From Crisis to Crisis

Debates on why architecture criticism matters today Nasrine Seraji, Sony Devabhaktuni and Xiaoxuan Lu (eds.)

From Crisis to Crisis examines how reading, writing and criticism can address the urgent issues faced by architecture today, including: the role of the architect in the era of specialization; the function of criticism in diverse political, economic and cultural contexts; and, the possibility of architectural education to take on history, theory, civic engagement and political participation. Drawn from an international public symposium organized in the spring of 2017 by the University of Hong Kong (HKU) Department of Architecture, the book is comprised in equal parts of focused essays and transcripts of the wide-ranging discussions. From Crisis to Crisis reflects Hong Kong’s ongoing transformation from a gateway between China and the world, to a regional hub opening up a new milieu for the cultural, economic, and intellectual resources of Asia. The HKU Department of Architecture is part of this ongoing transformation, attracting thinkers from Asia, North America, Australia and Europe to engage in critical, relevant dialogues. The publication reflects this diversity and is characterized by its flexibility, contingency, vitality, and open-endedness.

With contributions of: Anthony Acciavatti, Chris Brisbin, Sony Devabhaktuni, Françoise Fromonot, Seng Kuan, Xiaoxuan Lu, Jonathan Massey, Graham Brenton Mckay, Kamran Afshar Naderi, Angelika Schnell, Eunice Seng, Nasrine Seraji, Zhi Wenjun, Tao Zhu

Layered Landscapes Lofoten

Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change Magdalena Haggärde & Gisle Løkken / 70°N arkitektur This book discusses approaches towards landscapes under pressure and transformation, and the importance of unprejudiced and experimental investigations to reveal its natural and cultural complexity. Layered Landscapes Lofoten, Understanding of Complexity, Otherness and Change aims to challenge internalized concepts about how landscapes are considered and investigated, to open for alternative research, and legitimize subjective, singular and experimental approaches as valid and appreciated as a foundation for an informed process. These approaches take into consideration both the landscape and the practices taking place in the landscape, that are consistently full of individual and collective stories and experiences —the complexity created in both time and space, which influences our societies not only as traces of historical events, but as present realities and even expectations and what is to become. Under the concepts of complexity, imbrication, vulnerability, fieldwork, flexibility and reorientation ideas are developed, all based in the contemporary and historic layers of the dramatic and contested landscapes of the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway —where pressure from political decisions and structural changes, increasing tourism, a potential new oil industry and uncontrollable global forces' impact on nature and societies and cause continuous transformation and alteration of landscapes and topography, surrounding the traditional and modern fishing communities. DAM Deutsches Architekturmuseum International Architecture Book Award 2019

Layered Landscapes Lofoten. Understanding Complexity, Otherness and Change aims to address urgent issues about living together in landscapes and territories under severe pressure, to encounter people and landscapes with openness and to gain knowledge about complex realities that set the conditions for all existence. In the light of an ongoing crisis we can learn to be less biased and superficial in our approaches, but aim for a more resilient society, and for flexibility in the confrontation with unknown challenges. _Magdalena Haggärde (23/04/2020)

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Global Housing Projects

25 buildings since 1980 Josep Lluis Mateo

The world is merging into one global system of goods, people and information. This book explores the social, cultural, and economic phenomena of globalization through housing. The Chair of Architecture and Design at the ETH in Zurich examines the last 25 years of housing development. This book is a historical criticism with the built projects as protagonists. Housing typologies have been chosen as contemporary architectural prototypes. The selection of housing projects reflects the most innovative and influential built housing projects to propose new important guidelines in housing. EBOOK EDITION

Un-Conscious-City

Wiel Arets No one demands that people move to cities; people tend to do so, on their own. People choose to move to cities for opportunity. Such choices are often made unconsciously, as they are based on rules, traditions, and local communities–or a combination of all three. Un-Conscious-City explores and unravels Dutch architect Wiel Arets’ kaleidoscopic viewpoints on the ways the collective, unconscious decisions taken by the world’s citizens throughout time–a process that remains invisible to the naked eye–are now working to transform and shift the physical, sensory, and emotional experiences of human beings, as they navigate and live in today’s metropolises as well as the countryside. People tend to only belong to one religion, one society, or one club–which completely defines their existence. One day most human beings will live in a globalnomadic-urban-condition; this will soon be amplified to unknown heights. Un-Conscious-City raises questions, predicaments, and ideals regarding the future of our cities, while recognizing their limitations. Wiel Arets–renowned architect, writer, and thinker–identifies this condition as the Un-Conscious-City. DAM Deutsches Architekturmuseum International Architecture Book Award 2019 The Best Dutch Book Design (De Best Verzorgde Boeken) 2019 EBOOK VERSION

GSD Platform 10: Live Feed

Jon Lott & John May Platform 10: Live Feed is the latest installment of Platform, Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s annual compendium of select student work, events, lectures, and exhibitions. Platform 10: Live Feed confronts a central paradox: the “live feeds” of our lives are exponentially more mediated than the analog forms of documentation they are so quickly replacing and erasing. This fact, in combination with the rapid manipulability endemic to all electronic media, now presents us, its users, with radically new conditions of knowledge and imagination. Under these conditions, real-time platforms for meaningful self-expression and fictionalization are inextricably tied to the novel consequences—political, ethical, epistemological—of a world in which distortion, simulation, and manipulation are often indistinguishable from their opposite. Platform 10: Live Feed is a document of images presented in reverse chronological order from July 2017 to August 2016. Pulled from a crowd-sourced database of 117,518 available files, this “live feed” of the institution samples images from students, faculty, and staff alike, revealing the fluidity between the place, production, and people of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

GSD Platform 11: Setting the Table

Esther Mira Bang, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, Enrique Aureng Silva Platform 11 is the 2017–2018 installment of Platform, the annual compendium documenting select student work, events, lectures, and exhibitions at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering. It exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD. In Setting the Table, the first student-led installment of the series, editors Esther Mira Bang, Lane Raffaldini Rubin, and Enrique Aureng Silva assemble a diverse body of work and cut it up—reinterpreting, rearranging, and ultimately composing a poetry revealed in each retelling.

Las bóvedas de Guastavino (SP ED.)

John Ochsendorf Cada año, millones de personas pasan bajo las bóvedas tabicadas de Guastavino en espacios históricos de todos los Estados Unidos, desde la Sala de Registro de Ellis Island (1917) hasta el Biltmore Estate en las montañas de Carolina del Norte (1895), y desde el Capitolio del Estado de Nebraska (1932), en Lincoln, hasta los e dificios del campus de la Universidad Carnegie Mellon de Pittsburgh (1912). Sin embargo, son pocos los visitantes que aprecian la aportación de la familia valenciana Guastavino a la arquitectura estadounidense y las condiciones que propiciaron que las bóvedas tabicadas de Guastavino fueran durante décadas uno de los sistemas estructurales preferidos. Buy Catalan edition EBOOK VERSION

Imminent Commons: Live from Seoul

Hyungmin Pai, (ed.)

The fourth book from the Seoul Biennale 2017 explores the sites, exhibition installations, and diverse array of programs that were realized during the Seoul Biennale. Imminent Commons: Live from Seoul is Centered on the Live Projects sections (Production City, Urban Foodshed, Walking the Commons) and the Public Programs, the book highlights Seoul's complex urban fabric as a theatre on which the Seoul Biennale was played out. It is a book that focuses less on individual installations and more on the biennale as a specific set of places. It shows how much the character of theses places is an integral part of the Biennale's cosmopolitan, transnational gaze. The book includes essays by Hyungmin Pai, Hyewon Lee, Yerin Kang and Jie-Eun Hwang, Soo-in Yang and Kyungjae Kim, Soik Jung, E-Roon Kang and Wonyoung So, Won-joon Choi, John Hong, Kyubg Yong Lim, Sunjae Kim, Nayeon Kim, Dongwoo Yim and Calvin Chua, OBRA Architects, with photographs by Kyung Sub Shin and Suyeon Yun.

KERB 24

Louella Exton, Kim Morte, Hayden Matthys, Millicent Gunner, Emma Groot

Kerb Journal is a 24 year running, produced by the Landscape Architecture program of RMIT University. 2016 sees Kerb24 focus on the thematic of Territory and its place in the discourse of Landscape Architecture and the broader design industry. Territories start off as nonphysical, often simple ideas, emerging in the physical and becoming a perpetual mixture of the two. Often formed to acquire resources, yet inherently a resource. Land is seized for economic gain, borders are traversed through changes to regulations, and new territories of control are born from land reclamation where previously none existed. Imposing order and control over landscapes in varying states of flux. Conflict often leads to territories shifting or being taken by force. Yet as often as the former, unions of territories can proliferate through consensus and peaceful treaties. They can be rigid or malleable and perceptions of territories can differ for individuals compared to a group of people aligned in thought. Territory can be a landscape of blurred and invisible boundaries, overlapping in time and space. All these assertions lead us to questions. To create a territory, must one first understand it? What becomes possible when we start to question what territory is? How can it link-up with other disciplines?

Verb Matters ( FR ED. )

Albert Ferré Verb Matters revisa las posibilidades formales y materiales de la construcción actual. Obras publicadas de Diller-Scofidio, Jürgen Mayer H., OMA, Toyo Ito, Media Lab, MIT y Metapolis.

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