator Charles Jencks, conversations between Vriesendorp and historian Beatriz Colomina and cult novelist Douglas Coupland, a rumination by Hubert Damisch on Freud's London house and Vriesendorp's studio close by, Fenna Haakma Wagenaar on the 'productivity of distraction', a photo-essay by Charlie Koolhaas on her mother's house/studio, and Rem Koolhaas in a frank interview on origins, ambition and privacy, along with other texts on 'Bad Paintings', 'Smallness' and the compulsion to 'collect people'. Other contributors include Zaha Hadid, Brett Steele, Hans Ulrich Obris, Stephan Trüby and Zoe Zenghelis.

In Progress: The IID Summer Sessions

Irene Sunwoo (ed.) Contributions by Brett Steele, Nicholas Boyarsky, Grahame Shane and Dennis Crompton. This book is the first to document the remarkable history of the International Institute of Design (IID), an independent school of architecture founded and directed by Alvin Boyarsky from 1970 – 72, and highlights a pivotal episode in the career of Boyarsky, best known for his subsequent role as chairman of the Architectural Association (1971 – 90). Launched in the wake of the institutional upheavals that had swept schools of architecture during the late 1960s, the IID introduced an alternative model of architectural instruction: one that brought together a range of teaching methods, design strategies, theories and projects alongside an international assortment of protagonists. In Progress details this short-lived experiment through a trove of previously unpublished material, and reveals how three informal architectural gatherings, held over three successive summers, can be seen to have established not only a network of architects and discourses, but a new model for architectural education.

The Breastmilk of the Volcano

Bolivia and the Atacama Desert Expedition Unknown fields 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. Over half of the world's reserves of lithium - a key ingredient in batteries - lie under the ethereal inverted skies of the Salar De Uyuni in Bolivia. If the future is electric then the future is here, lying in wait for the world. For The Breastmilk of the Volcano Unknown Fields chase the grey rush across the shimmering white expanse of this ancient salt flat which, according to traditional indigenous narrative, was created from the breast milk of a weeping volcano. This book is an account of a contemporary creation story for our energy, from the Big Bang to the battery, from the birth of lithium at the beginning of the universe to the low power warning flashing on our screens. We power our future with the breast milk of volcanoes. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

Space as Membrane

Siegfried Ebeling, Walter Scheiffele and Spyros Papapetros This book includes the full 1926 text by Ebeling, supplemented by critical essays by Walter Scheiffele and Spyros Papapetros with original drawings by Ebeling, as well as a brief biography of the German architect. Translation by Pamela Johnston and Anna Kathryn Schoefert. With essays by Walter Scheiffele and Spyros Papapetros.What if architecture was no longer 3D or 2D, mass or surface, object or space? And what if the architectural environment was envisioned not as an abstract continuum, but as a material envelope that grows organically from the human body, uniting its skin with the periphery of a city, a region or a continent, and even the entire earthly atmosphere? Such a sprawling hypothesis informs the theoretical premise of the 1926 essay 'Space as Membrane', written by former Bauhaus student, architect and cosmological theorist Siegfried Ebeling. Read and praised by Mies van der Rohe, denounced by Walter Gropius and presaging some of the technological innovations introduced across the Atlantic by Buckminster Fuller, Ebeling's treatise has been the subject of a number of recent commentaries, yet the text itself remains unread, due mainly to the scarcity of the original publication. This is the first English translation of Ebeling's original treatise, as well as the first contemporary edition of the text in any language.

Snowing in the Supercomputer

Far North Alaska Expedition Unknown fields 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 CityÂ 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. For Snowing in the Supercomputer Unknown Fields locate the environmental forecasts and data landscapes of the city and travel to Alaska's far north, to visit a territory that sits in the collective imagination as one of the last remaining wildernesses. Unknown Fields spend the winter solstice with climate scientists from around the world who are camped out in the most northern cities on the planet to collect data that is fed into the climate-modelling supercomputers and environmental policies further south. Traditional data visualisations and guilt-laden headlines may no longer be sufficient strategies to encourage the cultural shift now required. In this book Unknown Fields peers inside the supercomputer to find a set of surreal landscapes that sit between tradition and technology, the real and the imagined, the present and the future. They are landscapes given new narratives by native Alaskan authors and generated from the climate data and modelling software of supercomputer scientists. Against these images run panoramas of the supercomputer infrastructure that simulates them and the doomsday statistics that are shouted at us everyday, but that we do our best to ignore. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

Small Architecture / Natural Architecture

Kengo Kuma Translated by Alfred Birnbaum with an introduction by Thomas Daniell This two-volume set of essays by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma offers an overview of his key built works and gives insight into his ideas about architecture. Until now available only in Japanese, this edition comprises a lucid theoretical manifesto for humble, sustainable architecture that is sensitive to materials and to place. Written in the wake of the 2011 tsunami which devastated parts of northern Japan, the essays take on a particular poignancy. Each book features a signature of original drawings produced by Kengo Kuma especially for this English-language release.

Practice of place

Emma Smith Contributions by Can Altay, Dennis Atkinson, Ricardo Basbaum, Janna Graham, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Annette Krauss, Maria Lind, Ute Meta Bauer, Christian Nyampeta, Emily Pethick, Filipa Ramos, Louise Shelley, Eva Wisniewska and others Practice of Place explores the role of social and participatory art practices to consider the contribution of artist and gallery. Proposing present-tense practices including collaboration, commitment, imagination, play, forgiveness, reflexivity and trust, the book looks at the potential for tactics over strategy as a mode of being in place. Texts ask how we might consider this theory in relation to the gallery as a bordered space, both physical and imagined.

Paradise Lost

Mark Campbell This book explores the notion of architectural obsolescence through a study of the contemporary United States. While the US was the world's greatest economic, scientific and cultural force during the twentieth century, it now appears to be obsessed with its own decline. In this obsession the changing patterns of consumption and demand often result in an architectural redundancy where buildings exist as a form of by-product or residue. While our stereotypical image of the US reflects the heroic potential of production, this book examines the opposite - of that which isn't work. Or, more pointedly, those abandoned pleasures and lost paradises that remain when there is no longer any work left to define them.

Panel

Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola Although largely marginal within official accounts of modern architecture, during the second half of the twentieth century the development of large concrete panel systems was central to debates about architecture's modernisation and industrialisation. Through this development, not only was construction transferred from the building site to the factory floor, and manual labour succeeded by automated mass production, but political, aesthetic and ideological debates began to inscribe themselves onto the panel itself, a symbol for a whole new set of architectural values. Distributed and adapted to many different cultural, geographical and political contexts, these systems went beyond national borders in producing more than 170 million apartments worldwide. This book focuses on a particular aspect of this history, namely those systems exported from Soviet Russia into Cuba and then on to Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Written from the point of view of the worker as much as the architect, and containing an incredible visual panoply of archival photographs, stills, cartoons, sketches and drawings, as well as oral histories from its surviving protagonists, the book offers a fascinating portrait of an architectural and political history whose symbolic and physical register all along is a concrete panel.

Never Never Lands

Western Australian Outback Expedition Unknown fields 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. In Never Never Lands Unknown Fields chronicle the creation stories of the city and head off on a dust-blown road trip across Australia, into the vast and mysterious interior of this remote island continent in search of its ancient tribal hinterlands and its immense techno-landscapes. Here, in the Never Never, are the resource territories of the city, a land of rich geology, endless horizons and mining pits so large that they generate their own weather systems. For this book, Unknown Fields travel 1km beneath the surface of the earth to find gold and to survey and laser-scan the technological incisions that release it from the ground. These massive excavations are cut through the narrative landscape of the Dreamtime, the creation mythology of the Aboriginal Australians. Stories from two indigenous authors act as our Dreamtime guide as we drift across the grounds of traditional creation, before diving deep to follow a new subterranean songline, one created from underground mine computer models and laser survey data. Roughly 0.034grams of this landscape is locked away in each of our mobile phones, charged and quietly vibrating. We all carry a little piece of Australia in our pockets. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

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