
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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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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Unnatural
Territorial Relations between City and Nature
Nicola Valentino Canessa
The theme is increasingly important mini European cities where the urban transformations must be able to bring in nature, but it is also very interesting the relationship of new urban contexts those generated by new metropolitan areas that allow you to connect areas that were previously considered a "back" to the city.
The book is divided into two parts the first more theoretical with the story of these new territorial opportunities, the second part instead is more graphic that linked feeling of some projects developed within the courses of the thesis.