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.

GSD Platform 8

Zaneta Hong Platform 8 catalogs a curated selection of work generated in the past year at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Alongside final products of design education, Platform 8 places particular emphasis on collecting and documenting the people and artefacts that shape research-driven design practices. Here, design is presented both as process and as a final product. The book's indexical structure, punctuated with a collection of portraits, presents a comprehensive picture of the school. Platform 8 shows the intention, direction, and passion seen and experienced every day at the GSD. One of the 50 Best Books for 2016 by the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Designers)

Caza: 2011-2015

The inaugural monograph of the Brooklyn-based design studio CAZA, celebrating the first five years of the firm. CAZA: 2011-15, the inaugural monograph of the Brooklyn-based design studio CAZA, celebrates the first five years of the firm, and includes photographs, drawings, building descriptions, essays, and conversations that relate to CAZA's global architecture and design practice. The book opens with a photo essay by world-renowned photographer Iwan Baan, who documented CAZA's first internationally acclaimed project, the 100 Walls Church, in Cebu City, Philippines. With offices in Brooklyn, New York; BogotÃ¡, Colombia; Lima, Peru; and Manila, Philippines, CAZA has emerged as a risk-taking, forward-thinking studio working on a mixture of residential, civic, and corporate projects that are shaping the built environment in cities around the world. The launch of CAZA: 2011 will coincide with the opening of La Biennale di Venezia in May 2016, with a special installation at Palazzo Mora in Venice, which will subsequently travel to various cities around the world.

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.

Chiharu Shiota (SP ED.)

Las líneas de la mano Chiharu Shiota Casa Asia presents the contents of the first exhibition by Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972) in Barcelona, showing installations integrated in a unique project at its headquarters. Shiota’s installations produce their own spaces, where hundreds of invisible threads that bond us to things can be seen. In these domestic scenarios she proposes, threads become bridges between a bride’s dress and the absent subject, a piano, suitcases and a mirror. In her work, these threads are veins with tears, fear for abyss, life and death; threads that are plots of particular and universal stories, interweaving like the inverted roots of a tree, just like a rhizome through multiple branches that hold up the relationship between she and the world. EBOOK VERSION

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.

Verb Connection (ENG. ED.)

Albert Ferré The third issue of Verb boogazine is about the changing status of the city in the electronic era. Connection looks at the impact of electronic technology on new forms of urban reality, which are generated by new phenomena that affect all aspects of space and the experience of living in these new urbanisms. Faced with an increased blurring of the distinctions between the physical and the informational dimension of cities, we explore the relation between virtual connections - the effect of digital networks on the spaces and uses of the city - and the persistent role of architecture in creating physical connections between people, programs and uses. Featured works and texts: OMA, Atelier Bow-Wow, AUDC, PLOT. Featuring the Palast der Republik story in Berlin, Chip City by Shinobu Hashimoto and Rients Dijkstra, and Sim City, which contrasts the real city (the product of virtual processes) with virtual cities (created by real people, via computer-based simulations).

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.

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Experiments in Architectural Agency: Croatia 1990-2010