America Recovered

Chad Ress, Jordan H. Carver, Miriam Paeslack

America Recovered reveals the point where abstract political processes manifest themselves in the physicalÂ world, thus providing an alternate means of experiencing the contemporary American landscape. Collectively, the images and essays show what aspects of our everyday lives are being assigned value in the promise of a recovered America. In 2009 President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act known as the stimulus bill. Along with the bill, the administration launched Recovery.gov , a website to foster greater accountability and transparency in the use of covered funds. America Recovered collects forty images that mark one of the only efforts to document the breadth of projects funded by the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unlike the New Deal and other programs designed for employment and infrastructural development, the Recovery Act was passed without any funds dedicated for photographic documentation. Using an official government website as his guide, Chad Ress took photographs of projects across the country. The publication of America Recovered at this moment allows for a critical reassessment of the Act and its lasting impact on the American landscape. The two essays by architectural writer Jordan H. Carver and photography historian Miriam Paeslack situate Ress's photographs within broader discourses of urbanism, infrastructure, and politics. The question of what role the government should play in everyday life remains one of the touchstone issues in American politics. The photographs and essays ask a different set of questions, not whether government spending is good or bad, whether it worked or didn't, but what, exactly does government spending look like. And importantly, America Recovered asks how government spending and civic identity are constructed around place.

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Between East and West: A Gulf

Hamed Bukhamseen & Ali Karimi / Civil Architecture

Between East and West: A Gulf looks towards the contested hydrography of the Arabian/Persian Gulf and proposes a new masterplan for the region. In an area of physical, religious, and political division, the publication tells the story of the Gulf's islands and the possibilities they hold for a joint territorial project. Hundreds of islands dot the waters between the Arabian and Persian shores. An afterthought in the political maneuverings of their respective coasts, tell an alternative narrative to the one which drives conceptions of the region. They represent a possibility greater than spaces of political contestation and hesitant demarcation. These islands are the sites of identity in formation, places of experimentation and architectural invention. Their historical roles were as varied as places of leisure, spirituality, planning, war, exile, and health.

The book was an accompaniment to the third Kuwaiti participation at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2016 with a pavilion that shares the same title.

Crown Hall Dean’s Dialogues 2012-2017

Kazuyo Sejima, William Baker, Wiel Arets, Junya Ishigami, Stefano Boeri, Peter Eisenman, Ben van Berkel, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Phyllis Lambert, Riken Yamamoto, Herman Hertzberger, Armand Mevis, David Adjaye, Erwin Olaf, Dominique Perrault, Stan Allen, Bernard Khoury, Agata Siemionow This title collects the voices of 18 esteemed architects, designers, educators and theorists in dialogue with students from the Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture. Voices ranging from Phyllis Lambert to David Adjaye to Rafael Vinoly expound and express their thoughts freely, digging deeply into essential themes that drive their work, study and process. This title provides intimate insight directly from leading architectural and design practitioners, who in the process of being interviewed, further the academic discourse conducted at IIT College of Architecture. EBOOK VERSION

Open(ing)

Space-Time-Information & Advanced Architecture 1900-2000. The Beginning of Advanced Architecture Manuel Gausa

In defense of a new architectonic logic, Manuel Gausa explores a pioneer decade of decisive experiences in the turn of the millennium. The last few decades have confirmed the evidence of a spectacular change of scale –and thinking– in our spaces of exchange and sociability –in our own habitats– linked with the exponential capacity to process and interact complex and digital parameters of information. Transversal, relational and multi-scalar. Focusing on the mapping of the contemporary project and city in the turn of the millennium, this book explores the capacity of links between dynamic systems and irregular structures. Manuel Gausa defends a new underlying architectonic logic (spatialtemporal in conception) that has emerged within current culture of the informational age. In accordance with a shared terrain of inquiry, which represent a series of decisive experiences from the past years, this new logic can be considered an advanced "logic of complexity".

Superhumanity

Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity Chin Jungkown, Common Accounts (Igor Bragado & Miles Gertler), Arisa Ema, Hong Sungook, Yuk Hui, Kim Jaehee, Catherine Malabou, Hannah Proctor, Erik Rietveld, Mark Wasiuta

The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects, but rather extends from carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes.Focused on post-labor, psychopathology, and plasticity of human mind and body, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea, MMCA, organized a Superhumanity symposium in Korea, consisting of lectures and panel discussions by experts from diverse disciplines, ranging from design and architecture to science, media, history, philosophy, and contemporary art. This book introduces essays by these experts, whose insightful presentations and followed conversations are resonated as a compilation. Faced with the fourth industrial revolution, this book shed light on the necessity to recognize that manmade, artificial objects are continuously reshaping our daily lives, and thus to rethink the intimate and fundamental relationship between design and what it means to be human.

With Contributions of Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Jihoi Lee, Mark Wigley, Chin Jungkown, EBOOK EDITION

Possible Mediums

Possible Mediums presents a collection of sixteen speculative design mediums by emerging architects. Each chapter defines an active medium in contemporary architecture through descriptions, drawings, and objects. Possible Mediums arranges projects according to shared technical and aesthetic traits, creating a vibrant taxonomy of design. Descriptive texts explain the working principles behind each medium and introduce design concepts intended to inspire students and professionals alike. Through its many contributors, Possible Mediums establishes design as a collective endeavor propelled by the open exchange of ideas and techniques. Possible Mediums is not a systematic theory, a manifesto, or a banal survey; it is a projection of architecture and knowledge to come.

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Buildings and Almost Buildings

Eric Bunge, Mimi Hoang / nARCHITECTS Buildings and Almost Buildings explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture. Is architecture inherently complete? Or is it a state of incompletion and seeming inadequacy that incites us to imagine architecture as an armature for an ever-changing daily life? Buildings and Almost Buildings explores the work of nARCHITECTS as a single project an anti-monograph with a subtle manifesto about the open-ended, incomplete, and ambiguous in architecture. Structured around a variety of modes of representation specially prepared for the book, Buildings and Almost Buildings reveals the ways in which the celebrated New York office led by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang addresses contemporary issues of a world in flux. Across a range of buildings, public spaces, and ephemeral installations, nARCHITECTS argues for the formal and social potential of an architecture that remains somehow incomplete and ambiguously perceived or in the authors words, Almost Buildings. EBOOK EDITION

Venezia, Venezia (ENG ED.)

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar's immersive site-specific installation in the Chilean pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, "Venezia Venezia" is a call to examine how today's culture, composed of increasingly complex global networks, can be adequately represented on a world stage.This publication features essays by 18 prominent, international authors from different fields of work and thought, including political and philosophical thinkers, critics, theorists, art historians and curators. Their contributions consider Venezia Venezia in its critical context, as well d recent global developments and the volatile conditions of contemporary art practice.

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Gran Mediterraneo

Project, Process, Progress David Tajchman David Tajchman's first book about a self-initiated architectural research for a White City-specific High-Rise: the Gran Mediterraneo. Gathering working documents, sketches and rare pictures in an object specifically designed by graphic designer and art director Sara Jassim. In 2016, architect David Tajchman made public a self-initiated high-rise proposal on which he worked in secret during a few months. He decided to propose a new typology of skyscraper, more city-specific for Tel Aviv. Based on his previous observations that a new skyline is appearing in the White City, which according to his experience of the city and his knowledge of the local architectural history, does not take enough into account the 1930s and later Brutalist legacies. His yet unbuilt (but surely to get built) skyscraper is a spontaneous proposal from a foreign architect to the local decision makers, to open their eyes and their mind to other visions, for a more Tel Aviv-specific vertical architecture. The Gran Mediterraneo has been widely published as an architectural innovation and has won several awards gaining international recognition, with the recent Architizer A Awards 2017 received in New York. During the design process, David sketched, wrote, read and photographed about the various topics involved into his high-rise proposal. This book is an opportunity to share his references, background, research documents, notes, drawings and working (3d) models. The book was first an exhibition-catalogue, presented last September 2016 in Paris in the framework of a solo show entitled «Gran Mediterraneo - Project Process Progress». It contains archive documents on different topics and texts from invited contributors. EBOOK EDITION

Barcelona: The Secret Museum (ENG ED.)

Ignacio Vidal-Folch Una mirada subjetiva e insólita de Barcelona de la mano del escritor Ignacio Vidal-Folch, a modo de guía literaria de la ciudad. Rincones desconocidos, olvidados desfilan por las páginas de este libro, ilustrado con fotografías de Txema Salvans. Unlike any other city travel guide, Barcelona Secret Museum, written by Barcelonian novelist Ignacio Vidal-Folch, proposes a view of the city from the subjective perspective of a writer. His contemplative, humorous, and beautifully descriptive writing guides the reader through 80 sites monuments, squares, buildings, as well as shop windows, hidden streets, desolate neighborhoods, walls of posters and street art always with fascinating cultural commentary and universal references to the history of art, cinema and literature. Buy Spanish edition

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