The ReView: What is affordable?

Andrea Bardon de Tena The Review: "What is Affordable?" presents the work of Tulane School of Architecture over the past years in response to contemporary concerns and challenges. The outcome of TUSA's various programs - Architecture, Design, Historic Preservation, and Real Estate - is organized into four major chapters according to different action plans for addressing affordability: environmental, cultural, economic, and social. Posing the question “What is economically, socially, environmentally and culturally affordable?”, raises many other questions: What is desirable? What is fair? What is logical and exciting? What is appropriate? The work of the students, faculty, and researchers at TUSA demonstrates the commitment of the school to developin g sustainable alternatives for our future built environment. With Contributions of Iñaki Alday, Casius Pealer, Edson Cabalfin, Carol Reese, Sonsoles Vela

Dispositional Intelligence in Architecture

Unveiling Architectural Innovation José Aragüez Dispositional Intelligence proposes a contemporary theory of spatial organization in architecture through original research into a particular kind of hybrid design production—inherently architectural yet strongly driven by modes of intellection traditionally associated with engineering—which surfaced between the mid-1950s and the mid-2000s. Three highly important yet radically overlooked bodies of work are examined here: those of the Italian architect and artist Vittorio Giorgini (1926–2010), the Israeli architect, engineer, and geometer Michaël Burt (b. 1937), and Sri-Lankan-born, London-based engineer and theorist Cecil Balmond (b. 1943). Giorgini was a trailblazer in incorporating surface topology into architectural thinking with a considerable level of scientific self-awareness. Burt’s body of work proves to be one of the earliest, most thoroughgoing investigations into the discovery and visualization of three-dimensional models for the subdivision of space based on patterns of configurational continuity. Balmond pioneered the translation of aspects of nonlinearity into design moves of significant architectural consequence as well as the application of design frameworks thus initiated to the conception of entire buildings. By combining granular historical analysis of these bodies of work with advanced theoretical investigation, this volume substantially expands the distinct dispositional possibilities for architecture enabled by the deep scientization of design that unfolded across the West over the course of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In so doing, it addresses the urgent need to extend the boundaries of architectural thinking in a fundamental fashion—beyond conventional models of three-dimensional articulation—and it contributes not only a new mode of thought to the history of architecture, but also novel critical and design frameworks to today’s discourse and practice culture.

Habitatge a l’àrea metropolitana de Barcelona (CAT ED.)

IMPSOL 2015-2024 Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management (IMPSOL) The Institut Metropolità de Promoció de Sòl i Gestió Patrimonial (Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management, IMPSOL) develops innovative, high-quality, affordable social housing that meets gender requirements. To carry out this task, it promotes architecture competitions with the aim of achieving the highest architectural quality of the proposals by recruiting the best professional talent, and encourages close collaboration with the teams responsible throughout the process. This publication brings together the projects and works developed by IMPSOL between 2015 and 2024 that represent the new criteria: architectural quality, energy efficiency, typological innovation and inclusivity. This is an important shift in social housing proposals in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where there has not been as much architectural innovation in this sector in the last half century. The housing projects presented here represent a radical break with models and layouts that have been accepted for decades. With Contributions of Maria Amat, Mariona Benedito, Josep Maria Borrell, Iñigo Bujedo, Rafael Gómez-Moriana, and Marta Peris.

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Vivienda en el área metropolitana de Barcelona (SP ED.)

IMPSOL 2015-2024 Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management (IMPSOL) The Institut Metropolità de Promoció de Sòl i Gestió Patrimonial (Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management, IMPSOL) develops innovative, high-quality, affordable social housing that meets gender requirements. To carry out this task, it promotes architecture competitions with the aim of achieving the highest architectural quality of the proposals by recruiting the best professional talent, and encourages close collaboration with the teams responsible throughout the process. This publication brings together the projects and works developed by IMPSOL between 2015 and 2024 that represent the new criteria: architectural quality, energy efficiency, typological innovation and inclusivity. This is an important shift in social housing proposals in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where there has not been as much architectural innovation in this sector in the last half century. The housing projects presented here represent a radical break with models and layouts that have been accepted for decades. With Contributions of Maria Amat, Mariona Benedito, Josep Maria Borrell, Iñigo Bujedo, Rafael Gómez-Moriana, and Marta Peris.

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Neglected Dimensions

Sketches for Public Space Paul Carter How public space is produced is one of the great enigmas of democratic society. Paul Carter’s innovative concept of spatial history, his theory and practice of material thinking and, more recently, his account of public space design as choreotopography have been internationally influential in promoting new postcolonial planning discourses and design ecologies. Neglected Dimensions is the first publication of the drawing practice that underwrites his analysis of public space dynamics. Carter’s description of public space as a continuous entanglement of trajectories, experienced multi-modally (discursively, kinetically, mimetically) is the fruit of a public art experience that has encompassed Olympic Games commissions, major urban design (Federation Square, Melbourne) and significant Aboriginal co-design engagement. It also reflects Carter’s subject position as a migrant where ‘the ground is not given’: the local improvisation of meeting protocols applies wherever hyperdiversity complicates finding common ground. The graphic DNA articulating this trajectory of unending arrival is a kinopoetics that entwines choreography and typography, represented in Neglected Dimensions by 46 full page colour plates and 88 in-text black-and-white figures, drawn from over a dozen major architectural and landscape design collaborations, spanning over 25 years of thinking and making. The sketches are ideational timelapses, evoking processes of complexification, pressurisation and dispersal that the empty outlines of architectural drawings necessarily neglect. They evoke the performances of a public space that is always phantom. Public space design is collaborative. This principle is reflected in the design by acclaimed artist and designer, John Warwicker. The pioneer chemist Wilhelm Ostwald described colloids as ‘lying in the World of Neglected Dimensions.’ Our book is a textual colloid. The medium of design finely disperses two graphic registers, typography and hand drawing, through each other. The drawings dimensionalise qualities of public space that designers neglect. They do not represent anything but suggest a way of gluing things together. At the borders, drawing turns into writing. The essay is a drawing out of implications in the sketches, a suspension of related but different thematic molecules, from which on a ‘like to like’ principle, sketches are periodically hatched. Colloidal structures are formed at the interface between media: dispersing text and image through each other, the book’s design discovers a new interface. Each page exhibits an ‘enormous development of surface relative to the amount of matter present’. The magnification of subdivisions (the page) produces new textual distributions intermediate between the solid and the gaseous. The book inhabits its own neglected dimensions. It is a worked example of the view that writing and drawing enact and mobilise what they describe: in a CAD-dominated design culture, this redefinition of representation is timely and liberatory.

Housing in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (EN ED.)

IMPSOL 2015-2024 Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management (IMPSOL) The Institut Metropolità de Promoció de Sòl i Gestió Patrimonial (Metropolitan Institute of Land Development and Property Management, IMPSOL) develops innovative, high-quality, affordable social housing that meets gender requirements. To carry out this task, it promotes architecture competitions with the aim of achieving the highest architectural quality of the proposals by recruiting the best professional talent, and encourages close collaboration with the teams responsible throughout the process. This publication brings together the projects and works developed by IMPSOL between 2015 and 2024 that represent the new criteria: architectural quality, energy efficiency, typological innovation and inclusivity. This is an important shift in social housing proposals in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where there has not been as much architectural innovation in this sector in the last half century. The housing projects presented here represent a radical break with models and layouts that have been accepted for decades. With Contributions of Maria Amat, Mariona Benedito, Josep Maria Borrell, Iñigo Bujedo, Rafael Gómez-Moriana, and Marta Peris.

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The Joy of Sharing

Twenty-Five Writers Inspired by Videos Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation over the Past Twenty-Five Years Han Nefkens, Kyung-sook Shin, Marjorie Evasco, Nazli Ghassemi, Amanda Lee Koe, An Yu, Cristina Morales, Prabda Yoon, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Wu Ming-Yi, Carol Bensimon, Faisal Tehrani, Eduardo Ruiz Sosa, Tomoka Shibasaki, Tsotne Tskhvediani, Manuel Forcano, Gaspar Peñaloza, Nguyen Thuy Hang, Inez Tan, Najwan Darwish, Matías Candeira, Norman Erikson Pasaribu, Shalim M Hussain, Chikọdịlị Emelụmadụ, Kyla Pasha Many of the artists the Han Nefkens Foundation works with have been inspired by literature, but with this book the Foundation has turned it around. To celebrate the twenty-five years Han Nefkens has been an activist in the art world, the Foundation has invited twenty-five international writers and poets to write a piece inspired by one of the videos the Foundation has produced. Many of these writers had not looked at video art before and some were not familiar with art from cultures other than their own. Yet, all have written intriguing, often unexpected pieces which shows how moving images can spark imagination.

The Biopolitical Garden

Space, Lives and Transition Paola Viganò In all the new research on the future of urban space, the renewed interest in life, tragically affected by health, ecological and socio-political crises, raises a crucial theoretical and projective question: what role can space play in maintaining and promoting life in the broader sense of bíos? This book is based on the conviction that there is an urgent need to revisit the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics - free, however, from the privilege given to the goal of control - to rethink the project of the city and territory in transition in an affirmative and emancipatory way. The 'biopolitical garden' designates both the mental place and the set of concrete spaces in which the critical thinking developed in this book takes place. Profound and original, it starts from a consideration of the modern and contemporary project as one committed to the maintenance and emancipation of a population. Re-reading a series of paradigmatic projects from the twentieth century, Paola Viganò acknowledges the long-term validity of the three fundamental concepts of functional space, natural space, and social space. She then proposes a theoretical renewal that considers the value of space as an agent subject endowed with its own vitality. Finally, the projects developed by the author in recent years provide a laboratory for 'situating' her thinking within a perspective of spatial, social, and environmental justice.

Lines of Development

Analysis, Geometry, Architecture Cameron Wu Much attention has been paid to developable surfaces in building technology recently, especially in the area of digital geometric consultancy. The advent of complex forms in contemporary architecture has necessitated the use of developable surfaces to post-rationalize geometries of double curvature for economy and constructability. In lieu of such remedial measures, these forms might serve as the a priori buildings blocks of a new spatial and tectonic language. These surfaces require specific knowledge of their curvature and isometry for successful deployment. They offer productive resistance in terms of how they permute, generating geometric grammars and legible syntaxes—attributes necessary to bring their virtues into a discursive frame. Lines Of Development traces the history of ruled surface geometries and their relationship to architectural design and practice. Theoretical writings describe the intractable presence and mathematical significance of ruled surfaces throughout the history of architecture leading up to contemporary practice. A collection of case studies with analytical drawings and descriptions show how ruled surfaces are used in historical and current precedents. A geometric primer exhibits various combinatory techniques used to produce formal architectural idioms. Finally, a collection of architectural projects exhibits these geometric design techniques.

We Have Never Been Private

The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe Ioanna Piniara The publication puts forward the management of domestic space through the transformation of the concept of the private within the socio-economic regime known as neoliberalism. It proposes a critical reassessment of housing privatisation not merely as a policy introduced in the 1980s to promote new contractual relationships, but as a post-war urban strategy to establish a change of ethos, culture and organisation of housing. Against the neoliberal idea of the institutional autonomy of the private, the thesis argues that the state has constantly partnered the market (‘private sector’) in the promotion of a certain pedagogy of domestic privacy and, therefore, the private has hardly existed ‘as such’ in the neoliberal era. Methodologically, the thesis deploys a typological study to demystify this pedagogy through selected urban housing schemes in London, Berlin and Athens, marking a geographical and chronological vector of neoliberal advance: from anticipation to severe crisis.

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