Spatial Infrastructure

Essays on Architectural Thinking as a Form of Knowledge José Aragüez José Aragüez's second book revolves around a new concept in architecture, spatial infrastructure, that operates both as a design tool capable of projecting architectural thinking forward, and as an analytical category that shifts our understanding of the history of the field and contemporary production. Taken together, the collection of essays presented here investigates some of the most intractable issues pertaining to architectural discourse, while also examining scientific, critical, and cultural dimensions where relevant. Key subjects include a building’s discursive building, engineering patents and spatial disposition in architecture, typological invention and sponge surfaces, “the organic” at the intersection of architecture and philosophy, imageability in the context of an evolving market economy, language vis-à-vis self-determinacy in creative practices, a building’s spatial kernel, and the possibility of architectural metacriticality. Building upon each other to engender a coherent and distinct outlook on twentieth-century and contemporary architecture, these essays put forth a strong argument for architectural thinking that emerges from intimate knowledge of its capacities, as well as an ability to maintain epistemological clarity and integrity when purporting to expand our horizons of understanding. EBOOK VERSION

UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT FOR CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE (ENG ED.)

UFO’s Experiments between Political Activism and the Artistic Avant-garde Beatrice Lampariello, Andrea Anselmo, Boris Hamzeian (eds.) The contemporary context is defined by a unique conjuncture. On one hand, we witness the revival of the Radical Architecture that from the avant-garde experiments of the origins recovers creative processes and iconographic fragments while nullifying the original ideological and political values. On the other hand, we see social protests in defense of fundamental rights of democracy, as in 1968. With these premises, Architecture is now reinvestigating those ephemeral experiments that have endured half a century as new “stone monuments” capable of indicating new perspectives for both research and design. Placing UFO group, one of the authors of those still poorly known “monuments”, at the core of the contemporary debate means investigating their formal and seductive aspects, but also the ideological, political and social values with which objects, installations and happenings have been innervated, transforming them into devices of an architecture nourished by literature, art and political commitment for the foundation of an eloquent and activist project even more radical than the well-known Superstudio and Archizoom. The collaboration between Beatrice Lampariello, an architecture historian specialized in the 1960s and 1970s, and False Mirror Office, a group of historians and designers engaged in the rediscovery of UFO group, lead to a monograph focused on the UFO’s work and an evaluation of their legacy relative to contemporary architecture. The monograph is composed of four sections: 1) History, a first-ever study of UFO by False Mirror Office via analysis of all archival and bibliographic sources, as well as a series of interviews with UFO members and a collection of its writings (published and unpublished), for the first time translated into English; 2) Context, composed of essays by historians and architectural theorists (Beatrice Lampariello, Simon Sadler, Alessandra Acocella, Giovanni Galli, Jacopo Galimberti) intended to place UFO’s work in the context of the avant-garde that influenced its work, from the experience of Florentine Radical Architecture to Umberto Eco’s theories on semiotics and the American experiences between Pop Art, Video Art and Happening; 3) Legacy, articulated through graphic contribution and essays by young designers, as False Mirror Office, Parasite 2.0, Point Supreme, Jimenez Lai, Andrew Kovacs, Adam Nathaniel Furman, Traumnovelle, (ab)Normal and Peter Behrbohm, to investigate UFO’s legacy relative to the contemporary revival of the most distinguishing creative processes and obsessions that shaped the so-called Radical Architecture; 4) Anthology the first complete collection of UFO writings for the first time available in English. Granted by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Buy Italian edition EBOOK VERSION

Blue

Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions Malkit Shoshan UN peace missions operate today inside hundreds of cities across the world. Planned and engineered with the logic of security regimes, using single-purpose infrastructure, and dependent on extractive global supply chains, these ‘Islands of Blue’ generate a massive carbon footprint, profoundly impact local livelihoods, and leave mostly waste after decommissioning. Focusing on two missions and four cities in Liberia and Mali, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions charts and uncovers spatial realities produced by the UN in mission areas. It traces the complex processes and mechanisms behind the conduct of missions and the various spatial tools and architectural technologies that make them possible. BLUE questions the international, spatial, and cultural structures we put in place to support communities across the world in times of crisis. At the intersection of architecture, urban planning, international relations and activism, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions seeks not only to change UN missions but also to open up and expand the operative realm of architecture. It combines research and projects involving policymakers, military engineers and officers, anthropologists, local inhabitants, activists, rebels, diplomats and ministers, architects and planners. BLUE offers examples of how entrenched institutional bureaucracies can be confronted by using more inclusive models of engagement, and it shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence. The book is part of FAST’s ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work. It builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. With Contributions of Mausa Ag Asarid, Pieter Chilson, Isabel Carrasco, Erella Grassiani, Arnon Grunberg, Marcel Rot, Debra Solomon, Joel van der Beek, Laura van Santen, Rob de Vos, Marion de Vos, Leah Zamore. EBOOK VERSION

Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens

Ioanna Theocharopoulou Athens’ most distinctive building type, polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. “Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens” questions this stereotype, reassessing the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type: the polykatoikía (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikía as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the postwar urban economy, triggering the city’s social mid-twentieth-century transformation. The interiors of the polykatoikía apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikía interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives and the shape of the postwar city. This revised edition of Theocharopoulou’s study draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon. Written in the light of Greece’s recent financial crisis, the book’s updated Postscript considers the role polykatoikía might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city. Foreword by Kenneth Frampton

Foundations of Urban Design

Marcel Smets The book is structured into twenty-nine essays, each dedicated to a pair of urbanistic concepts. Discussing historical and contemporary, interpretive and designerly approaches to urbanity, the notions composing the 29 pairs relate dialectically, as theses-and-antitheses. Still, we are warned, ‘the presented antagonisms are not a priori in opposition, but rather complementary. “With this book, Marcel Smets not only offers an inspiring vocabulary to describe the spatial features of the city but, above all, a unique dictionnaire raisonné to discuss past and future interventions in our largest man-made artefact.” Tom Avermaete, Chair for the History and Theory of Urban Design, ETH Zürich. Smets’ fundaments may be likened to emblems. A Renaissance genre, proliferating before the Industrial Age, emblems are complex knowledge repositories, their meaning emerging at the intersection – but not as ‘sum’ of – a title, a text and an image. The paired titles, the written analysis, alternating abstractions and historic references, together with Heinrich Altenmüller’s pairs of essentialized computer graphics, neither completely ‘explain’, nor exhaust each other’s suggestive capacities. Some of the pairs, such as Ribbon – Cluster, Ladder – Star, Fabric – Citadel, wide-span the history of the city, denoting quasi ubiquitous morphologies. Others, such as Monument – Icon, Street – Road, Hole – Void, address (the long) modernity, the second notion illuminating more recent developments. Flow – Shelter, Castle – Palace, tackle the city scale proper, while others, such as Network – Polynuclear Territory, Island – Archipelago, address the scale of the region, characterizing recent planning approaches, such as Landscape Urbanism or Infrastructure Urbanism. Finally, Destination – Morphology, Creator – Curator, Growth – Improvement, question processes and paradigms of making.” Cristina Purcar, Planning Perspectives, 2021, 36,6, “Marcel Smets’ lexicon of fundamentals offers an operative conceptual framework for urban design, a series of spatial elements, systems and approaches that become a starter tool-kit for the contemporary urbanist. It is an important contribution to the idea of a reflective yet pragmatic form of urbanism that maps the existing urban condition and at the same time rewrites it as a series of spatial figures for a possible or even desired urbanity”. Els Verbakel, UNESCO Chair in Urban Design and Conservation Studies, BEZALEL Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem “Yet, the most intriguing and fascinating in the structure of this book remains the fact that urban design is not portrayed as a transitory phase in the approach of urbanism, but as the core of the urbanistic discipline as an urban science.” Ed Taverne, Emeritus Professor, History of Architecture, RU Groningen Illustrations by Heinrich Altenmüller EBOOK VERSION

Cornell Journal of Architecture 12

After Val Warke, Hallie Black, Todd Petrie It seems that—with increased urgency—we are more frequently finding ourselves grasping for an "after," especially as we face futures with apprehension. "After" exists at different scales of time and context: there’s after an instant, after a day, after an era. And each after contains both a conclusion and a beginning. This volume of the Cornell Journal of Architecture looks at a vast range of the "afters" we architects find ourselves confronting, and offers not just warnings, but solutions; not just reminders, but projections. Because, while we humans are obliged to stand squarely within the present, as architects we’re equally obliged to cast our work into a hereafter that can be only loosely understood. And then we can hope that, in the aftermath, our intentions bear some resemblance to their consequences. With Contributions of A vast selection of architects, artists, designers, historians, and geoscientists, including Peter van Assche, James Biber, Olalekan Jeyifous, Michael Murphy with Jha D Williams, Felix Heisel, Jacques Ferrier, Common Accounts, Meredith Miller and T+E+A+M, and many others, representing an extensive diversity of approaches for identifying techniques of transcending pasts and presents.

GSD Platform 2

Felipe Correa Platform 2 provides a sampling of the most salient research and design explorations undertaken at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) during the 2008–2009 academic year. Organized thematically, the publication identiﬁes underlying congruencies among studio work, theses, research, lectures, conferences, and writings to unfold some of the many critical ideas and interests currently being explored in the School. Ranging in scope from detailed material fabrication to large-scale territorial and infrastructural strategies, the work spans a broad and diverse set of geographies and scenarios. In documenting this work, the publication archives and disseminates the rich intellectual momentum of the GSD.

Retrospecta 44

Saba Salkefard, Christopher Pin, Bobby Chun, Claudia Ansorena Retrospecta catalogs activity at the Yale School of Architecture. Each volume is a snapshot of evolving architectural and graphic design trends. The book demarcates events such as lectures, publication releases, and outstanding circumstances that have uniquely impacted the academic, social, and political environment at the school. Volume 44 covers the activities of the Yale School of Architecture 2020-21 academic year. This year’s vicissitudes of curricular hybridity forced upon us a necessary reorientation of the medium we communicate and design with, and a renegotiation of the space we inhabit while we work. Our methods and our material worlds were pushed through the lens of remoteness, and so too were the ideas that followed. As a publication that stands to react and reflect upon the beats of the previous year, two moves were absolutely critical in order to address this fulcrum of architectural education: a virtual extension of Retrospecta, increasing the autonomy and authorship of the student work in a year where projects were developed through incredibly diverse and idiosyncratic means; and a smaller book size that emphasizes a reappraisal of the physical act of reading, a more critical format lending to internal cross-content dialogue, and an heightened importance of the book as an artifact. This volume of Retrospecta sets out to reclaim the solace of solitude by renewing a lost intimacy between story, student, and school, revisiting the reader’s relationship to the book as a physical object.

Reimagining the Civic

Luis Callejas, Fernanda Canales, Stella Betts Reimagining the Civic investigates and describes the design challenges of three studios led by the three Kahn Visiting Assistant Professors at Yale School of Architecture: architect Fernanda Canales, of Mexico City, assisted by David Turturo, critic in architecture; Luis Callejas and Charlotte Hansson, directors of LCLA office, based in Oslo and Medellín, assisted by Marta Caldeira lecturer; and Stella Betts, of LEVENBETTS, in New York. Each studio focused on different environments and social contexts while scrutinizing age-old questions pertinent to the architectural discipline’s understanding of civic space.

Post DomestiCity + Open City

Open City Re-thinking the post-Industrial City / Re-pensando la ciudad postindustrial Almudena Ribot, Enrique Espinosa, Diego García-Setién, Begoña de Abajo, Gaizka Altuna / CoLaboratorio Currently 55% of the world's population lives in cities, predictably reaching 70% in 2050. Cities are organisms in continuous transformation: growth, change, but also shrinking or collapse. Open City explores and speculates from contemporaneity about the future of the post-industrial city, where industrial archipelagoes (S), frames (XL) and obsolete or deprogrammed singularities (M/L) represent critical contexts but also opportunities for a new Open City. Open Systems have been the research focus of CoLab. This book collects some relevant and engagingly contemporary insights, including contributions by Andrés Jaque, Juan Herreros, Philipp Oswalt, Momojo Kaijima (Atelier Bow-Wow), Langarita Navarro or Cedric Price, among others. Post DomestiCity: Re-thinking urban obsolescence Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot / CoLaboratorio PostDomestiCity is an inquiry and speculative exercise into the conditions of obsolescence in the post-industrial city, from a contemporary perspective. Working with three paradigmatic cases that were conceived from industrial logics—the Packard plant in Detroit, Lima’s PREVI neighbourhood, and theGrand’Mare complex in Rouen—, we explore alternative ways of reusing, reprogramming, and redensifying the built environment as alternatives to demolition. Relevant voices in the field of architecture share their approaches and visions of the future for the pre-existing city, helping us imagine post-domesticity in the current climate crisis and socio-technological context. PostDomestiCity, along with Open Building 2.0 (CoLab, 2018) and OpenCity (Actar, 2020), forms another trilogy by CoLaboratorio, approaching and understanding architecture as a resilient support with enormous transformative potential over time. With Contributions of Anne Lacaton, Marina Otero, Ippolito Pestellini, Duplex Architects, Lacol, Antonio Vázquez de Castro, Carmen Espegel, Luis Takahashi, Lys Villalba, O.F. architects, DABG, Patricia Lucas, Ramón Araujo, Paulo Dam, Renato Manrique, CoLaboratorio (Diego García-Setién, Enrique Espinosa, Begoña de Abajo, Almudena Ribot).

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