Catalyst: Conditions

An interdisciplinary monograph, this volume examines the work of multiple disciplines, many peoples and a multitude of approaches, all operating under the umbrella of one institution. Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh This volume examines one year of research and pedagogy at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, engaged in the conditions of the built environment, relative to 3 states of Flux, Stasis and Crisis. The questions asked are: What is the impact of design on the forces that shape our contemporary reality? To what extent do contingencies of time and place impact our practice, and in return how effective is our response in re-shaping the same contingencies?

Design Engineering

Adams Kara Taylor Collaborating with leading architects like Zaha Hadid, Foreign Office Architects, Norman Foster, and Will Alsop, Adams Kara Taylor have become the engineers of choice for projects that redefine the conventional boundaries between structural engineering and architecture. Their holistic approach expands structural thinking to include technical solutions, aesthetics, and advanced research to adapt both diverse architectures and design methodologies. Organized into a series of synthetic themes - complexity, trans-scalarity, modelling, process - this book presents a cross-section of diverse projects and methods as a manual for new relations between radical engineering and design. Contributors include Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Simon Allford, Patrik Schumacher, Tim Anstey, Mohsen Mostafavi, and Michael Speaks.

GSD Platform 4

Students from the GSD provide a framework to build upon

Author: Eric Howeler Beyond a design school, the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is an immersive environment dense atmosphere saturated with creative and intellectual activity. Platform 4 represents a selective sampling of agendas cultivated at the GSD during the last academic year, revealing a diverse mixture of projects, research, and events. Organized as a searchable database, this publication documents both site and situation at the GSDâit is an institutional index. While Platform 4 records research trajectories from the past year, it also has the capacity to set agendas for future work. By framing a set of issues and topics, Platform 4 focuses attention towards particular areas of interest, allowing individual work to build on and contribute to a larger body of disciplinary knowledge. In that sense, the themes within this book become projective, they provide frameworks for future inquiry.

GSD Platform 5

A year of research through studio work, theses, lectures, exhibitions and events at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Mariana Ibañez Platform 5 considers the expanded boundaries of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. It features not only the selections of the work produced at the GSD during the 2011-2012 academic year, but also the potential of that work to address broader questions and inform global initiatives.

Catalyst: Lineages & Trajectories

Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh This volume examines one year of research and teaching at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. At a time when fundamentals of design education are being questioned and studios are being used as laboratories for everything ranging from design-build and fabrication practices to community service, material research, and multidisciplinary incubators, this volume of Catalyst positions the current pedagogy at the University of Virginia School of Architecture within an extended history of the school through an archival project that traces the lineages of its faculty. It considers design pedagogy through the lens of the formative experiences and agendas of the faculties of the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, examining their role in shaping the school's direction, independent of top-down mandates and institutional agendas.

Biodigital Architecture & Genetics

Escritos / Writings Alberto T. Estévez Special selection of Alberto T. Estévez writings, after 15 years since the creation of the Genetic Architectures Research Group and of the Biodigital Architecture Master, in ESARQ (UIC Barcelona), year 2000. This book is about the interdisciplinary of Architecture, Design, Art, Science, Technology, Theory, Practice, Biology, Digital, Genetics... With writings about the application of genetics to architecture, about the first time that geneticists work for architects, towards frontiers of architecture, working with digital tools and organic forms, with the new bio & digital techniques in architecture and design

(IN)formal LA

Victor J. Jones Often portrayed as a confluence of cars and movies, this book traces another course to uncover Los Angeles' primal sources of creation - land and opportunity. Within the endless sprawl there reside flurries of uncodified spatial configurations that no high-definition map or satellite image can accurately capture nor present. (IN)formal LA explores a range of unique spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of politics in Los Angeles. While this book articulates growing skepticism in current design discourse and education, it also provides a spatial awareness that is culturally rooted, socially responsive and vitally connected to the city. Composed of essays, photos, projects and interviews, (IN)formal LA embraces the quirky, celebrates the wide and embellishes the close range to expose the complex social organizations within this contemporary urban network. (IN)formal LA serves as both a textbook for classes in art and architecture, urban design, planning and theory in addition to responding to the increasing interest in the study of Los Angeles by scholars in other fields. The book provides an extended overview of the range and variety of urban issues that are critical to understanding present-day Los Angeles.

The Car in 2035

Mobility Planning for the near Future. An artful and refreshingly multifaceted view of the future of mobility Kati Rubinyi The Car in 2035: Mobility Planning for the Near Future focuses on the car, the street, and public policy in Southern California. In this collection of essays and images, the car is viewed as both a challenge and benefit to our neighborhoods, cities, and suburbs. Despite rising fuel prices, the automobile will be Southern California's primary form of transportation in 2035 because the region's population will continue to be dispersed widely, and the car offers the best access to the area's tremendous diversity of economic, social, recreational, and cultural opportunities. But the infrastructure will need to accommodate a heterogeneous mix of modes of transportation, including more cars on the road than today.

The Cornell Journal of Architecture 8

RE Cornell AAP An essential collection of illustrated texts regarding the reiterative in architecture and design today. This issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture is about the now, the new, and the next in architecture, while simultaneously acknowledging that every possible future is intrinsically linked to the existent, to the present and its attendant past. At the heart of issue 8: RE is the understanding that the creative act itself is reiterative; that in rethinking, recombining, reshuffling, recycling, and reimagining aspects of the world around us, we produce work that both belongs to the current moment and establishes new future trajectories. The texts reflect the interconnected strands of technology, history, theory, and intuition that necessarily reinforce each other in architectural education and practice today: issues of reuse and recycling; of feedback loops and regression; of dialogue, criticism, and correspondence; and of the role that changing technologies have in restructuring the way we think, see, and remember.

The Cornell Journal of Architecture 9

Mathematics: From the Idea to the Uncertain. Exploring the dynamic and non-linear relationship between mathematics and architecture Cornell AAP While mathematics in architecture has historically referenced notions of order, proportion, and ideal form, the discipline of mathematics itself has shifted to encompass uncertainty, incompleteness, relativity, and chaos towards a situation in which truth itself is elusive. This move stems in part from an engagement with real phenomena, in which natural systems were shown to behave non-linearly and unpredictably. In architecture, while computational developments enabling dynamic and variable modeling have been subsumed into our culture of design and production, a new kind of idealism has emerged. Formally prolific and inherently multiplicitous, this book proposes algorithmic truth and statistical outcomes over predetermined objectives; it signifies a retreat away from reality and back towards abstraction and simulation in the smooth space of possibility. Meanwhile, the consequences of uncertainty have pervaded our culture to its core. Recovering from the initial high of fractal and random geometrical proficiency, architecture is just beginning to re-embrace the underlying issues embedded within this contemporary mathematics: uncertainty, unpredict-ability, chance, recursion, wildness, and informality. Contributors: Cecil Balmond, Mario Carpo, Lily Chi Adrian Lewis, Dana Cupkova Kevin Pratt, Tom Fecht, Francois Roche, Jenny Sabin, Anthony Vidler and others.

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Students from the GSD provide a framework to build upon