Beyond Patronage

Reconsidering Models of Practice Joyce Hwang, Martha Bohm, Gabrielle Printz This book explores contemporary architectural practices and design agendas that are being shaped or enabled by news forms of "patronage" Essays, projects, and interviews will examine emerging forms of sponsorship, new forms of connectivity –technological or social– that produce innovative modes of collaboration, and strategies for cultivating relationships that allow us to rethink typical hierarchies between those in power and those in service. One could argue that the profession of architecture has traditionally been characterized by patronage. Throughout the twentieth century, private clients have enabled architects to develop and realize their most significant work. Today, the landscape of patronage is shifting. While the role of private clients is still central to the survival of the profession, an increasing number of architects and design practitioners are actively cultivating partnerships with not-for-profits, granting agencies, educational institutions, and other public organizations. How are these broader relationships redefining the role of patronage in architecture? Have our current economic, ecological, and political climates provoked architecture to confront its own priorities and assumptions? How can the practice of architecture be shaped not only through relationships of power, but also through strategies of empowerment? How are emerging practitioners today grappling with issues of inclusion and exclusion in the field? EBOOK VERSION

[Re] Stitch Tampa

Shannon Basset [Re] Stitch Tampa, an international design ideas competition, challenged designers to consider innovative design ideas and strategies, employing connective urban landscapes and ecological infrastructure as an underlying framework for the post-war coastal city. The competition brief posited that this framework might operate as a catalyst for the economic redevelopment, as well as the landscape and urban recovery of Tampa, Florida. These strategies might physically reconnect a fragmented city, its urban fabric punctured with urban vacancies and significantly impacted by foreclosures during the financial crash, as well as earlier suburban expansion and urban renewal agendas. The Obama administration's announcement in 2010 of 1.25 billion dollars of federal stimulus package monies earmarked for a high-speed rail connection between Orlando and Tampa, to be the first in the United States, was the initial catalyst for the large scale infrastructural re-thinking of the city. While the high-speed rail was not implemented in the end, squashed by tea party politics, this infrastructural initiative still prompted the momentum and enthusiasm for an infrastructural re-thinking of the city. How might this new urban framework begin to choreograph the flows and movements through the city, to and from its river running through Tampa, virtually hidden and undetected? The charge of an urban design master plan, initially focused around what was designated as the high-speed rail station, was the impetus for the re-thinking and recalibration of infrastructure through ecologies for the city. This publication critically examines these issues through essays, in addition to showcasing selected competition entries, the results of [re] Stitch Tampa. The discourse distills the design schemes and examines their possibilities as viable alternative urban models for development, which reconsider the relationship of landscape to the city and urban redevelopment. It also proposes how the schemes might operate as transformative urban design agents and as the underlying connective tissue which [re] stitch the city to the river and bring the river and its ecologies into the city. EBOOK EDITION

Bracket 3: At Extremes

Lola Sheppard & Maya Przybylski This publication includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive? Bracket [at extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions? EBOOK VERSION

MCHAP The Americas 1

The Americas Fabrizio Gallanti (ed.) MCHAP: The Americas brings together leading architects and academics in a dialogue exploring the current state of architecture throughout the Americas and explores themes raised by the seven finalist projects (designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Steven Holl Architects, OMA/ LMN – Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, Smiljan Radic, Cristián Undurraga, Rafael Iglesia) from the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize cycle recognizing the best built work in the Amercas from 2000 through 2013. As part of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MHCAP) program, established by Dean Wiel Arets at IIT Architecture Chicago, recognizing the best built work in the Americas from 2000 through 2013, MCHAP is publishing MCHAP BOOK ONE, as well as publications by the authors of MCHAP 2000-2008 winner, Álvaro Siza, the MCHAP 2009-2013 winner, Herzog & de Meuron, and the MCHAP.emerge 2000-2013 winner, Pezo von Ellrichshausen. Within this editorial program, MCHAP BOOK ONE will critically explore themes raised by the jury process and the selected finalists projects (designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Steven Holl Architects, OMA/ LMN – Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, Smiljan Radic, Cristián Undurraga, Rafael Iglesia) including the two inaugural winners: Iberé Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, designed by Álvaro Siza, the 1111 Lincoln Road mixed use parking structure in Miami Beach, Florida, USA, designed by Herzog & de Meuron. MCHAP BOOK ONE uses the seven finalist projects to identify broad, thematic reflections on the American condition. In that frame, “American” necessarily refers to the entirety of the American continents, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. With contributions of Dean Wiel Arets, Kenneth Frampton, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Dominique Perrault, Sarah Whiting, Fabrizio Gallanti, Pedro Alonso, Luis Castañeda, Felipe Correa, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Horacio Torrent, Molly Wright Steenson, Mimi Zeiger. EBOOK VERSION

Thermodynamic Interactions

Architectural Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres Javier Garcia-German An Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres. Energy and sustainability is a complex topic that needs to address simultaneously core disciplinary values and ideas that come from other fields of knowledge. The interconnection between the environment and its climate, its built structures and the human body requires overlying architecture with other disciplines such as meteorology, thermodynamics or physiology to engage them in a holistic way. The book is structured in three blocks—Territorial Atmospheres, Material Atmospheres and Physiological Atmospheres—which present three distinct and successive realms at which thermodynamic exchanges are taking place. Territorial Atmospheres deals with the thermodynamic interaction between the environment and its built structures. Material Atmospheres focuses on the interaction between a building and the climate it generates. And lastly, Physiological Atmospheres centers on the interaction between indoor ambient and the physiologi-cal and psychological effects on human beings. Each of the blocks has a coeditor: Silvia Benedito for Territorial Atmospheres; Iñaki Ábalos for Material Atmospheres and Philippe Rahm for Physiological Atmospheres, who will work together with the editor defining the context of the book. EBOOK EDITION

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

XXL-XS

New Directions in Ecological Design Mitchell Joachim , Mike Silver XXL-XS represents the emerging discipline of ecological design by assembling a wide range of innovators with diverse interests. Geo-engineering, synthetic biology, construction site co-robotics, low-energy fabrication, up-cycling waste, minimally invasive design, living materials, and molecular self-assembly are just a few of the important advances explored in the book. At one extreme are massive public works, at the other, micro to nano-sized interventions that can have equally profound impacts on our world. From terraforming to bio-manufacturing, a whole new generation of designers is proposing unique ways of confronting the difficult challenges ahead. In this way design becomes a totality of relationships that affects all disciplines, which can no-longer be thought of as self-contained fields, each handled separately by narrowly focused specialists. Globalization demands a restructuring of the profession, as we know it. This requires a new breed of generalists who can work across fields and engage research on multiple sites around the globe. Today we need planetary designers versed in the craft of integral design. Our thesis is therefore both global and performative in scope. We need an architecture that is more than just a constellation of bio-picturesque images, digitally generated surface effects, and conventional materials. We seek a holistic architecture that uses the best techniques to connect directly with existing natural systems while creating a renewed ecology that can sustain itself well into the future. Along these lines, many of the projects featured in this book simply abandon the old tropes and construction processes of the past by creating numerous green alternatives that proliferate along unexpected pathways. EBOOK EDITION

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

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