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

Agenda: JDS Architects

Can We Sustain Our Ability to Crisis? Julien De Smedt, Jesse Seegers

AGENDA is a catalog of 365 days, like a diary or journal: a collective narrative, personal and subjective. It documents the work and thinking of JDS Architects over a specific year marked by crisis, beginning on September 15th, 2008, the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. The form of the book exploits the double meaning of its title, presenting the absurdities of day-to-day architectural practice while also staking our intent. Rather than a definitive direction, our agenda is a definitive attitude - of eagerness, enthusiasm, and optimism, of criticality and concern, of fun and inquiry. It is a directive, a motivation to act, at times without clear knowledge of where our agenda will lead. "Change," the buzzword of the last U.S. presidential campaign, is the order of the day, and the task of AGENDA is to explore what kind of change will be needed if architects are to assume a political and social agency in this new landscape. Bringing together diverse forms of content, AGENDA is a product of vigilant observation, introspection, and engagement with outside thinkers and collaborators - artists, curators, politicians, authors, economists, journalists, developers, educators, and architects. EBOOK VERSION

Yona Friedman / Pro Domo ( ENG ED. )

Yona Friedman In 1958 Yona Friedman published his first manifesto on "mobile architecture" and founded GEAM (Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile), which proposed different strategies and actions geared to the adaptation of architectural creation to modern user requirements for social and physical mobility. In this initial manifesto, Friedman claims that architectural knowledge cannot be the exclusive property of professionals and specialists, and suggests writing guides or manuals, which explain topics related to architecture and urban planning in clear and simple terms. Pro Domo is "a collection of fragments of scattered topics," a set of "milestones" selected by the author himself, a personal selection chosen "according to sentimental value", spanning 50 years of production. Spanish edition EBOOK VERSION

Suspended City: L’Aquila after the Earthquake

Michele Nastasi The photographs taken by Michele Nastasi of L’Aquila after the earthquake lay the city implacably bare as a place where it has become impossible to live: a deserted and surreal landscape, choked with structures shoring up the buildings and fixing the city in a state of suspension without any time limit The photographs, accompanied by drawings and essays written by Giorgio Agamben and Maddalena d’Alfonso, conjure up images of surgery: prostheses, braces and splints stabilize the body of the city, but while the operations have been a technical success, the patient shows no signs of life. The picture of L’Aquila presented here is not just a record of the catastrophe of the earthquake and its aftermath, but an image that has become exemplary of some decisive changes underway in the whole of European and Western culture. What is brought into focus in this book is the shift in political paradigms and the nature of government action, the febrile relationship of culture with history and the need to restore the experience of the community and urban living to its central role as a forge of identity.

SKYCAR CITY

Winy Maas, Grace La From the 2006 Marcus Prize Studio at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Winy Maas of MVDRV and Grace La of UWM present the work of twelve students who explored the relationship between infrastructure, architecture, and urban form. This highly investigative studio pushed the physical and conceptual limits of given definitions of city, circulation, and program. Tested in two scenarios (one real in Tianjin, China and the other purely hypothetical), the studio severed vehicular traffic flow from its traditional two-dimensional plane and then forecast the potentials of a new, hyper-volumetric city where given urban activity inflate to fully occupy all three-dimensions. Populated by 5 million inhabitants and rising 800 meters high, this new 'sky car city' is buzzing with the flows of goods and people, as they navigate the airways in several models of newly designed air-born vehicles.

City Sense

Shaping our environment with real-time data / 4th Advanced Architecture Contest The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia IAAC This publication compiles the winning and the finalist entries of the City Sense competition, organized by the Institute of Advanced Architecture. The competition was open to architects, engineers, planners, designers and artists who wanted to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable. See Preview on issuu

Self-Sufficient Habitat

5th Advanced Architecture Contest The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia IAAC Material Intelligence, simulations, sensors, actuators, as well as the bio-mimetic and digital manufacturing innovations provide revolutionary ideas on growth, adaptability, repair, sensitivity, replication and energy savings in architecture. Should we continue constructing rigid and fixed structures? Or can our habitats begin to think? EBOOK VERSION

SELF SUFFICIENT HOUSING

1st Advanced Architecture Contest Vicente Guallart Created for students and professionals to inspire changes in how new buildings are designed and constructed, the Self-Sufficient competition challenged participants to design a self-sufficient and ecologically oriented dwelling. In the early 20th century, the concept of “dwelling” was defined as a “machine for living”, a reference to a new way of understanding the construction of inhabitable spaces that characterized the Machine Age. Today, a century later, we face the challenge of constructing a sustainable or self-sufficient dwelling, a living organism that interacts with its environment, exchanging resources, and which functions as an entirely independent entity. The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) has collected a selection of entries presented during its 1st Advanced Architecture Contest: Self-Sufficient Housing.

Select Gift