The Caring City

Health, Economy, and Environment Izaskun Chinchilla Moreno This book invites us to rethink architectural and urban models, prioritizing not so much the technical, formal and abstract knowledge sought by urban planners, as the public and civic dimension of citizens’ experience when they try to care for themselves, for each other or for the environment. After decades of industrialization, our cities, in their physical and governmental dimensions, are productivity-oriented places. Cities are, nonetheless, a more hostile environment for non-productive activities: being able to choose where to sit and rest, use a public toilet, drink clean water without paying or breathe unpolluted air. The privilege that productive activities have enjoyed and those who exercise them has led to the denial of the various biological and subjective characteristics of its inhabitants and the multidimensional character of the city, becoming a cultural principle and a political practice. The Caring City opens up an extensive field of alternatives that can present a uniting vision of the economy, the environment and the health of a diverse community. The translation of this work has had the participation of Acción Cultural Española, AC/E.

Design for Biocities

Global Contest to Rethink Our Habitat from the Body to the City. Vicente Guallart, Laia Piferré The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) calls its 9th Advanced Architecture Contest as a global reflection to rethink human settlements at a time when our natural environments and the human habitats are more clearly intertwined. The planet is immersed in a fast process of urbanization while we are simultaneously facing a serious climate crisis that must be addressed. We look to the model of Biocities, cities that follow the principles of ecological principles in order to promote life and biodiversity, to provide us with potential design solutions. How can we reimagine our cities as Biocities, capable of creating an ecologically attuned and reciprocal relationship with nature? This year’s competition challenges students and professionals from all over the world to propose how to design urban spaces, cities, buildings, objects, or solutions of any scale, directed towards the transition to Biocities. These responses should explore how we might adapt to the changing relations between human and natural systems in a moment of climate crisis. Cities have always reflected the civilizations that built them, and at this critical moment where climate change is transforming our living environment, we must rethink our position of domination in relation to all that surrounds us. To respond to rising concerns of the bursting of planetary boundaries, which regulate the stability and resilience of the earth system as it currently stands, we urge the need to simultaneously look at nature based as well as advanced technological solutions to reimagine resilient cities of the future. The contest encourages participants to propose a design at any scale, anywhere in the world, that reflects different cultural, environmental, economic, or social conditions. EBOOK VERSION

Merging City and Nature (ENG ED.)

30 Commitments to Combat Climate Change Batlleiroig "We have chosen the motto “Merging city and nature” to encompass our improvement goals in each one of the actions we develop. We work with three different disciplines: Urban Planning, Landscape and Architecture, attempting to be extremely specialized in each one, without disregarding the unavoidable transversality required today to develop any intervention. Climate emergency is currently our main transversality, that which must guide all our actions." Batlleiroig Buy Spanish Edition EBOOK VERSION

Fusionando Ciudad y Naturaleza (SP ED.)

30 compromisos para combatir el cambio climático Batlleiroig We have chosen the motto “Merging city and nature” to encompass our improvement goals in each one of the actions we develop. We work with three different disciplines: Urban Planning, Landscape and Architecture, attempting to be extremely specialized in each one, without disregarding the unavoidable transversality required today to develop any intervention. Climate emergency is currently our main transversality, that which must guide all our actions. Buy English Edition EBOOK VERSION

A Book on Making a Petite École

Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, MOS As part of the 2019 Biennale d'architecture et de paysage in Versailles, France, MOS constructed Petite École, a small, open-air pavilion to house educational workshops for children. It is a place for looking and making, and for making and looking, constructed with 688 aluminum pieces modeled, flattened, cut, folded, prefabricated, shipped, and then assembled onsite. It is made to be taken down and reassembled elsewhere. It is designed to be easily understood, made of simple building elements: a long, low roof with columns and stacked beams holding it up. Undertaken during various design workshops, single page design exercises written by architects were assembled into a large book and given to children. A Book on Making a Petite École features an expanded collection of these exercises. Each exercise includes playful illustrations of its steps, starting a conversation about how designers look at, think about, teach, and imagine the foundations of design. Alongside these, the design process of the pavilion is included, as its own design exercise, from colorful illustrations of each step of the pavilion’s construction, to actual construction photographs and photographs of the completed pavilion being occupied. A Book on Making a Petite École considers basic questions of design pedagogy, abstraction, accessibility, experimentation, and equity, while considering and reconsidering architecture. With Contributions of: Djamel Klouche, Jean-Christophe Quinton, Sebastián Adamo & Marcelo Faiden, Yussef Agbo-Ola, Sir David Adjaye, Xavi Laida Aguirre, Stan Allen, Benjamin Aranda, Assemble, Tatiana Bilbao, Bureau Spectacular, Marlon Blackwell, Galo Canizares & Stephanie Sang Delgado, Sean Canty, Jan De Vylder, Ambra Fabi & Kersten Geers, fala, First Office, Antón García-Abril & Débora Mesa, Go Hasegawa, Steven Holl & Dimitra Tsachrelia, Wonne Ickx/PRODUCTORA, Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu, Sam Jacob, Andrés Jaque, Johnston Marklee, Ladi’Sasha Jones, l’AUC, LEFT Architects, Toshiko Mori, Catherine Mosbach, Umberto Napolitano, Daniel Norell & Einar Rodhe, Lütjens Padmanabhan, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Mónica Ponce de León, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Bolle Tham & Martin Videgård, UrbanLab, Welcome Projects, WORKac with Ayah Wood

Sharing Tokyo

Artifice and the Social World Mohsen Mostafavi and Kayoko Ota (eds.) The book questions how “artifice” and the “social world” can be mutually and constructively integrated so that the contemporary urban space can be shared by all. Taking the example of Tokyo, it takes up the two major traits in urban transformation – the large-scale development model on the one hand, and the small-scale model of neighborhood development or preservation on the other – and instead seeks alternative ideas and new strategies. A variety of innovative practices are presented by a diverse group of contributors including renowned scholars, architects, urbanists, and photographers from Japan and the US, and the research team at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. While the discourses and architectural works presented deal with the specificity of Tokyo, they were carefully selected to formulate together a collection of insights, new perspectives, and speculative experiments in urbanism and architecture that can also be used in other contexts. With Contributions of: Mustafa K. Abadan, Shin Aiba, Homi K. Bhabha, Kenta Hasegawa, Kozo Kadowaki, Hiroto Kobayashi, Masami Kobayashi, Japan Research Initiative Team at Harvard GSD, Jouji Kurumado, Seiji M. Lippit, Mitsuyoshi Miyazaki, Mayumi Mori, Mohsen Mostafavi, Jo Nagasaka, Erika Nakagawa, Don O’keefe, Yoshihiko Oshima, Kayoko Ota, Jordan Sand, Yoshihiko Sone, Tsubame Architects, Riken Yamamoto, Shun Yoshie

AA Book 2022: On Location

Ryan Dillon, Anna Lisa Reynolds (eds.) The AA Book 2022: On Location highlights the agendas and practices that have intersected both physically and metaphorically throughout the Architectural Association (AA) during the 2021–22 academic year. The publication features hundreds of projects by students from every unit and programme within the school, which together document the plurality of agendas explored, interests developed, approaches tested and questions posed and addressed by our community this year. With Contributions of Students and staff of the Architectural Association (AA).

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Plug-ins

Ezio Manzini, Albert Fuster, Roger Paez This book showcases some of the projects developed by Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab, a research institute that investigates the role of design in the material and social construction of our habitats, focusing on spatiality, temporality, interactions, meaning, citizen engagement and social impact. Projects by students, professors and researchers, in collaboration with multiple partners including the public administration, NGOs, industry and academy, articulate the concept of design as plug-ins as the core idea of this book. This notion of plug-ins results from a renewed approach to how design can be a key agent in city making. Given that the city is a system of relationships, design for city making means understanding, reinforcing and articulating this network. We posit plug-ins as situated design outcomes that aim to enrich the complex system of the city and expand its potentialities. This book’s central argument is that plug-ins are a solid yet supple conceptual framework for rethinking design’s agency in the city – the main aim of Elisava’s Design for City Making Research Lab. With Contributions of Ruedi Baur, Julia Benini, Josep Bohigas, David Bravo, Adrià Carbonell, Tomás Díez, Danae Esparza, Ramon Faura, Tona Monjo, Salvador Rueda, Oscar Tomico, Lluís Torrens, Manuela Valtchanova EBOOK VERSION

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