Nowness Files: 2012-2018

Wiel Arets, Vedran Mimica, Lluís Ortega Nowness Files charts the evolution of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, under the deanship of distinguished architect Wiel Arets, from 2012-2018. It is the second publication in the NOWNESS series from Illinois Institute of Technology's College of Architecture – announcing and documenting the college's activities. Whereas Nowness set the college's new educational, and urban-centric theme– "Rethinking Metropolis" –and sought to announce new initiatives instituted under then new dean Wiel Arets; Nowness Files documents the effect of those changes on the college's curriculum. Its pages chart the evolution of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), first awarded in 2014, expound on the numerous publications produced at the college from 2012-2018, reflects on lectures and lecturers, and highlights the college's new digital media outlets, as the website, and archiving system PROTOCOL. Special attention is given to the revised and expanded degrees the college offers, and to the activities of its faculty, staff, and students – who compose the college's community. Like the original publication it closes with a visual essay by the late photographer Michael Wolf–with a selection of images from his "Transparent City" series– documenting Chicago's glass skyscrapers, and life within them.

New Geographies 10: Fallow

Michael Chieffalo & Julia Smachylo The term fallow is borrowed from agriculture as a metaphor to critically examine the role of strategic dormancy in cycles of valorization and devalorization of the built and unbuilt environment. Rather than a strict binary of fecund or barren, however, New Geographies #10 conceives of fallowness as a rich and complex terrain to provoke a critical examination of the sites, strategies, scales, and imaginaries of the unused, the devalued, and the dormant, and explore modes of revalorization in all its forms: economic, ecological, social, cultural. Ultimately, it is hoped that this compilation will provide a foundation on which designers can build new lines of questioning regarding processes of urbanization that will illuminate new speculative horizons for the design disciplines, while also demarcating points for cross-disciplinary study of the built and unbuilt environments.

Architecture As Measure

Neyran Turan In light of the current political crisis around climate change, what can architecture possibly contribute towards a new planetary imaginary of our contemporary environment beyond environmentalism and technological determinism? Instead of conceptualizing the idea of the environment as purely natural and in need of protection, as solely a problem that needs to be managed, or merely as the Earth, which limits the scope with a scalar bias, can we speculate on architecture as a measure both to assess and to act upon the world? Architecture as Measure is an elaboration on this question, and on the disciplinary and cultural potentials of such a provocation. It positions climate change as a cultural and political idea that requires a renewed architectural environmental imagination. The book takes on this task by presenting a set of unconventional collisions between architecture and climate change, which all extrapolate broader concerns of the city, environment, and geography through the lens of specific architectural questions such as form, representation and materiality. In that way, the book is an invitation to boost architecture's planetary effect by collapsing the centers and the peripheries of the discipline, by colliding its very outside with its very core interior. In addition to the introductory essay, the book consists of nine separate chapters, each of which contains an essay by Neyran Turan and is coupled by a project by her architectural practice NEMESTUDIO. Each essay, and thus the associated project in each chapter, positions certain problems brought by climate change, such as resource extraction, materiality, long time span, representation, geology, and waste etc. in architectural terms. Inherent in the premise of the book is the proposition of a new conception of architecture's engagement with the wider world through a specific focus on architecture's capacity to boost its planetary effect from within. Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts grant award Winner In an era when humans are described as geological agents, architecture is a measure both to assess and to act upon the world. That's why this book is called Architecture as Measure. Measuring something means both to ascertain its degree by using an instrument, and also to scrutinize, to consider with pause and inner focus. The book argues that climate change requires architecture to expound its specific role in the world. It is an invitation that starts with the idea that shaking the discipline and the world compels us to not be afraid of slowing down and focusing inward, for the most robust outward influence. _Neyran Turan (26/04/2020)

By Practice, by Invitation

Design Practice Research in Architecture and Design at Rmit, 1986-2011 Leon Van Schaik, Anna Johnson (eds.)

Design Practice Research at RMIT University is a longstanding program of research into what venturous designers actually do when they design. It is probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. This first Pink Book documents some of its past achievements. Probably the most enduring and sustained body of research of its kind: empirical, evidence-based and surfacing evidence about design practice. It is a growing force in the world, with a burgeoning program of research in Asia, Oceania and Europe. This book documents some of its past achievements. Two kinds of knowledge are created by the research. One concerns the ways in which designers marshal their intelligence, especially their spatial intelligence, to construct the mental space within which they practice design. The other reveals how public behaviours are invented and used to support design practice. This new knowledge combined is the contribution that this research makes to the field of design practice research. EBOOK VERSION

Operative Mapping

Maps as Design Tools Roger Paez

The book's fundamental aim is to offer a methodological contribution to the design disciplines, both in conceptual and instrumental terms. When added to the resources of contemporary design, operative mapping overcomes the analytical and strictly instrumental approaches of maps, opening up the possibility of working both pragmatically and critically by acknowledging the need for an effective transformation of the milieu based on an understanding of pre-existing conditions. The approach is pragmatic, not only discussing the present but, above all, generating a toolbox to help expand on the objectives, methodologies and formats of design in the immediate future. The book joins together a review of the theoretical body of work on mapping from the social sciences with case studies from the past 30 years in architecture, planning, and landscape design in the interest of linking past practices with future ones. EBOOK VERSION

Stones Against Diamonds (Arch. Words 12)

Lina Bo Bardi This collection of essays is the first-ever English anthology of her writings. It includes texts written when she was still living in Italy as well as later contributions to a number of Brazilian newspapers, journals and magazines. An acute critic and a creative thinker, Bo Bardi proposes a series of new parameters for design thinking and practice, such as the notions of 'historical present', 'roughness' and 'tolerance to imperfection'. Presented collectively, her texts present a wealth of inspirational thoughts articulated in a refreshingly simple, straightforward fashion.

The House of Light and Entropy (Arch. Words 11)

Alessandra Ponte Written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, this collection of essays begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, 'The Map and the Territory', written specifically for this volume.

A World Adrift

South China Sea and Inner Mongolia 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. For A World Adrift Unknown Fields travel through Asia and beyond, tracing the shadows of the world's desires along the supply chains and cargo routes of the South China Sea to explore the dispersed choreographies and atomised geographies that the globalised city brings into being. This book is a collection of conversations and images from Unknown Fields' journey. From sea to source, we follow the routes of bits, bobs and thingamajigs in reverse and chart their unmaking, from container ship back through wholesalers and manufacturers and ending at the banks of the sludge-filled radioactive lake in Inner Mongolia where most of our technologies begin their lives. Part of the Collection: Tales from the Dark Side of the City (6 Vol.)

Rituals and Walls: The Architecture of Sacred Space

Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Shéhérazade Giudici In recent years the idea of sacred space has not been considered a relevant topic in contemporary architecture, a neglect that is even more pronounced in terms of debates about the city. The texts and projects collected together in this book aim to redress this oversight, and re-open a contemporary understanding and discussion of the architecture of sacred space. The book itself is the result of a year-long investigation on the nature of sacred space and its manifestation developed in the AA's Diploma Unit 14. It consists of design proposals that range from a multi-faith school in Strasbourg to the reconstruction of a festival hall in the city of Xian, China; from a Jesuit monastery in Detroit to a women's Islamic centre in Paris. Each proposal is introduced by critical texts that analyse the political and ideological meaning of religious architecture. The book is complemented by essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Shéhérazade Giudici and Hamed Khosravi that focus on the relationship between forms of worship and architecture, and argue that within sacred space form must follow function –in other words, architectural space must adhere to the rituals through which the sacred is enacted, and that the meaning of sacred space goes far beyond the stereotypes of contemplation and spirituality, and instead aligns with the political and social ethos of the city.

AA Women in Architecture 1917-2017

October 2017 marks the centenary of the admission of the first female students to the Architectural Association. Published to coincide with a symposium, exhibition and series of talks all celebrating this event, AA Women in Architecture puts forward the stories of women who have entered the architectural profession and their contributions to architectural practice and education.

Select Gift