Ábalos + Sentkiewicz ( ENG ED. )

Essays on Thermodynamics, Architecture and Beauty Iñaki Ábalos, Renata Sentkiewicz A compendium of essays and projects, that creates a projective document able to set up new scenarios for the architecture of the next decade. This is a book that unfolds arguments and designs around the concept of "thermodynamic beauty". This new aesthetic category opens up new and unexpected directions to the architect's work, connecting architecture and thermodynamics without giving up the tectonic tradition. The compendium is developed through the concepts of Somatisms, Verticalism, Thermodynamic Materialism, Monsters Assemblage, and, summarizing design strategies and opening new territories at the scales of building, public space and landscape. Buy Spanish edition EBOOK VERSION

The Generic Sublime

Organizational Models for Global Architecture Ciro Najle Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, high-rise housing, mixed-use developments, luxury condominiums, airport hubs, suburban office enclaves, industrial and technology parks, hotel complexes and resorts, conference and financial centers, entertainment venues, gated communities, theme parks, branded cities, new central districts, and satellite cities: extra-large architectural typologies dominate the contemporary built environment worldwide. Despite the ubiquity of these building forms, their development has been largely restricted by a reliance on outmoded traditions of urbanism and the strict separation of disciplinary domains within current architectural practice. The Generic Sublime investigates how the modern concept of the generic––once assumed to achieve universality by means of organizational homogeneity, formal neutrality, programmatic blankness, lack of identity, and insipidness of character––holds the potential to become its very opposite: the singular, the irreducible, and the extraordinary. Directing the work of students of the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Ciro Najle examines the organizational protocols of building collectives and develops architectural models for encompassing the unprecedented potential of the extra-extra-large. The book includes essays by Ciro Najle, Mohsen Mostafavi, Iñaki Abalos, Charles Waldheim, George L. Legendre, David Salomon, Paul Andersen, Lluís Ortega, Leire Asensio Villoria, David Mah, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Alberto Delorenzini, Marcia Krygier, Julián Varas, Erika Naginski, Hiromi Hosoya, Farshid Moussavi, and Anna Font. EBOOK EDITION

Making it Modern

The History of Modernism in Architecture and Design Aaron Betsky This book traces the astonishing opening up of a brave new world of open empty space, the arrival of the beauty and terror of the machine into daily life, and the attempts to represent them in the construction of a modernist world. At its root, modernism is that fundamental. It is a question of having something to represent that is of the moment. In the most radical interpretation, modernism always comes too late. The modern is that which is always new, which is to say, always changing and already old by the time it has appeared. Modernism is always a retrospective act, one of documenting or trying to catch what has already appeared –an attempt to fix life as it is being lived. Modernity is just the very fact that we as human beings are continually remaking the world around us through our actions, and are doing so consciously. Modernism is a monument to or memory of that act, which in its own making tries to remake the world it is pretending to represent. EBOOK VERSION

Water Index

Design Strategies for Drought, Flooding and Contamination Seth McDowell A book that highlights critical design projects from around the world those radically engage the fragile issues of drought, flooding, and contamination, revealing opportunistic, adaptive design strategies in response to the mounting global crisis. In the wake of an escalating global crisis with water, Water Index is the first critical inventory and analysis of innovative architecture, landscape architecture and design solutions to address the rising, disappearing, and contamination of water. As an ecological disaster complex ferments in contemporary architectural discourse, design competition briefs, conference topics and journal themes optimistically call for designers to reconcile or reimagine the relationship between water, architecture and city. Anxiety is elevated by the onslaught of extreme weather in the form of super-storms, hurricanes, tsunamis, landslides, floods, and droughts whose frequencies and intensities continue to increase. Couple the ever-present exposure to disaster with scientific data that suggests a future characterized by climate change and population growth, and then we have the ingredients for a full-fledged paranoia: the perfect motivation for absurd, expansive and radical building projects. Water Index, examines three hydrological tragedies (flood, contamination, and drought) through strategies that offer methods for controlling, escaping, or adapting to the vital natural resource. Water Index is a collective vision of the future that provides solutions for every continent and spans the disciplines of urban design, landscape architecture and architecture. The book works to create an enduring manual and manifesto for water development and design in the twenty-first century and to acknowledge crisis-initiated design as an important trajectory for architectural discourse. Water Index highlights a moment when designers have linked formal concerns with social, ecological and political agendas offering solutions for expanding global problems. EBOOK EDITION

The Social Imperative

Architecture and the City in China H. Koon Wee This book contains multiple short critiques, reflections and manifestos, affording each contributing architect and intellectual the time and space to imagine new social paradigms in China. Emerging from a tumultuous history of high culture and complex territorial conditions, there is nothing straightforward about the social development of China. The complexity of the social practices developed by architects and shapers of the built environment can be explained in part by the last three decades of an intensified adoption of the market economy by the Communist Party of China, after an equally short three decades of closed-door communist control. There is no political meltdown like the democratization of the former Communist Bloc, but there is a constant managing of discontent and resistance across China. At the apex of the many creative and intellectual forces in China, architects harbor and give form to many tactics of resistance. Unfortunately, architects are also the instruments and minds complicit with profit-mongering developers and governments, pursuing unchecked urbanization, degradation of the environment, exploitation of the marginalized, and the creation of a very inequitable China. This book begins with an introduction that defines the forms and tendencies of China’s society as it stands today, and it positions the work of a small number of architects and intellectuals who are at the forefront of reforming, rethinking and even revolutionizing the Chinese society. Beneath the veneer of a very successful China that the world readily acknowledges, a quiet revolution is taking place within the realms of architecture and the city. The social, architectural and urban theories documented in this book are organized around the established canons of social actions – from mobilizing, laboring, resisting and mediating, to networking, controlling, rationalizing and aestheticizing. This book aims to put the social agenda squarely back in the rapid development of the built environment in China. This publication is the culmination of a three-year study of social issues in the architecture and cities of China. It involved visits to sites undergoing massive change, discussions and debates among architects and critics, reflections by practitioners about their own work, and activists lobbying for social change. Supported by the non-profit AA Asia, the edition of the contents relied heavily on original input and exchanges between architects and theorists committed to China, from Asia and beyond. Since the 1990s, AA Asia remains one of a few unique think tanks committed to the study of architecture and cities in Asia. As an advocacy with strong academic roots, it seeks to establish the differences across various postcolonial and Asian contexts, and recalibrate the role of architecture in a technocratic era dominated by the global economy. EBOOK EDITION

[UN]Precedented Pyongyang

Dongwoo Yim [UN]Precedented Pyongyang" is an urban research on how Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was reconstructed from the Korean War based on the idea of socialist urbanism and how those socialist urban spaces will transform when it adopts the new market-economy system. Despite the notorious fact of it being one of the most veiled countries in modern history, North Korea recently has started to get engaged with the rest of the world, and now we can easily witness various socio-economic changes of the nation which was seen in the 1990s in other post-socialist countries. And as the capital of the nation, Pyongyang has already entered into fast transformation stage with numbers of developments both in public and private sectors since the new regime of Kim Jung Un. However, we sometimes overlook the fact that the city was built based on the goal to be an ideal socialist city. After the three years of Korean War in the 1950s, Pyongyang was completely demolished and had a unique chance to build a new city based on the socialist ideology. Although the current morphology may not be exactly same as the original master plan, many urban spaces and infrastructures remain as evidences of socialist urban planning. And interestingly enough, these are urban elements that have major conflict with the idea of market-oriented economy, and at the moment, the morphology of the city is already changing. Then, the question is, will Pyongyang become one of post-socialist cities, having them as precedents to the city, or will it have its own development path that is unprecedented? EBOOK VERSION

Suprarural (ENG ED.)

Architectural Atlas of Rural Protocols of the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas Ciro Najle, Lluís Ortega The Atlas of rural protocols in the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas is structured along eight systems of organization: transport and infrastructure, land subdivision, agricultural production, water management, storage and maintenance, human habitation, animal management, land management. Each of these systems possesses a number of organizational types, material components, normative relationships, and spectra of performance, which become available through a manual of instructions for a Suprarural architectural environment. The research is based on a realistic-overriding ethics towards design that operates by abstracting and intensifying unexplored territorial phenomena. Buy Spanish edition EBOOK EDITION

Tiny Taxonomy

Individual Plants in Landscape Architecture Rosetta S. Elkin Tiny Taxonomy offers a visually engaging collection of images and texts drawn from a series of contemporary garden installations, which highlight the role of individual plants in landscape architecture. Tiny Taxonomy showcases species that are in cultivation or in profusion, but rarely purposefully planted. A grouping of plants is categorized by common traits derived from an evolution towards feature miniaturization, generating another form of classification. Due to the diminutive size of their features, these plants are often over-looked and therefore tend to be under specified. It seems that as the world around us gains complexity and intricacy, our biological world is tending towards monotony. Tiny Taxonomy considers smallness a design opportunity, offering innumerable microcosmic considerations of the leaf form, flower structure, and physical habitat of individual plants. EBOOK EDITION

Ellen Kooi Above Rotterdam

One Glass Tower by Wiel Arets & Nine Situations by Katrien Van den Brande John Bezold Colliding modern architecture, theatrically informed photography, and surreal poetry and prose; this carefully-crafted collaboration between artist Ellen Kooi, architect Wiel Arets, and artist Katrien Van den Brande documents five sets of highly-staged visual ‘scenarios’, and nine textual ‘situations’, of numerous imaginary guests, who simultaneously inhabit the B’ Tower–a high-rise in the center of Rotterdam. Each scenario was dreamt up, created, and captured on camera by Kooi; each of Van den Brande’s situations were written while staying at the tower, in the guise of the many other, ‘unseen’, temporary tower guests. EBOOK VERSION

KERB 23

Digital Landscapes Georgia Aldous, Sophia Horomidis, Rebecca Pike & Robert Williamson Originating as a RMIT university pamphlet in 1989 for the purpose of discussing landscape architecture. The journal now boasts a diverse selection of contributors, focusing on contemporary landscape architecture themes. The journal is edited by a group of students, who select the articles pertinent of each edition. Kerb seeks to set the agenda for designers and architects, establishing a platform for new ideas and contemporary design theory. Kerb Journal is now featured on university reading lists around the world. It is the identification and manipulation of matter that has the potential to inform, change, align, and drive a physical interaction and making with the world. Kerb 23 examines ways in which ‘Digital Landscape’ discourse can be applied to landscape architecture. Through exploring Simulation, Fabrication, Augmentation and emerging theories of ‘Digital Ecologies’ we can navigate new horizons of what is made ‘possible’ within and through the realm of digital landscapes in regards to unlocking, transforming, storing and distributing the way we might reveal, uncover, and generate alternative modes of translation and interaction. EBOOK VERSION

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