NESS. On Architecture, Life and Urban Culture 2

Issue 2/ Mad World Pictures Lots of Architecture Publishers introduces NESS: a magazine on Architecture, Life, and Urban Culture. NESS is a printed publication about architecture, life, and urban culture. We are in continuous dialogue with provocative designers and thinkers to expand and diversify our conversations and to be open to new visions and ideas. It is divided into Browser, The Dossier, and Documents NESS 2 focuses on planetary representations: MAD WORLD PICTURES. In our second issue's Browser we visit design studio LaFeliz, Luis Úrculo's landscapes, and the research enterprise of Feminist Architecture Collaborative. Picking up on the question "What are the limits to the possible?" posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, The Dossier places the issue of planetary representations at center: Richard Saul Wurman recounts maps as a tool for understanding; Alexandra Arènes and Bruno Latour develop new cartographies of The Earth; Giuliana Bruno defines 'tender mapping; the exhibition Walls of Air drafts the immaterial barriers of Brazil's architecture and territory; and Fake Industries speculate on the sudden invention of the Indo-Pacific Region. Also, Uriel Fogué, Parasite Lab, María Jérez, Jesse LeCavalier, and Sophia Al Maria dared to play with an exquisite corpse via email. In Documents, we talked to Michael Maltzan: learnt about his beginnings, the office and its projects, as well as his commitment to architecture as a culture building practice. Finally, we interviewed Ensamble Studio in the Cyclopean House. We looked into the span between prefabrication and their most dramatic landscape structures. With contributions of Florencia Rodríguez, Pablo Gerson, Isabella Moretti, Renee Carmichael, Daniela Freiberg, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bruno Latour, Giuliana Bruno, Uriel Fogué, Jesse LeCavalier, Richard Saul Wurman Part of the Ness Collection.

The Diamonds of American Cities

Edward P. Bass Distinguished Visiting Architecture Fellowship #13 Janet Marie Smith, Alan Plattus, Andrei Harwell This book features the advanced studio at Yale School of Architecture to develop concepts for both minor and major league baseball stadiums in cities. The Diamonds of American Cities presents the work of Edward P. Bass Visiting Distinguished Architecture Fellow Janet Marie Smith, vice president of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Alan Plattus and Andrei Harwell, Yale faculty members, with students of the School of Architecture. The challenge was to analyze ballparks and their urban ramifications in a two-phased project, one each for a minor and a major league team. The students formed four groups and developed proposals for the Pawtucket Red Sox on different New England sites. Critical analysis of the development opportunities for a large-scale sports facility and the consequences on a medium-size city drove the presentations to the Pawtucket team management and informed its move to Worcester, Massachusetts. In the second half of the semester the students designed a center-field addition to Dodger Stadium, in Los Angeles. The projects encapsulated large and small scales, investigating ideas such as circulation to and from the stadium and the types of concession placed within the structure. The students considered the future of baseball viewership, testing ideas ranging from AR/VR batters' eye walls to public dugouts. The book features an interview with Smith, an essay by Plattus, and a closing discussion between Stan Kasten, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Larry Lucchino, president emeritus of the Boston Red Sox. The book is edited by Nina Rappaport and Ron Ostezan ('18) and designed by MGMT.Design

Barcelona Regional (SP ED.)

Pasado, Presente, Futuro. Barcelona Regional Agency This publication wants to be much more than an institutional memory of the works that Barcelona Regional has developed in the last 25 years. It is a double publication with a unique design that wants to emphasize the role of the agency as an instrument of discussion and innovation for the City Council and the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The publication is divided into two volumes that are integrated into a single box. The first volume, Barcelona Regional, past and present, focuses on the people who have directed and worked at the agency, and the most emblematic projects that they have developed during these 25 years. Mayors of Barcelona, directors and workers relate the close relationship of Barcelona Regional with the transformations of the metropolis, and how the agency has been able to adapt, incorporating multiple methodological innovations in the ways of thinking and doing the city. The second volume, Ring roads Barcelona, present and future, wants to be an open reflection on the future of the metropolitan cities, using the case study of the ring roads of Barcelona to rethink their impacts as a territorial border. It is a statement of the multiple perspectives of future challenges that open up to the shared discussion of Barcelona Regional with other agents, such as universities, external professionals and even with the subjective views of citizens who tell us about their "intimate" relationship with an urban freeway that, as such, has the days (or rather the years) numbered. Buy English edition

Ring Roads Barcelona (ENG ED.)

Past, Present, Future Barcelona Regional Agency This publication wants to be much more than an institutional memory of the works that Barcelona Regional has developed in the last 25 years. It is a double publication with a unique design that wants to emphasize the role of the agency as an instrument of discussion and innovation for the City Council and the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The publication is divided into two volumes that are integrated into a single box. The first volume, Barcelona Regional, past and present, focuses on the people who have directed and worked at the agency, and the most emblematic projects that they have developed during these 25 years. Mayors of Barcelona, directors and workers relate the close relationship of Barcelona Regional with the transformations of the metropolis, and how the agency has been able to adapt, incorporating multiple methodological innovations in the ways of thinking and doing the city. The second volume, Ring roads Barcelona, present and future, wants to be an open reflection on the future of the metropolitan cities, using the case study of the ring roads of Barcelona to rethink their impacts as a territorial border. It is a statement of the multiple perspectives of future challenges that open up to the shared discussion of Barcelona Regional with other agents, such as universities, external professionals and even with the subjective views of citizens who tell us about their "intimate" relationship with an urban freeway that, as such, has the days (or rather the years) numbered. Buy Spanish edition

Treasured Island

Madagascar 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 Treasured Island Unknown Fields travels through Madagascar to catalogue the push and pull of economy and ecology and meet the illegal traders of the world's luxury brands. In times past an anarchist community of pirates called Madagascar home. It was an island beyond the law and off the map, a place of rogues, booty and bounties. This book unravels the contemporary black market supply chain that strings the precious gem stones from the wild west mining towns of Madagascar to the celebrity necklines and trembling newlywed fingers of the city. One of the planet's most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and in the shadows of the world's desires we uncover some of the complex value negotiations that play out across this unique island. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

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.)

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