deCoding Asian Urbanism

Farooq Ameen (ed.) deCoding Asian Urbanism is a captivating exploration into innovative architecture and urban interventions reshaping the landscape of Asian cities. The book highlights projects that embrace the rapid growth, cultural richness, and intricate complexities of the contemporary Asian urban fabric. The magnitude and speed of 21st-century urbanization are extraordinary, with projections suggesting that Asia's urban development in the next two decades could surpass the total global urban growth of the past two centuries. As we stand on the brink of this urban revolution, deCoding Asian Urbanism brings together the minds of visionary architects, historians, sociologists, urban designers, and activists from around the world. Their essays offer unique insights into the diverse and multifaceted nature of Asian cities, each an intricate tapestry of history, culture, and aspiration. This enriching journey through the book is accompanied by a multitude of images, analytical diagrams, maps, and captivating photographs. You'll find yourself immersed in the ideas and spirited discussions captured in symposium panels at Harvard University's South Asia Institute. Here, contemporary thinkers and practitioners from various disciplines reveal their innovative design and planning approaches for Asian cities. deCoding Asian Urbanism transcends the boundaries of mere globalization; it delves into the essence of systemic innovation, elevating the Asian city to new heights. The book is thoughtfully organized into three sections: Decoding the City, where the context is set and the urban puzzle begins to unravel; Mediating the City, which unveils strategic approaches to address the complex urban challenges; and Transforming the City, the grand finale showcasing projects that breathe life into urban spaces, infusing them with vitality, renewal, and transformation. With Contributions of Kenneth Frampton, Rahul Mehrotra, Ken Yeang, Farooq Ameen, Saskia Sassen, Edward Glaeser, Diana Balmori, Kongjian Yu, Jonathan D. Solomon, Steven Holl, Weiping Wu, Stephen Kieran, Kashef Chowdhury, Qingyun Ma, Frances Anderton, Kazi Ashraf, Nate Berg, Nondita Correa Mehrotra, Terence Young, Rafael Vinoly, Satoshi Toyoda.

Soil Lab

A Built Experiment Eibhlín Ní Chathasaigh, James Albert Martin, Anne Dorthe Vester, Maria Bruun / SOIL LAB This anthology is a critical reflection on the making of Soil Lab, a project built with a community in North Lawndale, Chicago, and hosted by the Danish Arts Foundation at the 2021 edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The pages give space to a conversation that stretches far outside both the confines of the Soil Lab’s site in North Lawndale and the short duration of the biennial. The book is a meeting place for the voices which contributed to the Soil Lab project, and maps their constellation of disciplines—across architecture, art, anthropology, ecology, craft and community work—and global geographies, including the US, Denmark, Ireland, Puerto Rico and Austria. The story of the project, and the many lives and threads that it brushed up against, is told through histories, criticism, photographic essays, instruction manuals, soil recipes and interviews. With Contributions from Catherine Fennell - anthropologist (US) Emmett Scanlon - architect, writer, curator (Ireland) Sami Akkach - architect and rammed earth specialist (Austria) Traci Wile – architect, educator and community liaison (US) Craig Stevenson – artist and community liaison (US) Calvanita Fipps AKA Nini – artist (US) Anjulie Rao – journalist and critic (US) Ta-Nehisi Coates – writer and journalist (US) Annette Skov – art facilitator and advisor (Denmark) Amara Abdal Figueroa – agroceramist, artist and environmental advocate (Puerto Rico, Kuwait) Will Quam – photographer, writer and brick specialist (US) Ellen Braae – landscape architect (Denmark) Benita Marcussen – photojournalist (Denmark)

Treacherous Transparencies (ENG ED.)

Thoughts and Observations Triggered by a Visit to Farnsworth House Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. The architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day. Published in the context of the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP). Launch of the publication series by the inaugural MCHAP award winners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for their project 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Buy German Edition EBOOK VERSION

Knowing and Unknowing

The lives of Repair Mauro Baracco & Louise Wright with Linda Tegg The exhibition invites you to look anew at a plant community that has been overlooked as a site only for human use, to the extent that there is only 1% now left and to reflect on the ground, what it supports, what is displaced. As presented through our premier cultural institution, La Biennale di Venezia, this exhibition will live on through seed the authors of this investigation have already started to collect and through relationships they are building with research institutes in Europe.

Buildings & Living Things

Garden House Mauro Baracco & Louise Wright with Rory Gardiner This holiday house is conceived as just a little more than a tent: a deck and raised platform are covered by a transparent 'shed'; the interior perimeter 'veranda' is garden space; the soil and natural ground line are maintained and carried through; a low lying site with terrestrial orchids and lillies, flood waters seasonally move through the site unimpeded; similarly the indigenous vegetation has begun to grow inside.

Iaac Bits 10: Learning cities

Collective Intelligence in Urban Design Areti Markopoulou The digital intelligence that is inevitably starting to penetrate every aspect of our previously analogue systems of living, working or social interacting calls for new models of designing our city and opens new territories of experimentation in the processes related to urban design. While the idea of intelligent machines that simulate “cognitive functions” such as “learning” or “problem solving” is not new, its extensive use, in recent years, in the urban design discipline opens up a series of new possibilities – as well as plenty of cultural, ethical or even aesthetic hesitations and risks. How do our cities learn? Can machines design and what? Is crowd intelligence appropriately harvested in our evolutionary and generative design processes? And has our current big data analysis approach reached the limit of human and computational intelligence? Learning Cities explores the “intelligence” applied in the processes and outcomes of designing our urban environments. From a variety of applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning for urban planning to co-creation processes that merge crowd intelligence with digital technologies, Learning Cities highlights that “intelligence” in the built environment should be understood beyond human, object or machinic intelligence alone. Through a variety of contributions from experts in different fields the current IAAC Bits Journal Issue explores novel collective intelligence design processes in which designers, users, the built environment, and digital codes all play a fundamental role in a unique resonance that takes place among them. With Contributions of Areti Markopoulou, Manuel Gausa, Jordi Vivaldi, Benjamin Bratton, John Frazer, Molly Wright Steenson, Stanislas Chaillou, Sarah Williams, Theodora Vardouli, Neil Leach, Angelos Chronis, Jose Sanchez, Mathilde Marengo, Aldo Sollazzo, Aleksandra Sojka, Matias del Campo, Chiara Farinea, Rodrigo Delso, Sandra Maninger, Javier Argota, Cobus Bothma and others. EBOOK VERSION

Wood Urbanism – United States – 40€ shipping cost included in the price

From the Molecular to the Territorial

Daniel Ibañez, Jane Hutton, Kiel Moe

Wood holds unique and timely lessons for urbanization, yet it remains inadequately characterized in architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. From under-considered thermal properties to emerging manufacturing possibilities, from changing forestry regimes to larger carbon cycle dynamics, Wood Urbanism explores the unique material and scalar properties of wood, presenting it as a critical material for design today. It brings into conversation scholars and practitioners who focus on wood from a range of perspectives: from the working forest to the mid-rise building to the basic cell. Drawing from the inherent intelligence and depth of multiple disciplines, this book offers a transcalar perspective on the role of wood in contemporary urbanization: from the imperceptibly small to the confoundingly large. "Design and research are not distinct activities. Rather, meaningful work on one is not possible without deep engagement with the other. Design and research, or design research is a single continuum of praxis." Kiel Moe Visit urbanNext for exclusive on-line content about this book

The Mannerist Mind

An Architecture of Crisis Francisco González de Canales Art critics between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries imprinted a long-standing derogatory meaning to the word “mannerism”. Even though scholars such as John Shearman or Wolfgang Lotz rehabilitated the term to a certain degree during the twentieth century, it is still uncommon nowadays to find the expression “mannerist” used without certain pejorative connotations—connected to everything which is affected and contrived, or characterized by unnecessary gestures and excessive self-references. While the term has barely been revised within the shared vocabulary of architects, the presence of an attitude that may be identified as mannerist is more evident than ever within a significant range of design decisions of the architecture that is produced in Europe today, including practices such as Lutjens Padmanabhan, architekten de vylder vinck taillieu, Ted’A, 6a architects and Office KGDVS, among others. This book provides a contemporary revision of the mannerist attitude for the present, creating a framework to analyze and shed light not only on the work that these practices are carrying out, but also on the less evident filiations and affinities, as well as on their deeper implications. Introduction by Rafael Moneo EBOOK VERSION

Ciudades y Ríos (SP ED.)

aldayjover arquitectura y paisaje Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover, Jesús Arcos, Francisco Mesonero

The architectural culture of Spain in the last 20 years of boom and bust has been an important incubator for a paradigmatic shift of vision in the profession, a process in which the architecture of Iñaki Alday and Margarita Jover, with their firm aldayjover architecture and landscape, has played a pioneering role. Taken as a whole, aldayjover's work demonstrates the importance of understanding architecture in all its facets, from building design to landscape and territorial planning, as a unified cultural and a technical discipline that is capable of addressing complex problems in holistic terms. During the years of the icon builders, the cultural dimension of architecture was seen chiefly as a question of individual creative expression, of a personal poetics or sensibility, which was invested in the built object as if it were a work of art. aldayjover's role, in contrast, is comparable in certain respects to those contemporary artists who seek to disengage the creative process from its focus on the objecthood of art, and seek, in its place, to engage more directly with the vital substance of life and experience. aldayjover see architecture's cultural dimension as a question that arises from the problem itself, and whose solution is found there as well. They discover the hitherto unconscious narrative histories of the site or the landscape, the hidden currents of its cultural formation, and bring them to the surface in new configurations. In their work, the continuity of architecture's cultural dimension does not exclusively pass through the architect as an individual creator. Rather, they are highly-informed, thoroughly prepared and perceptive facilitators, like a wizards or a sage, if you will, who transform knowledge into action. And this, I think, is how architecture can once again prove its worth as a discipline capable of introducing positive changes in everyday life. David Cohn North American critic of architecture specializing in Spain.

With contributions of Eduardo Arroyo, David Cohn, Luis Francisco Esplá, Elisabeth K. Meyer, Bruno de Meulder, Xavier Monteys, Javier Monclús, Kelly Shannon, Sueanne Ware

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Geospaces

Continuities Between Humans, Spaces, and the Earth Alper Derinboğaz Architectural history is a fragment of the long evolution of forms of habitat. The shape of the lands and the way we inhabit them are at the root of all architectural endeavours. However, our established conception of architecture is based on a hierarchy between nature and culture. Modernity and its break from the vernacular has led to a crisis of connections which we are experiencing the effects of. To move towards an architecture more in tune with earth, we need to think in continuities, looking at the emergence of natural forms, the history of human inhabitation and the future of fabrication technologies. What if we see buildings as iterations of nature rather than artificial objects? This book is an extended visual essay of ideas, images, drawings and projects that follows the work of Alper Derinbogaz over the past decade, framing an approach based on empathy with earth. Exploring architecture through the lens of evolution, Geospaces traces relationships between topography, geology, genetics, ecologies, and construction technologies, arguing that a hybrid approach to making will shape our future habitats. With Contributions of: Bahar Türkay, Di̇lek Öztürk, Blaine Brownell, Edipcan Yıldız, Enise Burcu Derinboğaz, Furkan Temir, Laura Pedata, Loris Rossi, Nicola Cherubini, Rana Irmak Aksoy, Simona Finessi, Sinan Logie Foreword by Luca Molinari With essay by Graham Harman EBOOK VERSION

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From the Molecular to the Territorial