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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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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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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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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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.
Terra-Sorta-Firma
Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient
Fadi Masoud
For centuries, cities have grown and expanded onto previously saturated grounds;"reclaiming" land from estuaries, marshes, mangroves, and seabeds. While these artificial coastlines are sites of tremendous real estate, civic, and infrastructural investments, they are also the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Terra-Sorta-Firma documents the global extent of reclaimed coastal lands, and provides a framework for comparison across varying geographies, cultures, and histories. It renders visible the ubiquity and precarity of urban coastal reclamation in an age of increased environmental and economic indeterminacy. The five parts of the book question urbanism's political, economic, and physical binary relationship to wet and dry grounds in search of a new understanding of land in a state of permanent flux.
This book challenges designers, developers, policymakers, engineers, and urbanists to reconsider the design and construction of land itself, and to re-imagine this most fundamental of all infrastructures along a gradient
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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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Houston Genetic City
Peter Zweig, Matthew Johnson, Jason Logan
No city in the United States is synonymous with unbridled growth and land speculation as the sprawling Texas city of Houston. Though Houston is described as a city, its massive size makes it regional or even megaregional in scale—including a patchwork of satellite downtowns and suburbs, a vast floodplain of bayous and coastal prairie, as well as a long stretch of Gulf Coast. This fragile landscape is increasingly beset by global problems, from flooding to rampant growth to congestion. Its lack of zoning means ad hoc developments scatter across the landscape with little formal planning, where urban developments are always provisional and negotiable.
Houston Genetic City is a collaborative and speculative book about Houston’s future, and by extension the future of urbanism in unplanned cities globally. Using maps, photographs, timelines, and collages, the book lays out the conditions for new urbanization in this fragile landscape. We
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