GSD Platform 7

Leire Asensio Villoria A selection from a year’s design speculations, events, and other activities at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The Harvard Graduate School of Design prides itself on the wide scope of its global aspirations, collaborations, and projects. As a School, they are deeply interested in the conditions giving rise to new topics that benefit from the design imagination of our students and faculty across a range of fields and practices. This approach is not so much new as it is intentional, forming a deliberate cornerstone of our mission and pedagogy. They wish for their work to be transformative in multiple locations and in richly varied geographies, societies, economies, cultures, and political circumstances. The projects presented in this book all play their part in taking up this planetary imperative.

Reflections on Light

Coordination: Isabel Valle Designed by: Folch ‘Reflections on light’ gathers a series of conversations with designers, architects and artists who work with and think about light every day. Behind any object, especially those concerned with light, there is a clear intention to attempt to improve the quality of life of the user and take care of the space in which the light is found. Light allows us to see our surroundings; as such, looking after light is essential, and it is precisely this that is at the heart of this project. These interviews focus on the people behind the objects, concentrating on their creative vision and background from which their ideas are born; the importance of the beauty of well-made objects, and how the objects affect our perception of life.

Analytic Models in Architecture

Emmanuel Petit Analytic Models in Architecture documents Yale School of Architecture student work from the undergraduate studio course “The Analytic Model: Descriptive and Interpretive Systems in Architecture,” taught by Emmanuel Petit from 2005 to 2014. The projects are organized to a set of ten conceptual categories that emphasize varying strategies of formal analysis: Aggregation, Cinematics, Condensation, Diagrammatics, DNA, Fluid Interlocking, Fragmentation, Morphology, Seriality, and Thickened 2-D. Five critical essays focus on particular aspects of analysis in architecture: Anna Bokov about the Soviet avant-garde, Matthew Claudel about agency as the crucial qualifier, Kyle Dugdale draws an analogy to Homeric analysis, exposing the web of deceit that underlies the ostensibly dispassionate analytic exercise, John McMorrough asks what constitutes architectural analysis after close reading is over, and Emmanuel Petit reviews the different ideologies that concepts of analysis have occupied in architectural theory throughout modernity.

The Metapolis Dictionary (ENG ED.)

City, technology and society in the information age Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Muller, Federico Soriano, Fernando Porras, José Morales In the format of a selective dictionary of cross-referenced terms, Metapolis identifies a new architectural will within the contemporary social and cultural panorama. It contributes to a global vision of the emerging new architectural action that participates in advanced cultureâ and visual art disciplines and technology. The book speaks of an architecture inscribed in the information society and influenced by the new technologies, the new economy, environmental concerns and individual interests. The diversity of authors and works is invaluable for the generational intersections in theory discourse. Featuring Manuel Gausa, Vicente Guallart, Willy Muller, Federico Soriano, José Morales, Fernando Porras, Iñaki Ãbalos y Juan Herreros, José Alfonso Ballesteros, Xavier Costa, Enric Ruiz-Geli, Alejandro Zaera Polo. Buy Spanish Edition

A New Urban Metabolism

J.Acebillo, Alessandro Martinelli The growing urbanization of the planet, visible in the fact that by the middle of this century some 70% percent of the population will live in cities, situates the urban question as a key issue for global sustainability. Many of the causes generating the huge environmental crises, climate change for instance, have their rationale in the metabolic inefficiency of our cities. Greater metabolic efficiency contributes to the energy rationalization of urban system and also contributes to greater urban competitiveness. Urban metabolic analysis demonstrates efficiency that small and medium-sized cities can have in the new neo-tertiary context, and could be used as a test to previously evaluate the functional and ecological consequences of future urban transformations.

A Peripheral Moment

Experiments in Architectural Agency: Croatia 1990-2010

Ivan Rupnik A comprehensive account of the recent architectural scene in Croatia, this book is an account of the highly productive decade of architectural experimentation in Croatia lodged between the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and their slow integration into the EU. Ivan Rupnik guides the reader through the emergence of this bizarre and fascinating architectural scene on the very edge of united Europe, utilizing Ljubo Karaman's theory of the periphery as a distinct space of artistic production from that of the center or province, Manfredo Tafuri's concept of architectural experimentation, as well contemporary notions of agency. The account is framed using a variety of different lenses, including the observations of this moment by renowned writers, through the atmosphere of the period as defined by Croatia's complex post-socialist/postwar identity and the subsequent positioning of the architectural profession vis-a-vis that context, the practices that emerged, and through a series of discussions with some of the peripheral moment's primary agent provocateurs: 3LHD, njiric , Randic - Turato, and STUDIO UP.

Candide 4

Journal for Architectural Knowledge Axel Sowa Candide is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to exploring the culture of knowledge specific to architecture. It is released twice a year in English and German. Each issue of Candide is made up of five distinct sections. This frame- work responds to the diversity of architectural knowledge being produced, while challenging authors from all disciplines to test a variety of genres in order to write about and represent architecture. “Essay” provides a forum for discussion of architectural knowledge, including both fundamental research into and speculative arguments on its nature. “Analysis” allows for in-depth examination of built form: how can the knowledge embodied in buildings be retrospectively extracted and creatively re-used? “Project” is directed at architects who see design as a theoretical tool: how can a specific design proposal become a model of thought? “Encounters” gives access to the personal knowledge of renowned, unjustly forgotten, or entirely unknown protagonists of architecture. “Fiction” reflects the editors’ conviction that sometimes the imaginary may reveal more about architectural knowledge than science.

Candide 5

A periodic journey of architectural knowledge Axel Sowa, Susanne Schindler Candide is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to exploring the culture of knowledge specific to architecture. In this fifth issue of Candide, rather than one Essay, you will find six articles on the notion of architectural knowledge, and rather than one piece of Fiction, you will be pulled into seven episodes on the elusive quest for architectural greatness. Framed by these shorts, in Analysis, Ian Pepper challenges the reception of Richard Serra by looking at the American artist’s intervention on a nineteenth-century railroad bridge, previously transformed by the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart. In Encounters, Kim Förster employs oral history to unearth stories from behind the scenes of New York’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), focusing on its program of publications in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In Project, Luc Merx reflects on aspects of ruin and figuration in “Rokokorelevanz,” a research and design project ongoing since 2005. With contributions by Mario Carpo, Kim Förster, Pedro Gadanho, Sophie Houdart, Luc Merx, Ian Pepper, and Katherine Romba, among others.

Desert America

Territory of Paradox Ramon Prat The desert is a huge paradox. Beneath its outward appearance of immensity and silence, are the sounds of various experiments, mysteries, and utopias. The setting of outrageous true histories, entertainment oases founded on consumerism and play, and the secret staging of military power, the desert is far from empty. Instead, it is full of activity: unexpected, uninhibited, and excessive. Not subject to barriers and seemingly free of the formal, ideological or cultural ties of global society, the desert cultivates alternate architectures, urbanisms, and built phenomena. Through photographs, essays, and history, this book emerges as an exploration of some of these phenomena and the protagonists that made them possible.

Architecture & Violence

Bechir Kenzari This is a compelling compilation of essays by international architectural theorists on the relationship of violence to space. With the events of September 11th, the London bombings, the Madrid train explosions, and the daily blasts in Baghdad, the question of violence and terrorism is imposing architectural ramifications with renewed urgency. A new sense of architectural awareness has been forged as violence is forcing its place as an architectural datum. With contributions of: Libero Andreotti, Annette Fierro, Elie Haddad, Dorita Hannah, Sarah Treadwell, Andrew Herscher, Bechir Kenzari, Donald Kunze, Nadir Lahiji, William B. Millard. EBOOK VERSION

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Experiments in Architectural Agency: Croatia 1990-2010