Traces

LAN (Local Architecture Network) Umberto Napolitano, Benoit Jallon Undertaken at the occasion of LAN’s 10th anniversary, Traces recalls the journey of Umberto Napolitano and Benoit Jallon through their projects and their travel impressions. The city is the point of departure and arrival for the “architectural experience”. It is, therefore, a palpable, external fact as well as a product of the mind, an abstraction. This book attempts to recreate this trajectory and to describe this exchange between the mind and the world through the traces it has produced. Two separate moments lie at the heart of this book’s very structure and shape: one when the city is the site of an experience and of reflection and the other, when architects modify this site through a new project. EBOOK EDITION

Projective Ecologies

Ecology, Research, and Design in the Climate Age Chris Reed & Nina-Marie Lister (eds.) The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity of contemporary ecological research and theory— embracing Felix Guattari's broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential— and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are ecological thinking and theory now? What do current trajectories of research suggest for future practice? How can advances in ecological research and modeling, in social theory, and in digital visualization inform, with greater rigor, more robust design thinking and practice? EBOOK VERSION

The Function of Style

Farshid Moussavi This book interrogates further the formfunction relationship of its projects. It focuses particularly on the history of drawing techniques of describing different concepts of function. All is shown through drawings that describe amongst other criteria the structural function [arrangement of activities or materials], the physical function [such as acoustics, traffic, lighting], the psychological function or the social function of built forms. During the 19th and most of the 20th century, discussions of style revolved around pure formalism or pure functionalism. Style, as the way of assembling forms, was trapped in producing consistency and sameness across architectural forms. This publication is the third in a series at the GSD focused at researching a contemporary idea of style in architecture. EBOOK EDITION

OAB (Updated)

Office of Architecture in Barcelona Carlos Ferrater & Partners OAB draws on the collaborative nature of the Carlos Ferrater previous studio, incorporating new ways of understanding the contributions of each team member to generate richer and more varied, prepared and flexible projects. The creation of this new platform attempts to address the challenges that contemporary architecture has raised in intellectual, social, technological, and environmental spheres. The contents are organized as a collection of chapters that turn the spotlight on both projects and recently built works. These convey a willingness to work in different scenarios, expanding and enriching the range of proposals in the pursuit of new avenues of formal expression. The book covers the theoretical aspects of each project, focusing on innovation, research, and the application of new technologies. At the same time, as we explore each project’s development, emphasis is placed upon context, the building’s objectives, and the social roots of the architect’s work.

Third Coast Atlas

Prelude to a Plan Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, Mason White Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region. It assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This thick description encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts. Postponing diagnosis, let alone treatment of these conditions, Third Coast Atlas aspires to simply describe. It proposes a new geographic gestalt for urban analysis. Superimposed upon the North American continent, and with easily recognizable yet divergent political and geological borders, this megaregion traverses portions of eight U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the world's largest collection of surficial fresh water. Third Coast Atlas characterizes the littoral edge as a distinct field of urbanization, and constructs a reading of the region both specific and speculative. This publication was awarded by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts. EBOOK EDITION

Empire, State & Building

Kiel Moe Whence the accumulation of raw matter and energy of building in New York City? This book considers the material basis of building as a key impetus of both urbanization and the energetics of urban life. The otherwise externalized material geographies and thermodynamics of building’s material basis reveal much about the dynamics and efficacy of how we build. This book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan—the parcel of land under the Empire State Building—over the past two hundred years. Through rich illustrations, it tracks all the building material that have passed through this parcel or remain it in geographic and ecological dynamics: spatially (in terms of their geographic material footprints and industrial processes) and quantitatively (in terms of embodied energy, embodied carbon, and emergy flow). In successive chapters, the book articulates the empire and states that are inherent to building, but remain unconsidered—abstract and unknown—by architects. EBOOK EDITION

BCN Noteguide

Papersdoc Barcelona Essential Travel Item: 60 of the best works of architecture in the city of Barcelona, from art nouveau until the present, chosen by well-known architects. Each technical information page contains: address, a location map, an artistic photograph and an explanatory text written by an expert. In addition to a short list of specifications, a QR code refers to qualified institutional websites where more information can be found. At the foot of each page, there is a reference to the maps in the final pages, organized by area and marked with routes adapted to the proximity of each work. Four blank pages follow for writing, drawing or pasting in memories of your visit, to turn the guide into a personalized object and a souvenir at the end of your trip.

Passages

Transitional Spaces for the 21st-Century City Espaces de Transition pour la Ville du 21e Siècle Institut pour la Ville en Mouvement / VEDECOM

Tunnels, footbridges, escalators, urban cable cars, pathways – passages are essential links, with the potential to generate distinctive urban environments. They require little investment and should be an integral part of all big urban projects, helping to repair the fractures produced by fast transit infrastructures and the urban zoning practices of the recent past. Designing and building passages is a way to act quickly and to lay the foundations for larger scale transformations: international analyses and examples. The product of a joint program with an international network of cities, universities, and experts from different disciplines, as well as the catalog of a touring exhibition, the book analyzes more than 150 completed passage projects and describes methods for action. It is addressed to researchers, designers, politicians and technicians, transit firms and operators, citizen groups and anyone interested in the right to the city and concerned with the quality of these small spaces of movement. Eight articles by the exhibition curators punctuate the catalog and provide insights into passages in their historical, spatial, social, and sensory dimensions, as well as from the perspective of emerging mobilities and the desires of city dwellers. Contents: the thousand and one barriers of the contemporary city; historical chronology; global panorama of passages defined in terms of Link, Place, and Transition; mutating mobilities and passages; taking action: international examples and actions by IVM; Manifesto for the Passage and call for innovation.

New Geographies 09: Posthuman

Mariano Gomez-Luque & Ghazal Jafari

Posthuman signals a historical condition in which the coordinates of human existence on the planet are altered by profound technological, ecological, biopolitical, and spatial transformations. Engendering new ways of being in the world, this condition challenges long-established definitions of the ‘human’, and by extension, of the human environment. Interpreting design as a geographical agent deeply involved in the territorial engravings of contemporary urbanization, New Geographies 09 investigates the urban landscapes shaping the posthuman geographies of the early 21st century, fostering a wide-ranging debate about both the potentialities and challenges for design to engage with the complex spatialities, more-than-human ecologies, and diverse forms and habits of life of an increasingly post-anthropocentric world.

Retrospecta 39

Dimitri Brand, James Coleman, Amanda Iglesias, Jeongyoon Song Retrospecta is the annual journal of student work at the Yale School of Architecture. Part historical record, part monograph, Retrospecta seeks to capture and record the current life of the school. Documenting one academic year, each issue contains exemplary work from both the design studios and support courses. The daily activities of the school, including lectures, symposia, exhibitions, and studio reviews, are also highlighted through numerous candid photographs and quotations. The journal is edited by students and published by the school.

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