Ábalos + Sentkiewicz ( SP ED. )

Ensayos sobre Termodinámica, Arquitectura y Belleza Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz A compendium of essays and projects, that creates a projective document able to set up new scenarios for the architecture of the next decade. This is a book that unfolds arguments and designs around the concept of "thermodynamic beauty". This new aesthetic category opens up new and unexpected directions to the architect's work, connecting architecture and thermodynamics without giving up the tectonic tradition. The compendium is developed through the concepts of Somatisms, Verticalism, Thermodynamic Materialism, Monsters Assemblage, and, summarizing design strategies and opening new territories at the scales of building, public space and landscape. Buy English edition

Landschaft Stimmung (DE ED.)

Ein Stadtpark an der Donau Silvia Benedito & Alexander Häusler / OFICINAA Landscape Tunings maintains that landscape is more than ecology and technical performance; it is also an environment of paramount importance to one’s dispositions and wellbeing—an emotional space of social relevance, tuned with and for its communities. In this book, OFICINAA examines the design potentials of the Danube River as a civic anchor, a bioclimatic medium, and a space for collective imagination in the city of Ingolstadt, Germany. Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube explores the city’s littoral landscapes with video-essays, drawings, walks, public installations, and exhibitions—each spotlighting the sensate-space where the city meets the Danube’s edge. It then showcases the bottom-up and tactical design approaches of the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project, which aims to foster the spatial embodiment with the riverine environments facing the present challenges of the anthropogenic era. With contributions by Günther Vogt, Andres Lepik, and Simone Schimpf, Landscape Tunings projects the role of littoral landscapes as a medium for the collective wellbeing of the city. Flowing through ten countries, the Danube is one of the most international rivers in the world. Regardless of its scale, economic output, and ecological relevance, the Danube’s landscapes act as cornerstones for civic interaction while “touching” numerous urban fabrics. Initiated in 2013, the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project in Ingolstadt derives from a three-year design study in collaboration with the various communities in the city. Rather than totalizing, and related to the key German concept of “Stimmung” (tuning of space), the design interventions are spatial tunings to foster community access, wonder and delight. These interventions intensify the particularities of the river landscapes with its distinct environments, and leverage the potentials of the riverbanks as a “thick” space in the pressing commitments to social wellbeing. The Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project was exhibited at the Museum of Concrete Art and Design in Ingolstadt. The exhibition shared the multiple scopes and scales of the design, inviting the public to envision the Danube’s inherent beauty as a spatial component in the urban fabric of one the fastest growing cities in Germany. Buy English edition

¡Créate! (SP ED.)

Eduardo Arroyo This book shapes a thick network of experiences and crossed interests opened throughout last twenty-five years in the office NO.MAD and its founder Eduardo Arroyo. In its pages there are mixed reflections, anecdotes and creations that shape an exciting cocktail between living, thinking and creating. In some time of our physiological life something inside each one gets lost and the mind fills with doubts. In spite of the inertia of the long crossed distance, to stop and to look behind with exploratory smell can help us to enter with courage in the unknown days. Topics like the origin and the memory, the soul and the precision, the random and the instability, the empathy, the instants and the choice, the hybridization and the blurry systems, the cloning, the invisible orders and the essential complexity turn out to be here interlaced. The trip across these invisible paths demonstrates a critical vision of the world and the voluntary obligation to try to transform it from the creative independence, the determination and the valor that they are the transparent message of this book. Buy English edition

Experimentos con la Vida Misma (SP ED.)

Arquitecturas Domesticas Radicales ente 1937 y 1959 Francisco González de Canales

Five experiments made by prestigious architects on their own homes during the dark days of the Second World War. In most books or manuals on the history of modern architecture we found a large number of pages devoted to the avant-garde movement that took place in-between wars and to the reconstruction and expansion after World War II. Therebetween, as a misunderstanding or an agreed silence, is a big gap of dark years, wars and exiles of which you can hardly speak about. It is precisely in those dark years when the most experimental and inspiring projects had place. Architects and artists relegated to the margins of civil reality began to present a picture of reactions to a cultural situation unsustainable. Francisco González de Canales analyzes a constellation of scattered cases between late thirties and late fifties of the twentieth century he calls domestic self-experimentation.

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Facts ( SP ED. )

by mateo arquitectura Josep Lluís Mateo Vision of recent buildings and projects from one of the most outstanding European architectural practice, also presented from a multilayered critic panel. Presenting architectural works at the time when they have been done is a critical question to understand, by specific practices, trends into our contemporarity. This book presents a full description of the projects by reelaborated materials (plans, texts, photos) producing a network able to transmit the qualities of the real architecture. Different contributions theoretical. Coming from preeminent academicians, expand the arguments passing from the single cases to a category. Buy English edition

Construïnt Europa (CAT ED.)

25 Anys d'Arquitectura Diane Gray European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe Award 25th Anniversary, a reflection about the past, present and future of European Architecture. As a part of the activities that will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, this catalogue explains the value of the Prize as a platform for discovery and debate about two main topics: the historical value of the Prize as a demonstration of the significance of European architecture, and the Award’s role as a mechanism for bringing up topics of concern in today’s European architecture, and as a process that contributes to building an architectural and urban discourse, both in Europe and throughout the world. The works of the last 25 years are essential tools for defining the future in the upcoming years. Buy English edition

Barcelona Guia d’Arquitectura Moderna (CAT ED.)

Manuel Gausa, Marta Cervelló, Maurici Pla, Ricardo Devesa This guide brings together the most important and interesting examples of modern and contemporary architecture in Barcelona. It covers the emergence of Modernisme and Noucentisme, creative periods for which Barcelona is known the world over: the emblematic German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (1929), rationalist works conceived from the 40s and 50s, large housing projects of the 70s, the Olympic architecture of the late 80s, post-Olympic architecture, examples of the ongoing urban redefinition from the 90s, and the iconic architecture of the 21st century. Each entry has a brief description that includes planning and completion dates, a summary explanatory description, and subsequent restoration and alterations with a graphic coding system. This updated edition features the most recent architectural production (up until 2012), including landmarks such as Jean Nouvel's Agbar tower, the 2004 Forum building by Herzog & de Meuron, the Media-ICT building by Enric Ruiz Geli, the Santa Caterina Market by EMBT and the Diagonal ZeroZero Telefonica Tower by EMBA. Buy English edition Buy Spanish edition

Barcelona Guia de Arquitectura Moderna (SP ED.)

Manuel Gausa, Marta Cervelló, Maurici Pla, Ricardo Devesa This guide brings together the most important and interesting examples of modern and contemporary architecture in Barcelona. It covers the emergence of Modernisme and Noucentisme, creative periods for which Barcelona is known the world over: the emblematic German Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe (1929), rationalist works conceived from the 40s and 50s, large housing projects of the 70s, the Olympic architecture of the late 80s, post-Olympic architecture, examples of the ongoing urban redefinition from the 90s, and the iconic architecture of the 21st century. Each entry has a brief description that includes planning and completion dates, a summary explanatory description, and subsequent restoration and alterations with a graphic coding system. This updated edition features the most recent architectural production (up until 2012), including landmarks such as Jean Nouvel's Agbar tower, the 2004 Forum building by Herzog & de Meuron, the Media-ICT building by Enric Ruiz Geli, the Santa Caterina Market by EMBT and the Diagonal ZeroZero Telefonica Tower by EMBA. Buy English edition Buy Catalan edition EBOOK VERSION

Estructuras Compartidas, Espacios Privados (SP ED.)

Vivienda en México Fernanda Canales

A case study that analyzes the relationship between ideas and houses, this book focuses on 100 years of housing projects in Mexico. The geographic, social, and economic diversity of Mexico constitute a prime example of the challenges inherent to meeting individual needs in an increasingly crowded world. The drawings and essays comprise new ways of looking at theories and buildings in order to redefine the connection between housing and the city. This research is centered in drawings of 70 housing projects, creating a common language highlighting different attempts at reinventing the house not as an isolated battle but as part of a strategy for reimagining how we want to live. This book showcases the pivotal voices that have shaped major cities through housing projects and explores how policies and ideas transform into built form, and how in turn buildings shape societies.

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Andrea Branzi (IT ED.)

E=mc2 Il Progetto Nell'Epoca Della Relatività Andrea Branzi, Elisa C. Cattaneo

From radical research to contemporary design, this book collects Andrea Branzi’s work about city-design and a new opportunity to interpret and anticipate the next dynamics of society. Territories that are conceptual categories, through spaces that are offered up by reality such that design can act and perform cognitively: in this sense, the city becomes a critical concept capable of overcoming its own image. Each passage presents a precise anthropological articulation: from the concept of commodity civilization of the Sixties to that of immateriality, from the concept of the metropolis to that of the anthropological territory, in which the infinitely small and the immensely large coincide, to the point of generating and passing beyond our commonly held concept of the city. The publication begins from the Andrea Branzi’s reflection on the relationship civility-design, from the Radical's research on mass-production civilization to the "infinite territories", proposing new territories able to interpret and anticipate the new dynamics of society. In particular, if the first chapters review the historical/critical works of Andrea Branzi and of Radical Movement, the last opens a new parenthesis of research, right now never expressed: the issues ignored by Modernity, like life, death, destiny and the sacred: themes which underline the new drama and the fracture between tragedy and normality, between consumerism and death, between theology and technology, between the silence of reason and the voice of an irrational reality.

Graham Foundation Grant Buy English edition

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