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.

Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy

Peter Wilson Italian cities have been points of reference for much of architect Peter Wilson's professional life and the many reasons for visiting the country have long presented themselves as not just the easy list –holidays, food, architecture and culture. The grand tour is the most obvious of tropes for framing these things, but it can also serve as a useful vehicle for a more ingrained understanding into Italy's wider architectural habitat and cultural mythology. This book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same title at the AA School in 2016, appears in the form of a latter-day Baedeker. But rather than a pragmatic itinerary, its content here offers an eclectic and idiosyncratic list of assorted reasons to head south, richly illustrated by Wilson's own drawings and watercolours. Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy refers not only to the pilgrimages of architects from Inigo Jones to Le Corbusier, but also those of the grand tourists of the 18th century, romantics of the 19th century and icons of the 20th century like Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud or Brigitte Bardot. This long tradition included Peter Wilson, whose travels to Italy to develop two architectural competition entries resulted in the new Monteluce Quartier in Perugia, which is currently nearing completion. A few of these journeys were documented in AA Files #68, most are illustrated by drawings which include 'Counter-factual Histories' (Jorge Luis Borges) in the form of handcrafted miniatures. Such works may be anachronistic in the age of digital spectacle but they are also reminders of cultural continuity. Some Reasons for Travelling to Italy include: to live cheaply, to travel with a consumptive relative, to look up, to abandon a bikini, to disappear, to make the Pope smile, to invent neo-classicism, to research Tarantism, to discover a telefonino on Etna and in an English garden in Naples.

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.

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.)

Didier Fiuza Faustino: Misarchitectures

Brett Steele, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Steven Matijcio, Pedro Gadanho and Philippe Vasset. Didier Fiuza Faustino: Misarchitectures brings together for the first time the entire work of Didier Faustino and his office Bureau des Mesarchitectures. Through drawings, diagrams, photographs and essays this part-monograph part-manifesto explores the ideas that drive Faustino's architectural and artistic works: the political and ethical conditions for constructing sites and spaces within the socio-cultural layout of the city, and in particular how to critically approach the problem of the body in both private and public space. At the same time, the book revisits Faustino's projects –from sculptures and installations, to public art, architectures and books– up to his most recent work, offering new insight into the architect's perspective.

Memo For Nemo

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.

Little worlds

Natasha Sandmeier (ed.) Little Worlds documents three years of conversations and projects in Diploma Unit 9's ongoing enquiry into context. At a time when architecture is trying to redefine itself, the issue of context –how to collect it, make it, shape it, talk about it, and enter one's architecture within it –is more pressing than ever. The book pulls together a collection of utterly unique and singular worlds that together argue for a positioning of architecture: not geographically, but rather set within its rich cultural context shaped by real histories and imagined futures. Ultimately, Little Worlds addresses a question all architects face at the beginning of their bright futures– how to shape an identity.

Scavengers & Other Creatures in Promised Lands

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.

High Strange

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.)

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