William Firebrace Memo for Nemo is an account of the human inhabitation of the undersea, in fact and fiction. It takes as its starting point Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with the Nautilus submarine and its captain Nemo –inventor, explorer, oceanologist, gastronome, musician and terrorist. The undersea is examined as a zone created both by exploration and invention, from the earliest attempts to photograph and descend into the depths with deep-sea devices, through the 1960s experiments and actual inhabitation, such as the US Sealab and Cousteau's Conshelf, to contemporary surveillance of the rapidly changing oceans. This history is paralleled and subverted by a fictitious history of films such as The Abyss, The Life Aquatic, Das Boot, Bioshock, Fantastic Voyage and other hallucinogenic delights.

Ricardo de Ostos and Nannette Jackowski

Is the idea of environment in architecture only ever reducible to 'environmental architecture'? For AA unit masters Ricardo de Ostos and Nannette Jackowski the answer is a resolute no. Instead they offer an alternative reading of 'environment', in which the brutal and lyrical are juxtaposed through visually compelling narratives of architecture. Illustrating their approach, this book presents ten years of student projects, all prompted by the unit's visits to extreme geographic contexts –from the rainforests of Brazil to the quarries of northern India. With additional photographic documentation and conversations with Lebbeus Woods, Geoff Manaugh and Peter Cook, Scavengers & Other Creatures in Promised Lands explores the gripping power of myth and fiction as radical narratives for imagining the near future of cities and forests.

United States Black Sites 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. To chart the black sites of the Unknown Fields city the studio commandeers an old US school bus and heads off on a reconnaissance trip through the borderlands of military outposts and the crater-pocked, fenced-off folkloric landscapes of the United States. The militarised landscapes which defend the city are hidden behind barbed wire, within inhospitable terrain or beneath the low resolution distortions of doctored satellite images and beyond their physical might, they are sites of psychological warfare, where rumour begins. High Strange is a graphic novel developed together with embedded comic artist Kristian Donaldson in response to the material Unknown Fields collected along this journey. It is a portrait of a landscape as a factory of fictions. A form of weaponised folklore. A territory that can be only understood by examining the stories the world tells about it. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

Metzger at AA  Gustav Metzger

'Auto-destructive art is a comprehensive theory for action in the field of the plastic arts in the post-second world war period. The action is not limited to theory of art and the production of art works. It includes social action. Auto-destructive art is committed to a left-wing revolutionary position in politics, and to struggles against future wars.' Facsimile edition of a lecture transcript given by German-born artist Gustav Metzger at the Architectural Association in February 1965. This new edition is published 50 years on since its original printing in June 1965 by the AA's Action Communications Centre (A.C.C), reigniting Metzger's urgent and ever-relevant arguments which confront society's obsession with destruction and the detrimental effects of machinery on human life.'

Theodore Spyropoulos Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living examines computational frameworks that explore a time-based poly-scalar urbanism. The publication includes essays by Mark Burry, Brett Steele, John Frazer, John Henry Holland, Makoto Sei Watanabe, Patrick Schumacher, and David Ruy. Architecture finds itself having to cope with new social and cultural complexities that demand systems that are open, adaptive and participatory. The book explores organisational systems that examine a model of collective living constructed as an evolving ecology. As a response to models of accelerated urbanism that privilege top down master planning the book explores experimentation that examines a generative and time-based approach towards a computational urbanism. The research conducted by AADRL Director Theodore Spyropoulos with his research lab explores a pattern logic that is poly-scalar, allowing bio-diverse patterns to operate between urban, building and material agency. The model of architecture and urbanism speculated here is not one embedded in a blueprint as with most man-made structures, but rather are correlated operations that are governed through emerging collective interaction.  

Other Histories of Architectural Modernity Detlef Mertins

These essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, from journals to anthologies - including such noted books as Lars Spuybroek's NOX: Machining Architecture and FOA's Phylogenesis - they are now assembled for the first time in this volume.