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,
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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
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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
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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
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
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UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT PER L’ARCHITETTURA CONTEMPORANEA (IT 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
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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
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Climax Change!
How architecture must transform in the age of ecological emergency
Pedro Gadanho
Climax Change! offers an overview of how the current environmental emergency will impact the practice of architecture. At a crossroads in which the construction sector and built environment produce nearly 40% of greenhouse gases accountable for global warming, architects are just starting to acknowledge their complicity in an impending disaster.
In need of a paradigm shift similar to that of the Modern Movement, architecture desperately requires clear guidelines and targets so as to operate its inevitable transformation towards an ecologically-friendly design logic. From historical analyses of ecocide or the environmental avant-gardes, to topics such as decarbonization, degrowth, the Great Transition and the aspirations of Green New Deals, this book features ten essays around today's climate change debates, bringing them home to architectural thinking.
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Supertight
Models for Living and Making Culture in Dense Urban Environments
Graham Crist & John Doyle
The rapidly growing large cities of Asia are critical to understanding our future footprint. Asian cities provide insights into new ways of being densely urbanised. The by-product of this unprecedented metropolitan convergence will be the emergence of new urbanisms and new architectures, new models for living and making culture.
The Supertight refers to the small, intense, robust and hyper-condensed spaces that emerge as a by-product of extreme levels of urban density. Tightness arises as consequence of density, but tightness itself is not density. Tightness is a series of social, economic and cultural practices that have developed in cities as a response to the rapid growth and consolidation of cities. While architectural models of density have been heavily explored, this project investigates the culture of tightness that has emerged in Asian cities over the past thirty years, and the
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Out of the Ordinary
The Work of John Ronan Architects
John Ronan
In previous decades, architectural production was constrained by the limits of technology; architects pushed on the boundaries imposed by technology and it gave them common purpose. Those limits are gone. Over the preceding two decades it has been demonstrated that with enough technology (and money) anything is possible. What does an architect do when anything is possible?
This is the question which confronts architects today, who now operate within a professional landscape where all is possible, but little has meaning. The “anything goes” mentality which currently prevails has resulted in innumerable self-referential “object” buildings which engage only with their architect’s ego, often resulting in an urban fabric of autonomous formal objects comprised of arbitrarily-applied design tropes which celebrate formal invention for its own sake. But what do architects leave society once the novelty of form has worn off?
In this architectural age of arbitrary shape-making, devoid
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Ambiguous Territory
Architecture, Landscape and the Postnatural
Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon, Kathy Velikov (eds.)
The writers and designers in this collection are among the most thoughtful architects, artists, landscape architects, and theorists working today. The editors organized these essays and works of art and design around three territories: the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic. Each cluster of essays is further framed by forewords and afterwords, which draw individual points of view into a larger articulation of what an ambiguous territory might be and how it operates. Ambiguous Territory emerged from a symposium and exhibition held at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017, and exhibitions at the University of Virginia and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018, and at Ithaca College in 2019. The conversations that arise in this book are inquisitive and critically engaged. They pressure assumptions we routinely make about what constitutes meaningful and principled perspectives in architecture,
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Logics of Evolution for the Contemporary Contexts
Master in Integrated Architectural Design 2020/21
Ricardo Devesa and Marta Bugés (eds.)
This collection of instalments compiles the works of the students of the Master in Integrated Architectural Design during the academic year 2020/21. The program objectives are to promote innovative architectural design integrated with the wide range of skills on technical and cultural knowledge that contemporary architecture demands.
The course is organized in 5 logics: environmental, social, digital, tectonic and cultural through which the students explore how architectural design can adapt to the context in which they operate. Their systems of methods and principles are expanded to face challenges such as climate change, technological disruptions, economic and geopolitical collapses, and demographic movements, among other major global changes.
With Contributions of
Kiel Moe, Interboro, Ciro Najle, bosch.capdeferro, Marina Otero, T.J. Demos, Ferran Vizoso, Javier García-Germán, Alex Ivancic, Pau Bajet, María Langarita, Carles Baiges, Cristina Gamboa, Anna Font, Edouard Cabay, David Tàpies, Francisco Cifuentes, Arturo Franco,
Outdoor Domesticity (ENG ED.)
On the Relationships between Trees, Architecture, and Inhabitants
Ricardo Devesa
The first part of this publication is to present a collection of exemplary five houses that evinced explicit relationships with preexisting trees. The five twentieth century projects are: La Casa (B. Rudofsky, 1969), Cottage Caesar (M. Breuer, 1951), Ville La Roche (Le Corbusier & P. Jeanneret, 1923), Villa Pepa (J. Navarro Baldeweg, 1994) and Hexenhaus (A. & P. Smithson, 1984-2002). The second part of the book is to contribute with three theoretical concerns for the contemporary project, those ones which are established in the process, with respect to time, place and outdoor domesticity in modern western housing.
One of these theoretical contributions establishes that any house located on a site finds a significant place in conjunction with the preexisting trees. The second contribution describes the effects in terms of time, in addition to spatial considerations, which trees can contribute to the architectural project.
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Systems Upgrade
(Re)fabricating Tectonic Prototypes
Leire Asensio Villoria & David Mah
Systems Upgrade offers a design research approach that leverages the embodied knowledge latent within the material legacies of design history for direct applicability in creative practice. This long-spanning research into the construction of links between the deep study of precedent and future practice has been advanced through a simultaneous engagement with digital archeology and the new tools of creative practice. Invested in the belief of a need to open design and its material legacies to a multiverse, this research has yielded a collection of methods, techniques and novel outcomes grounded in history yet openly speculative in outlook.
Systems Upgrade extensively illustrates an engagement with some of the most notable works of the Austrian American sculptor and designer Erwin Hauer. This book highlights several important phases of this specific design research project to provide a detailed view of how a series of bridges between analysis
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Green Obsession
Trees Towards Cities, Humans Towards Forests
Stefano Boeri Architetti
Cities have contributed for centuries to the promotion of some of humanity’s greatest ideas, we must now urgently include them as among the principal players in the environmental debate and at the forefront of any policy tackling climate change. Nevertheless, even today one of the most significant technologies capable of absorbing CO2 and restoring our environment is photosynthesis. Planting trees, in addition to protecting, restoring and managing existing natural areas and biodiversity, together with de-carbonization, renewable energies, digitalization, smart mobility and the circular economy could be the set of tools necessary to counter the climate crisis.
Today the effects of the Anthropocene age are ever more visible, changing our environment and affecting every species that lives within it. Green Obsession offers a path to be taken, a hard but still necessary paradigm shift –even for architecture and urbanism– that aims to give a voice to this much needed ecological transition. This book aims to unveil the processes and the complexity involved in the search for a new kind of
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Designing Resilience in Asia
Thinking the Unpredictable, Designing with Uncertainty
Oscar Carracedo García-Villalba et al.
This publication, leaded by the National University of Singapore School of Design and Environment, presents the research by design results of four consecutive years in four different countries (China, Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand) responding to the current challenge of building more resilient cities in front of impacts of climate change, such as coastal and river flooding, water and air pollution, water scarcity, urban heat island effect, aquifer depletion or subsidence. The book brings together the work of highly-reputed academics, professionals and scholars from 20 universities worldwide with the aim of serving as a guide for mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change, and more specifically to reinstating the environmental qualities of our cities through carbon-neutral or carbon net-positive urban designs and plans.
The book demonstrates ‘seven inspirations’ – seven ideas –and 80 design interventions that contribute to the debate on
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Vacant Spaces NY
Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, MOS
This project began by walking around our neighborhood noticing empty storefronts. Once we saw them, they were everywhere. They followed us, appearing quietly throughout New York City. Many with no signage, no “for rent,” no “coming soon.” Usually empty, sometimes dusty, sometimes with brown paper covering the glass. Now, vacancy has only increased. In the densest city in the United States. During a housing crisis. Throughout a pandemic. The quantity of vacant spaces is anyone’s best guess. It’s only partially documented. They hide in plain sight.
Vacant Spaces NY is organized from large to small, general to specific. It begins by looking at vacancy within the United States and continues down to each Manhattan neighborhood, where we zoom into specific vacant spaces, where we have provided as case studies that imagine some possibilities for transforming current vacant spaces into housing or social services. There is also a
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Behavioral Formation.
Volatile Design Processes and the Emergence of a Strange Specificity
Roland Snooks
Emergent processes of formation create intensive, volatile, intricate, complex phenomena. These processes have come to define our contemporary understanding of the nature of becoming, which stands in contrast to established notions of architectural design and authorship.
The design research of Roland Snooks is a speculation on the relationship between emergent processes of formation and architectural design intention, and explores the strange specificity of an architecture that is drawn out of this interaction. This research operates within a larger architectural and cultural concern for complex systems and their role in algorithmic design processes.
The original methodological territory carved out from this larger milieu is the articulation of a design process in which architectural intention is embedded within emergent processes.
Roland Snooks is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT.
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Golconde
The Introduction of Modernism in India
Pankaj Vir Gupta, Christine Mueller, Cyrus Samii
Golconde is an astonishing architectural accomplishment. With technical finesse and extraordinary craft, it offers a living testament to the original modernist credo - architecture as the manifest union of technology, aesthetics, and social reform. Here exists an undiluted view of a wholly triumphant tropical Modernism, built during the tumultuous years of the second world war.
Mira Nakashima, George Nakashima’s daughter, contributes with a new 800 word introduction essay for this new edition.
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Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things
Archi-Tectonics
Winka Dubbeldam/ Archi-Tectonics
A manual for a non-standard approach to research and design in architecture. For close to a century, modernism was the norm, presented to culturally aware citizens as the expression of modern life. It arrived hand in hand with medical advances, mass standardization, and a shared ideal of what the ease and speed of the modern lifestyle could offer. Only in the early years of the 21st century did our widespread allegiance begin to shift away from modernism and towards a new social realm. The digital revolution introduced online societies, niche cultures, and digital design. Digital manufacturing facilitated opportunities of surface patterning and the fabrication of one-off special building components, removing the constraints of standardization in the construction industry and celebrating the experimental. Testing designs through prototypes allows for a much more informed decision-making process. The focus is on precise, rigorous research and development, rather than the usual representational
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Lewerentz Fragments
Jonathan Foote, Hansjörg Göritz, Matthew Hall, Nathan Matteson
Through new essays, recently discovered archival material, photography, and drawings, the publication Lewerentz Fragments explores the architect’s body of work spanning three-quarters of the twentieth century. Comprising writings from all the major scholars on Lewerentz’ work, along with several new voices, this publication offers new insight into the context surrounding this architect’s work. Rather than focusing on a single thesis, the book offers a diversity of insight from multiple cultural and professional perspectives. In addition, previously unpublished translations of interviews and dialogs among the architect and his contemporaries offer a voice to the ‘silent architect’ altering the traditional interpretations of the work and digging past the surface of what might be considered his philosophy of building. Rather than serving as an introduction to the architect’s work, this volume provides detailed fragments as a deep and diverse dive into one of the most mysterious
X!? 2010-2020 TEN YEARS OODA (ENG ED.)
João Rapagão
OODA is a Portuguese architecture collective, now celebrating 10 years of practice. Based in Porto with experience gained internationally in notable offices, such as OMA-Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid Architects, the collective aims to expand internationally, namely New York, São Paulo and Shanghai.
With a wide range of work (whether idea or built, new or rehabilitation) and participation in international competitions in Africa, America, Asia, Middle East and Europe, their work includes partnerships with Kengo Kuma and the Pritzker prize Souto de Moura.
More than presenting and dissecting the work of the practice, this book is an adventure in technical and artistic exchanges. It is divided into three parts; the appraisal of the first ten years, hence the X mark - X - in the title of the book and also predictions for the next ten; a presentation of case studies and projects according to six criteria and knowledge approaches –
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Residentialism
A Suburban Archipelago
Lina Malfona
This book tells the story of the making of a community, which occurred hand-in-hand with the building of an archipelago of suburban residences, which reaffirm the value of the countryside within a technological and digital society. From 2010 onwards, Lina Malfona together with Petrini Architects and thanks to the support of the structural engineer Tommaso Malfona has been designing and building this archipelago of villas in the countryside north of Rome, which is also where their home-studio is located. This experimental residence has become a point of reference for the design of an innovative housing typology, an ‘ultra-residential’ villa as a place to experience private as well as public life.
With Contributions of
Pippo Ciorra (introduction); Kenneth Frampton, Stan Allen (blurbs)
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Portals
Portals: Pedagogy, Practice, and Architecture’s Future Imaginary (RISD 2020)
Amy Catania Kulper, Kevin Crouse, Jennifer Liese (eds.)
This book documents an interregnum, a pause, a moment of self-reflection in which architects, imperiled by the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the forms of inequity that this global crisis surfaced, confronted remote architectural pedagogy and practice as a critical threshold for the future imaginary of the discipline. The renowned group of architects, educators, theorists, critics, and curators assembled in this volume provide critical insights into the future of architectural pedagogy, utilizing the thesis and design research projects of the RISD Architecture class of 2020 as exemplars of the transformations currently taking place in the field. This volume considers the forms that architectural activism and advocacy take in a moment when architects are critically reexamining the conventions of their practice and the question of which constituencies they serve.
With Contributions of
RISD B.Arch & M.Arch students with
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States of Entanglement
Data in the Irish Landscape
ANNEX / Sven Anderson, Alan Butler, David Capener, Donal Lally, Clare Lyster & Fiona McDermott
As our everyday lives become increasingly entangled with data technologies, the book addresses the utopian fantasy that surrounds the Cloud, as transcending physical presence or resourcing. By bringing the physical infrastructure around data, and its impact on the environment under the spotlight, it hopes to reframe how we understand data production and highlight the myth that information technologies are hidden and without major material manifestations on the landscape. The context for the book is Ireland which has a significant historical role in the evolution of global communications and data infrastructure. In 1866, the world's first transatlantic telegraph cable landed on the West coast of Ireland. In 1901, the inventor of the radio Guglielmo Marconi transmitted some of the world's first wireless radio messages from Ireland across the Atlantic Ocean to Newfoundland. Today,
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Pan-Arab Modernism 1968-2018
The History of Architectural Practice in The Middle East
Ricardo Camacho, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Sara Saragoça Soares
Following two publications in 2016 and 2017 on Modern Architecture of Kuwait, this new publication expands on the growing interest for the building and urban practice exchange between territories throughout the Middle Eastern region which remains at the threshold of architectural theory, postcolonial critique, and visual cultures studies. This book format exposes relevant and critical material on the individual's education and experiences as well as the architecture practice and influence in the Middle East.
Using Kuwait as a case study and Pan Arab Modernism as a lens, this book comes to fill two voids in the literature on Middle Eastern architecture: one is in practice and the other is in history. The current practice of architecture in Kuwait, the Gulf and the larger Middle East, is typically a-contextual and lacking any understanding of the local context.
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Another Kind
A Survey of the Possible City
David Leventhal, Lee Polisano, PLP Architecture
The last decade has seen an accelerated evolution of typologies. Today's cities are marked by a growing digital presence and the emergence of a global sharing economy; shared spaces have increased our social and sustainable focus, drastically altered our understanding of ownership and responsibility, and redefined our experience of public and private domains. Such changes have in turn rewritten the demands on architecture, the role of the designer, and the power of the profession.
In Another Kind, PLP Architecture presents ten projects as case studies to examine the emergence of a new typological fluidity. These projects serve as anchors to survey the cultural landscape of the past ten years. Projects can no longer be traditionally codified and instead present themselves as assemblages of exterior influences, new cultural interests, and 21st century social habits. In Another Kind, projects are intertwined with essays
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Responsive Environments
An Interdisciplinary Manifesto on Design, Technology and the Human Experience
Allen Sayegh, Stefano Andreani, Matteo Kalchschmidt
What makes an environment "responsive"? This book provides some key concepts in the form of a design manifesto. Critically articulated from the perspective of leading experts, scholars and professionals, the ideas explored are unpacked through speculative urban visions and design projects at different timeframes, contexts and scales ranging from interactive artifacts to augmented cities. Drawing from a multiyear research at the REAL Lab at Harvard GSD and design work by INVIVIA and other innovative practices, the book unfolds the experiential facets of our technologically-mediated relationship with space in the fields of architecture and urbanism, design and art.
With the collaboration of
the Harvard REAL Lab.
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MIAS Architects at Centre Pompidou
Josep Miàs
Tracing through the pieces being published, you sense that Josep Mias is essentially a man who takes strips and edges and develops them into meshes, and then maybe combs, and then maybe honeycombs with a conspicuously boyish delight in making the sketch, the linear diagram, the scale model and the built building.
Underlying the apparently fearless is a sense of what can fly, swing, lurch, lean or rest: in other words the composite that makes something possible to be as it is in space.
With contributions of Peter Cook
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Geometric Taxonomy (ENG ED.)
Carlos Ferrater, OAB
Geometric Taxonomy gets closer to the geometries of Carlos Ferrater and OAB that are present in timeless architecture, those that are explicit in the great treatises, those that dazzled us with "the correct and magnificent wise play of forms under the light", the elemental forms that inspired modernity a hundred years ago. __ Ignacio Paricio
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RCR at Centre Pompidou
Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramon Vilalta
Recognition of RCR's work in France with an exhibition including a selection of 7 projects, ranging from the first competition they won at the Punta Aldea Lighthouse to the last works still to be built in Paris, Île Seguin and the Vide Pavilion. The journey through the space was made through a sensory experience -with sound, lighting and video-, extended with the artistic collaboration of the duo CaboSanRoque. The trajectory of RCR Arquitectes has been especially recognized in France: named Chevalier and Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres 2008 and 2014 respectively, the Académie d'Architecture awarded the Gold Medal to Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem and Ramon Vilalta the 2015, two years before receiving the Pritzker Prize.
There is no doubt that the buildings produced by RCR Arquitectes encourage experience: to cross, to land, to take the time, to observe, to feel. Everyone at their
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Mobile Theater (ENG ED.)
Architectural Counterculture on Stage
Fernando Quesada
Architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (1942) graduated in 1968 at Madrid School of Architecture. During the academic year 1970-1971 he travelled from Madrid to London thanks to a grant of the British Council to complete his postgraduate training at the Architectural Association. There he designed a building called Mobile Theater. It was a theatrical device composed of several 8 x 2,5 meters trucks carefully designed, which contained all the building elements needed to shape a space for the performing arts or other collective uses. The assembly time —estimated for four workers— was six and a half hours. This project was internationally showed and published between 1971 and 1975, but was never built.
This book intends to release this project, largely ignored by canonical historiography, and to culturally place it in time and space: the agitated city of London in 1971. After the convulsions of May 1968,
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China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanism
Jeffrey Johnson, Cressica Brazier, Tat Lam
Superblocks are the basic unit of China's urban development, but they are also spatial instruments with social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications, operating between the scales of architecture and the city. These redefined "Megablocks" then become laboratories for the consequences, opportunities, and potential global proliferation of Chinese urban models, reconsidered through the filters of ecology, economics, and ethics.
In The Guide to Megablock Urbanisms, the Columbia GSAPP China Lab aims to document a wider conversation on the policies and collective experiences of large-scale development and advances of China's urban future.
With the contributions of
Amale Andraos, David Bray, Eric Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Renee Y. Chow, Edward Denison, Duanfang Lu, Joris Fach, John Fitzgerald, Steven Holl, Michiel Hulshof, Jun Jiang, Clover Lee, Zhongjie Lin, Matthew Niederhauser, Xuefei Ren, Daan Roggeveen, André Schmidt, Grahame Shane, Jian Shi, Jiaming Zhu, Jianfei Zhu
"The megablock, a self-contained spatial unit, can become an
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Pure Space (ENG ED.)
Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements
Elisa Silva
The publication is not intended to serve only as a catalogue, guide, or manual on how to produce public space in spontaneous settlements. Rather, it goes beyond the aims of an index of best practices. It is intended, instead, as an empirical base for a critical and theoretical engagement with the problematic of development, social inclusion, public investment, (in)formal settlement, civil society and the public sphere. The publication achieves its final function at this third level, by providing a compelling argument to expand the agency of architects and urban designers and creatively find ways of justifying, financing, and building public spaces in communities —spaces that have a catalytic effectiveness in achieving significant urban and social transformation.
Graham Foundation Grant and CAF Development Bank of Latin America
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