Dirk Denison 10 Houses

Dirk Denison and Fred A. Bernstein / Denise Bratton

Architect and educator Dirk Denison reflects on the diverse influences that have shaped his practice over 30 years in a volume featuring 10 remarkable houses designed in a broad range of modernist vocabularies –each finely tuned to its site and occupants.

Taking the form of an in-depth conversation between architect and educator Dirk Denison and journalist Fred A. Bernstein, this volume chronicles Denison's childhood in Detroit, travels and early encounters with the arts and architecture, and his education at Cranbrook, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A perceptive interlocutor, Bernstein deftly draws upon Denison's own insights into how these experiences have influenced his aesthetic sensibilities, design philosophy, and working processes over 30 years of collaborative practice.

For design professionals and students of architecture, Dirk Denison 10 Houses draws attention to the manifold ways in which life experiences at all scales nurture and shape a career in the field, but the book is an engaging read for anyone interested in the gratifying process of building one's own home.

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Twisted

Lafayette 148 New York Factory in China Mehrdad Hadighi, Marc Neveu, Tsz Yan Ng

Is it ultimately possible to address the social inequalities produced by global garment manufacturing through design? A collected volume of essays using the Lafayette 148 New York factory in Shantou, China as a foil to discuss issues of textile manufacturing, global/ local building practices, concrete construction in relation to labor, and evolving nature to factory typology. The book presents the building as an artifact of architecture, with detailed documentation of images and drawings. The book also presents essays that offer a series of distinct but interrelated responses to the many questions that arise when building a garment factory facility in contemporary China. Issues addressed range from the architectural import of the building typology, to the ecological footprint of a factory, to social and architectural concerns regarding labor as well as construction practices, to the ethics and aesthetics of factory building.

Unboxing New York

ODA New York

In a city like New York, dominated by regulations and defined by a strong post-recession development boom, the architect is bound by conventions and prescribed parameters. Code, market, and time are words as common in the architect's vocabulary as context, proportion and light. Consequently, the architect's power has been pushed away from fundamental qualities of living. Unboxing New York investigates these architecture topics to recover the power to design with quality of life as the number one objective. Unboxing New York is a behind-the-scenes examination of the changing shape of New York City since 2010 -revealing the forces, theories, and histories that have transformed the city, studying the common conventions that architects deal with as a result. In a bind-up of five smaller books with a wide variety of short articles, research pieces, diagrams, and an analysis of key facets of projects, the book presents the realities of the profession and lays out an accessible and engaging roadmap to working within a large, highly regulated metropolis like New York to create valuable additions to urban life. With prolific experience designing and building in New York -with over 50 designs within an area of 50 square miles- ODA is uniquely positioned to lead this exploration. The firm witnessed the city's rapid development firsthand, and under a soaring volume of work and no time to waste, it has developed an intuitive formula of decision making to design alternative as-of-right buildings that rearrange priorities and transgress molds.

One of the 50 Best Books for 2018 by the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Designers) in partnership with the Design Observer Visit urbanNext for exclusive on-line content about this book

Revisiting Metropolitan Barcelona (ENG ED.)

Public Space 2013-2017

Projects and Urban Design Section, AMB / Poch Comunicación This volume, the fifth in the collection Metropolitan Spaces, is published with the intention of marking a turning point as it broadens its sights and moves away from the concept of catalogue. Its objective, beyond incorporating a historical reflection of the vital role that the AMB has played in the design, the construction of public space, and the transformation and structuring of the metropolitan territory, is to blaze new paths for the future. In order to do so, the volume offers three types of concepts: data, texts and projects. The data explains the context and offers the reader an objective idea of the territory. Then, the texts and their authors help to explain the complexity of the territory, its past and its future potential. Visiting public space, the way of understanding it and acting in it contributed by guest practices, is complemented by re-visiting the work carried out in the last 30 years, contributed by the team of the AMB. Finally, the projects included confirm the diversity and the quality of the works developed by the institution. The content is divided into six chapters: park space, river space, coastal space, covered space, urban space and mobility space. These are, in short, spaces that characterise the metropolitan area of Barcelona, and which, in the course of these 30 years, have acquired an entity of their own.

Verb Crisis ( ENG ED. )

Mario Ballesteros Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.It presents innovative projects and research through original photos, essays, and exclusive interviews with key figures from architecture and urban planning to environmental, economic, and global affairs. Confronted by shifting densities and uncharted urban transformations, Crisis tackles the conflict between the physical limits of architectural design and the demands on the practice for an updated social relevance. Buy Spanish edition EBOOK VERSION

Houses SANAA (ENG ED.)

Sam Chermayeff, Agustín Perez Rubio Sanaa's housing projects, both finished (House A, S House, House in a Plum Grove, Small House and Moriyama House), and unfinished projects (Flower House, Garden & House, Seijo Apartments, Ichikawa Apartments, House in China and Eda Apartments). SANAA's architecture embraces complexities within deceptively simple appearances. It has many elements that are impossible to understand unless actually "experienced". In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in representative media such as plans, models, and photographs. The representations of their architectural works incorporate ambiguity and chronological elements. This characteristic makes Sanaa one of the most innovative offices in the current architectural panorama. Spanish edition

Total Housing (ENG ED.)

Alternatives to urban sprawl Albert Ferré Total Housing was designed to be a demonstration of the virtues of high and medium density multi-family homes, and an antidote to urban sprawl. The selection of works in Total Housing (in hard copy and on its supplementary website: www.actar.com/totalhousing/) spans a period coinciding with the height of the housing boom, and consequent bust, experienced in most "developed" economies. From among the huge amount of projects developed in this period, Total Housing selects 61 of them from 22 countries which exemplify outstanding innovations in construction systems, layout of residential space, systems of unit aggregation, integration of the residential program into the other functions that make up our cities, and repercussions in the formation of the urban fabric. These innovations are summarised in a series of concepts or keywords that identify their "virtues" as a residential model on the first page of each project. This book is a design manual as much as a reference for future good practices. Its structure follows a simple sequential order of the number of homes included in each project (from 4 to 750), regardless of the other complementary programs they may respond to. This sequence aims to facilitate the identification of possible examples and case studies, and show that interesting design solutions are found in big and small projects alike. The final section consists of detailed plans of 17 of the works in the book. Buy Spanish edition EBOOK VERSION

Verb Natures (ENG ED.)

Irene Hwang What is fascinating is the inability to separate the real from the digital, because they already form part of the same nature. So we said in the last issue of Verb. Here we explore how this fusion takes place. Buildings and cities grow, are transformed, and dissolve. How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new architectural organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate space, and how do users and programs animate matter? The fifth volume of Actar's boogazine looks for a new definition of the organic.Projects by: Terraswarm, Aranda/Lasch, Shohei Matsukawa / 000studio, Kram/Weisshaar, Michael Meredith, mos, Foster Partners, George L. Legendre, IJP Corporation, PTW Architects Arup Australia CSCEC, ON-A, Hitoshi Abe, Manuel Gausa Asociados, Vicente Guallart, Mick Pearce, Yusuke Obuchi, R&Sie(n), Cristina Daz, AMID, INI, ONL...

Verb Processing (ENG ED.)

Jaime Salazar The shift from modern to digital systems of design and production opens up a material work to a deeper relationship between author and perceiver. From the classical work to the modern object and from the modern industrial to 'computerised' procedures, the interplay between author and user has become closer, more direct and open. How does this increasing complicity affect architectural practice? How can architecture be conceived as a more fluid informational development? Publishing architectures is much more than displaying a recently finished product in which the architect is the unique author. To make architecture is a real undertaking of numerous authors based on the processing of information before, during and after the materialization of the building. The contemporary relationship between information and authorship in architectural practice, featuring works and texts by Manuel de Landa, Jorge Wagensberg, FOA Architects, Sadar & Vuga, njiric & njiric, Love, Lacaton & Vassal. Buy Spanish edition

The Total Designer

Authorship in the Architecture of the Postdigital Age Lluís Ortega

This book develops an alternative and inclusive approach --based on the hypothesis that the impact of digitalization on architectural culture is similar to the effects of the linguistic turn in philosophy-- and steers clear of exclusive dichotomous approaches, without the foundational reconsideration of the discipline or its ontological conservation. The project is open and broad, which was a necessary condition for demonstrating the power of the turn brought about by digitalization. Most studies on the digital phenomenon carried out in the context of the discipline are focused on the more technical aspects, with expert discourses based on the standpoint of the optimization of existing processes. This text was inspired by a concern and a certain discomfort with respect to those positions, which are often underwritten by a positivist vision of reality. This concern gave way to the idea for a study rooted in a cultural approach to the phenomenon. Given the general tendency toward creating experts --a phenomenon that, on the other hand, is not exclusive to the field of architecture-- and encapsulating knowledge, this text is meant to be based on a transversal vision, which can help non-specialist readers to understand certain complex phenomena.

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Public Space 2013-2017