Pack Architectural Icons

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

Empire, State & Building
Kiel Moe

This book considers the material basis of building as a key impetus of both urbanization and the energetics of urban life. The otherwise externalized material geographies and thermodynamics of building’s material basis reveal much about the dynamics and efficacy of how we build. This book plots the material history and geography for one plot of land in Manhattan—the parcel of land under the Empire State Building—over the past two hundred years. Through rich illustrations, it tracks all the building material that have passed through this parcel or remain it in geographic and ecological dynamics: spatially (in terms of their geographic material footprints and industrial processes) and quantitatively (in terms of embodied energy, embodied carbon, and emergy flow). In successive chapters, the book articulates the empire and states that are inherent to building, but remain unconsidered—abstract and unknown—by architects.

Looking for Mies
Ricardo Daza

A historical photograph shows a room in a steel and glass building and a man which is evidently the architect Mies van der Rohe. Only the name of the photographer is known. In a manner more usually found in detective novels, the author has painstakingly researched the events surrounding its taking making deductions and gradually revealing in which room the architect is standing, in which building it is to be found, what the architect is looking at, what his stance and his gaze tell us about his person, his work. Step by step, the author systematically investigates the photograph, drawing fascinating conclusions and making astonishing revelations about the architecture, the man and his character from this one photograph. His hypothesis is illustrated by a short and compelling text and supported by further visual material.

Fuksas Object
Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas

This companion book to Fuksas Buildings features the works by the studio focused on product design, interior design, scenographies, furniture and jewelery. Perhaps the less known aspect of Fuksas work, their product design emphasizes a natural condition in changing scales, materials and uses. Research is also very present behind every piece. Richly illustrated projects such as the Armani stores, the Alessi collection and the furniture for Haworth Castelli, among many others.