theory Archives - Actar Publishers

Climax Change

Pedro GadanhoClimax Change! represents the much-needed overview of how climate change and the current environmental emergency will affect the practice of architecture.

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.

40,00€40,00€

Nature of enclosure

Nature of Enclosure

Jeffrey S. NesbitThis book interrogates the role of architecture and urbanization in a post-pandemic society, to discuss topics from closed forms of capital to the exclusive boundaries of environment and politics.

Jeffrey S. Nesbit From Crystal Palace in 1851 to Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth in 1969, nature became enclosed. Claimed to be a reaction of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Fuller’s geodesic domes became symbols of American counterculture. Yet, from Fuller’s description of Spaceship Earth “sea masters,” the dome seems to prioritize an environment of occupation inside the dome, over those residing outside—a world of civilized control on its interior and wilderness, war, and wasteland on the other side. Overlapped by cultural consumption and politics, planetary imagination stimulates a useful framework for interrogating the human impact on environmental limitations over a technological foreground. The blurry lines between the engineered logic and cultural imagination are continually embedded and influenced by intuition in the cultural practices of capital enclosure. Theories, design practices, and the forms of imagination, including science fiction, open up critical questions on the status of our environment here on Earth. Nature of Enclosure is

30,00€30,00€

MCHAP The Americas Two

MCHAP The Americas 2

Florencia Rodríguez (ed.)New approaches to nature, landscape, and territory were key in the jury’s and architect’s architecture discussions during the second cycle of the MCHAP prize.

Territory & Expeditions Florencia Rodríguez (ed.) The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), directed by Dirk Denison from within the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), promotes an academic award that is given to the best architecture built in the American continent during a specific period. “MCHAP The Americas 2, Territory & Expeditions,” is inspired on the discussions held during the second cycle of the prize, which took place in 2016. Based on the selection of the finalist projects—Weekend House by SPBR, New Campus for the UTEC by Grafton Architects, Pachacamac Museum by Llosa Cortegana Architects, Tower 41 by Alberto Kalach, Star Apartmens by Michael Maltzan Architecture, and Grace Farms by SANAA—, the jury conversations and “discoveries” were very much conditioned by the ideas of nature and its intimate relation to architecture and landscape. This book is part a reader, part a catalogue, part a visual essay/research on these matters. The texts and projects are

40,00€40,00€

Domesticidad a la intemperie- Ricardo Devesa

Domesticidad a la Intemperie

Ricardo DevesaThe relationships of contiguity between houses and trees have existed since ancient times. However, at the end of the 19th century those links became explicit in the design process.

Sobre las relaciones entre árboles, arquitectura y habitantes 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.

32,00€32,00€

Outdoor Domesticity- Ricardo Devesa

Outdoor Domesticity

Ricardo DevesaThe relationships of contiguity between houses and trees have existed since ancient times. However, at the end of the 19th century those links became explicit in the design process.

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.

32,00€32,00€

Green Obsession-Stefano Boeri

Green Obsession

Stefano Boeri ArchitettiGreen Obsession traces the long path that architect Stefano Boeri and his studio - Stefano Boeri Architetti - have followed in the last fifteen years of practice.

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

50,00€50,00€

The Making of Making (architecture)-Josep Miàs

Miàs: The Making of Making (architecture)

Josep MiàsThis catalogue shows the exhibition “The making of making (architecture)” by MIAS architects, exhibited at the Design Museum of Barcelona

Josep Miàs This exhibition analyses the design processes of MIAS studio, founded by Josep Miàs in 2000. The show proposes a route for the design process through seven concepts: Between lines, Everything could happen, Oniric spaces, Assemblage, Architecture to take away, X-RAYS and Ripped Surfaces. These concepts appeal to the most basic actions of the creative and productive process of study. With Contributions of Peter Cook, Izaskun Chinchilla, Bob Sheil, Josep Miàs, Marina Povedano

20,00€20,00€

Strange objects: New Solids and Massive Things

Strange Objects, New Solids and Massive Things

Winka Dubbeldam, Archi-TectonicsThe object as solid, having three dimensions, is not just a different formal trend, but a paradigm shift; a reconceiving of how the architectural object is produced and experienced.

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

47,00€47,00€

Lewerentz Fragments

Lewerentz Fragments

Jonathan Foote, Hansjörg Göritz, Matthew Hall, Nathan MattesonThe publication Lewerentz Fragments introduces new scholarship on the architect’s motivations and compiles new essays from all the major scholars on his work.

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

45,00€45,00€

Portals

Amy Catania Kulper, Kevin Crouse, Jennifer Liese (eds.)Considers the pandemic and the remote pedagogy it occasioned globally in schools of architecture, as a critical threshold to future architectural pedagogy.

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

40,00€40,00€

MIAS Architects at Centre Pompidou

Josep MiàsAs a kid who wanted to be an architect you could either make clay shapes, drag pieces of driftwood into vague boxes - or put together Meccano cages.

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 EBOOK VERSION

40,00€40,00€

Geometric Taxonomy

Ignacio ParicioGeometric Taxonomy gets closer to the geometries of Carlos Ferrater that are present in timeless architecture, the elemental forms that inspired modernity a hundred years ago

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 Spanish edition EBOOK VERSION

35,00€35,00€

Taxonomía Geométrica

Ignacio ParicioGeometric Taxonomy gets closer to the geometries of Carlos Ferrater that are present in timeless architecture, the elemental forms that inspired modernity a hundred years ago

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 English edition EBOOK VERSION

35,00€35,00€

Marcelo Spina, Georgina Huljich/ P-A-T-T-E-R-N-SInterrogating historical, contemporary, and speculative images, the book aims to construct a viable alternative to the icon’s cliché.

& Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich with Constance Vale/ P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S Interrogating historical, contemporary, and — more importantly— speculative images, ‘Mute Icons & Other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture’ aims to construct a viable alternative to the icon’s cliché and exhausted form of communication, positing one that is decidedly introverted and withdrawn. Developing a language and a sensibility for discovering simultaneous, contradictory, and even unexpected readings of architectural form, Marcelo Spina & Georgina Huljich / PATTERNS’s new book Mute Icons, aims to carve out a niche in contemporary culture and history by suggesting that far from being a crowd-pleaser, architecture can persist within society as a constructive cultural and social irritant. No longer concerned with narrative excesses or with the "shock and awe" of sensation making; the mute icon becomes intriguing in its deceptive indifference towards context, perplexing in its unmitigated apathy towards the body. Object

39,00€39,00€

The Threefold Logic of Advanced Architecture

Manuel Gausa, Jordi VivaldiThis work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity.

Conformative, Distributive and Expansive Protocols for an Informational Practice: 1990-2020 Manuel Gausa, Jordi Vivaldi This work proposes a threefold cultural narrative whose interactive and informational logic differs from that of modernity and postmodernity. It positions three different ethos by critically approaching the architectural side of a cultural mutation that has been affecting the Western experimental areas of knowledge and practice since the end of the last century. A transformative process constituted by a constellation of transdisciplinary manifestations, accelerations, turns, shortcuts and clusterizations that by no means can be read under one single epistemological umbrella. In this sense, rather than approaching the practice of architecture focusing on its disciplinary inner specificity, this book approaches the research of experimental architecture focusing on its extra-disciplinary entanglements. It argues that a vast multiplicity of fields of knowledge participates in a cultural endeavour modulated through three protocols -forms of action- that singularize three decades: Conformative Protocols (1990-2000),

35,00€35,00€

Towers in the city

Towers in the city

Hans Kollhoff and Kyle DugdaleThe book examines the tower as the architectural expression of a long-term commitment to the city.

Berlin Alexanderplatz Hans Kollhoff and Kyle Dugdale The book examines the tower as the architectural expression of a long-term commitment to the city. The conclusion is that development must be driven not only by property value and architectural ingenuity but also by respect for collective memory and common humanity. The book argues that these public commitments find architectural expression in a radically different tectonic to that of contemporary patterns of development. The volume presents a series of prompts, provocations, and projects to address the challenge of designing a tower that can be understood as a monolithic whole, even if assembled from discrete parts. From the introduction by Hans Kollhoff and Kyle Dugdale: The European skyscraper is not simply an extrusion of the site, driven by property value, but rather a vertical extension off the earth._At the heart of this studio is the contention that the European high-rise tower is imbued with public responsibility,

17,00€17,00€

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