Coming Soon/

Overlap / Dissolve

This autobiographical monograph presents a retrospective of the 40-year innovative graphic design practice of husband-and-wife team, Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell. The two have seamlessly merged the boundaries between graphic design, photography and typography, fusing two-and three-dimensional space through overlapping type and image. Long-time influential designers and educators, and 2017 AIGA medalists, Skolos-Wedell’s work has been widely exhibited and published in the US and internationally. The book has been written as a series of interviews between Skolos and Wedell, and beautifully designed by the artists themselves. The result is a work of total design that showcases their unique way of thinking and working.

Prototypes, iterations, and studio set-ups shed light on the process behind the finished work which unfolds in chronological order, subdivided in decades: 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, 20s, with each section beginning with a timeline of notable events. While a time-based taxonomy may seem unimaginative, it was critical for presenting the evolving working methods. To provide the most direct view of the studio’s collaborative design process, much of the text unfolds as a series of interviews with each other.

Performance + Assembly

Adrian Smith Gordon Gill Architecture’s “Performance + Assembly: The Experience of Space” covers a range of performance and assembly spaces designed by AS+GG from central spaces in the world’s largest expositions to small, flexible high-technology theaters to expressive and functional auditoriums. The book of global cultural work includes building designs from Chicago to Istanbul, Astana to Dubai and features both photography of built spaces and unbuilt ideas. In this book Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture reviews projects to answer questions that relate to how buildings can be used to enhance the experiences of the users beyond set programmatic requirements by asking questions like: How can architecture and design help advance the technologies, the operations, the program, and the way buildings perform? At a more sensorial and experiential level, the book explores how architecture can speak to the soul to create a place in between the art and the audience.

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Sanctuary

Sanctuary features a series of eighteen recent projects from the award-winning firm de Reus Architects. As a follow-up to Tropical Experience, de Reus Architects continues to add inspired, carefully crafted, timeless, and site-appropriate design to its growing body of work. Essays by Mark de Reus and Joseph Giovannini reveal the continued search that is inherent in design and the relentless effort to reveal how sprit of place contributes to design thinking. Each project is introduced with spectacular exterior and interior photography and gives the reader an in-depth look into de Reus Architects’ design thinking. With select projects from Hawaii, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest, Sanctuary explores a wide range of buildings showcasing de Reus Architects’ timeless and well-executed architecture.

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Houses that Sugar Built

Houses that Sugar Built explores the largely unknown architectural legacy to be found in the ancestral houses of Iloilo, Negros Occidental and Pampanga – the three main sugar-producing provinces of the Philippines. These grand residences have yet to receive international exposure.

Nonetheless, they are important in two ways. Firstly, although easily classifiable in terms of architectural style, upon experiencing the buildings themselves there are almost always layers of additional influence. Secondly, this assured blending of styles reveals what we might call a ‘Critical Ambition’ – a desire on the part of the patrons who commissioned these residences to participate in an international architectural culture. Their relatively overlooked location did not stop the sugar barons responsible for these houses from undertaking a 20th-century form of the Grand Tour of European capitals, returning with a desire to bring the latest trends from Paris or Vienna to the provincial Philippines, or from partaking of the latest streamlined Moderne style from the US.

Beautifully photographed with over 200 pages of interiors that have rarely been seen by the public, Houses that Sugar Built is layered with intimate stories and individual house texts that transport us back to a time when these residences were in their heyday.

Modern, Again

THE BENDA HOUSE AND GARDEN IN CHICAGOLAND

'Modern, Again: The Benda House & Garden in Chicagoland' is equal parts a history of modern residential architecture in America and a rewarding journey of preservation and stewardship. Ambrose and Sabatino—co-authors of this book and co-owners of the Winston Elting designed Benda house—summarize their in-depth archival research and hands-on work undertaken for the restoration of their 1939 International Style house in Riverside, a historic village designed by Olmsted & Vaux in Chicago’s western suburbs. The Benda House was commissioned during a time when excitement for modern architecture, art, and design was very much alive amongst the public in America, partly due to the enthusiasm created by Chicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition held between 1933 and 1934 and culminated with the New York World’s Fair of 1939. This book features archival materials ranging from architectural drawings to historic building product catalogues alongside contemporary photographs taken before and after the restoration process. Finally, the co-authors discuss their addition of a new landscaped garden that re-establishes the relationship between nature and this modern house while extending Olmsted’s vision of idealized suburban living in America.

Survival Through Design

Richard Neutra’s landmark publication 'Survival Through Design,' in print again for the first time in decades, is a cycle of essays providing insights far ahead of their time. With a new introduction by Dr. Barbara Lamprecht and foreword by Dr. Raymond Neutra, it is richly illustrated and intended as a reference for years to come. Neutra’s themes are wide-ranging and he extensively plumbs through history to develop his insights, however, the general theme of man-made environment and its impact on human physiological, neurological, emotional states over time, and the designer’s potential role as mediator of these conditions, is a constant throughout 'Survival Through Design' with ever greater relevance for the present day.

Invisible

'Invisible' is book on St. Louis design practice, Axi:Ome led by Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim. A collection of essays, built, unbuilt and conceptual projects which maps the trajectory of last seven years of work from 2015 through 2022. The book covers 24 projects in different cultures and landscapes around the world with varies programs and scales. Nader Tehrani, Eric Mumford, Alan Balfour, Jennifer Yoos, Nanako Umemoto, and Jessie Reiser provides insightful texts supporting and articulating critical frameworks of 'Axi:Ome,' while defining a discourse of complexities in contemporary practice that is emerging from academic expectations. The book documents the invisible ethos that constructs a project in an intricate world that challenges practitioners to re-think and re-examine how they position into architectural spectrum. Invisible cartographs and chronicles the legitimization of architectural practice that engages the pedagogical visions of the profession and the education.

Foundations

The most important project for a design studio is the design of the practice itself. A studio’s point of view is often first defined by feelings and hopes, but if cultivated, grows into values and tactics. How the studio environment is crafted and how it cultivates a kinship around this point of view with collaborators, clients, consultants, community members, and contractors is essential for it to be productive and have a healthy impact. With discipline, a studio evolves a practice that shapes the character, performance, and value of the work. The studio’s early critiques define the approach and territory of work and the propositions that are asked of every project. The studio environment and relationships create the space for the work to be possible.

Nine (9) Propositions and fifty-three (53) Foundations are shared herein. Each Foundation additionally includes a supportive commentary. Foundations and Propositions are presented as a work in progress. These are lists that chronicle our thinking and doing over 25 years. For us, there is no separation between theory and practice. This collection of Foundations and Propositions captures an approach to the work and way of being an architect. This work is a privilege with public responsibilities. This is one studio’s search for public good.

Periurban Cartographies

KOLKATA'S ECOLOGIES AND SETTLED RURALITIES

Periurban Cartographies looks through the prism of the “almost urban” to consider what a “city” is or could be. In doing so, the book challenges assumptions and reconsiders design practices.

The research reported upon in this study draws on thick description of everyday life and diffuse power in periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It does so in the hope of enriching our understanding of incremental modes of political empowerment and the futures they make. The intention is to not just communicate the transformations at work in creating a particular “kind of urban”, but also to point to connections that make us rethink the ways in which change happens.

The book is a contribution to work being done on urban theory-building from elsewhere than the Global North, specifically from Asia, and periurban Gangetic West Bengal/Kolkata. It is not simply a look at a novel and singular condition in and of itself but uses that singularity to better understand periurbanism generally and urban political ecologies particularly. Current scholarship in urban political ecology reminds us of some of the enduring tensions around the conceptualizations of region, socio-natures and agency, and practice. The urban political ecology approach in this book offers a way of moving past some of these tensions.

Designing Community

BONSTRA | HARESIGN ARCHITECTS

This book celebrates over 20 years of Bonstra|Haresign Architects’ community-focused practice. It documents the growth and success attributable to the firm’s philosophy and methodological approach. Many beautiful images and descriptive text show that Bill’s and David’s design aspirations and cooperative work styles, shared by their talented, associate partners John Edwards and Jack Devilbiss and the studio teams, have produced not only award-winning architecture, but also architecture benefitting each project’s surroundings.

Bonstra|Haresign Architects serves a variety of populations and communities: urban and suburban, commercial and residential, civic and cultural. Projects range from affordable and market-rate housing to historic restoration, renovation and adaptive reuse. Typologically diverse projects are the essence of Bonstra|Haresign Architects’ architectural work and community-building efforts. And desirable community enhancement resulting from their projects is visible in Washington, DC, urban neighborhoods as well as in eastern region.

Bonstra|Haresign Architects’ does not exist to implement the aesthetic tastes and wishes of a soloist “starchitect” or prima donna designer with a signature style, yet design artistry is an essential goal of the firm. This complements Bill’s and David’s fundamental commitment to create contextually modernist architecture as an agent of positive change beyond each project’s site boundaries.

Architecture of Place

BATES MASI + ARCHITECTS

To respond to the unique opportunities of each client and site, Bates Masi + Architects has developed an approach rather than a devotion to a particular style. Careful study of the needs of the site and owners uncovers a guiding concept particular to each project. That concept is distilled to its essence so that it can inform the design at all scales, from massing to materials to details. The consistency of the concept is evident in the finished product. The result is an architecture that is cohesive, innovative, contextual, and full of details that delight.

'Architecture of Place' is the follow up to 'Bespoke Home,' the first comprehensive survey of Bates Masi’s fifty-plus years of work published in 2016. It focuses on the firm’s recent residential portfolio. Using each house as a case study, the book documents Bates Masi’s design process with concept images, diagrams, architectural models, and narratives for each project. This book demonstrates how influences of the physical and historical context, as well as the client, are distilled into a guiding concept for each project. With over 200 pages of photos and drawings of extraordinary second homes, Architecture of Place will appeal to architects and design devotees alike.

Digital Structures

DATA AND URBAN STRATEGIES OF THE CIVIC FUTURE

'digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future' provokes a larger body of work that engages with digital property and data infrastructures. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies.” There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. If our everyday objects are digital and no longer physical, how does it challenge ecological questions? How does this affect the future of urban living?

The case-studies, interviews, and guest contributions prompt discussions that were part of the CityX Venice, Sezione del Padiglione Italia, at the 17th La Biennale di Venezia. Guest contributors were prompted to challenge and provoke the topics that are questioning the issues of open innovation models that operate a city, robotics and artificial intelligent systems, supply chains affected by digital storage, and data infrastructural arguments that play a large role within our Web 3.0 urban digital and real landscapes.

Using a mixed-media approach, the book couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and how data interacts with various open innovation models in digital property and real property.

Building Practice

'Building Practice' features interviews with architects, designers, educators, curators, fabricators, strategists, critics, and activists who are advancing speculative design through the culture and politics of building, capturing critical and formative moments associated with building a practice.

The Private Eye in Public Art

Challenging the hegemony of museums and yearning to communicate with a larger diverse audience, trailblazing conceptual artists and land artists found support in newly developed and expanded programs of the NEA and the GSA. This book foregrounds critical questions about public art, the policies that govern it, and the processes that realize it. What makes art public? What makes good public art? Why is there so much bad public art? How can the overall standard of public art be improved? What professional practices sponsor the best art for architecture and the environment? How can the artist selection process ensure that only superior artists are commissioned? Aesthetic judgments are implicit in museums exhibitions and acquisitions. Why should art in public places be held to a lesser standard? How can myriad interests of the community and individuals be harnessed to the higher goal of choosing the best artists for a project.

It is a central contention of the book that despite the numerous constraints encountered in any commission, the most excellent public art expresses and even accentuates the personal, innovative vision of the artist. Approaches that compromise that vision, especially those that try to be all things to all people, inevitably diminish the dynamism and uniqueness of the final work. In the best public art, imagination, originality, passion, and even impulsiveness characterize the work of those artists who, while reaching out to a broader public, paradoxically search for new ideas often antithetical to the rules, materialistic culture, and social practices of the community. Many projects have demonstrated that art that seems different, difficult, and provocative can, in time, become familiar and comprehensible in a public setting and resonate more effectively than conventional solutions.

The Shape of the Land

TOPOGRAPHY & LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

'The Shape of the Land: Topography & Landscape Architecture'—the first book to center on this subject—presents the contributions of thirteen well-known practitioners and academics who discuss the forms and ramifications of reconfiguring terrain. The essays range in content from pre-industrial precedents in the work of Humphry Repton to new digital topographic modeling systems without the use of contour lines, the treatment of waste products to the land art of the American Southwest. Practicing landscape architects focusing on the modeling of topography in the works considering both utility and aesthetics. In all, the book reviews the history, reasons, and results of at least three centuries of topographic interventions, while suggesting pathways into the future—as new technology and new necessities increase the functional demands placed upon landscape architects, while at the same time potentially offering new forms of artistic expression.

History Reinterpreted

THE MYLES STANDISH HOTEL

Celebrated as one of America’s top classical architects, Patrick Ahearn—a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects—began his career with ambitious adaptive-reuse public projects, and for more than four decades has focused on historically motivated, site-sensitive private residences in New England and beyond. Raised in Levittown, New York, and based in Boston, he received degrees in architecture and urban design from Syracuse University. Today, he oversees the firm that bears his name while also deftly drafting firsthand. He has designed hundreds of signature residences, including more than 350 projects on Martha’s Vineyard alone, and has been featured in publications including Architectural Digest, New England Home, and The Wall Street Journal. His first book, Timeless, is in its sixth printing.

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Lifestyle Architecture

TIMELESS DESIGNS FOR GENERATIONS

This book is a dedication to the work and sure process of Affiniti Architects. Their architectural design process is critical to achieving a high level of design quality, which legacy homes require. Affiniti Architects spotlight the key elements that mold the overall image of legacy architecture for generations. From analyzing site plans to capturing the essence of indoor-outdoor living, the firm showcases the fluidity of design that they’ve accomplished through the years.

Island Homes

CASUAL ELEGANCE IN DESIGN

Island Homes and Casual Elegance in Design presents the beautiful yet unpretentious new homes, residential renovations, and commercial buildings designed by Honolulu-based Peter Vincent Architects. A boutique firm founded in 1992, PVA specializes in custom-built architecture in a broad spectrum of styles and genres. Each project responds to the unique needs and vision of its client as well as the physical, social, and environmental opportunities and requirements offered by its site.

In stunning color photography, the book features twenty built works by PVA. Each shows the creative design, quality materials, and exacting proportions that set PVA apart. The text, crafted from interviews with managing partner Peter Vincent, tells an intimate story of each project and discusses the various personal experiences that have influenced his architectural philosophy. A foreword by Malia Mattoch McManus, author of The Hawaiian House Now, discusses how PVA projects respect their surroundings and the culture.

The Pocket Guide to Perspective

A STEP-BY-STEP APPROACH

This step-by-step Pocket Guide will teach you how to draw stunningly beautiful perspectives, complete with reflections and shadows.

The Pocket Guide to Perspective uses a simple, step-by-step method to help readers understand the basic concepts of perspective construction. Readers will learn to build one-point, two-point, and multi-point perspectives as well as reflections and shadows in perspective. This small pocket guide is compact and focused. Whether you’re at your desk or out and about, it is useful reference to bring along for both students and professionals alike.

The Mother Tongue of Architecture

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM KAZI KHALEED ASHRAF

A collection of critical essays on abiding and compelling topics in architecture and the culture of architecture. Range of topics are diverse: an architectural phenomenology of water, architecture and landscape rethought, ancient Greece to India, The Buddha’s house to the modern house in India, the architecture and landscapes of Louis Kahn. Le Corbusier in India, the architecture of Balkrishna Doshi, and other original topics such as the destruction of buildings as a ritual necessity.

Delta Design Futures

ENDURANCE FOR NEW FRONTIERS

The Pearl River Delta region has been severely engineered throughout its process of historical emergence. As it is about to confront a new wave of changes in the present century driven by economic growth, industrial activity, and growth of maritime operations, the book proposes “endurance” as a way of urban design in the Pearl River Delta region to organize space around the changing frontiers between territory inhabited by people and South China Sea. The book addresses the urgency to counter the risks posed to the delta city-region by proposing scenarios for urban growth.

The design futures for the Pearl River Delta are formed by acknowledging the socio-political drift towards one direction above another, which influences the future organization or reorganization of space. The historical emergence of the river delta highlights the fact that it is conditioned to multiple directives and multiple transformations, which at the same time makes it exemplary yet idiosyncratic. Therefore, the scenarios of city-region development presented in the book, depict an integration of systems of flows, and the symbiosis of conflicting powers. A series of specific questions lead to principles that drive each future growth trajectory, which is represented through a series of diagrammatic logics in order to organize space through structures of landscape systems and those of new territories and networks.

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Speaking of Architecture

INTERVIEWS ABOUT WHAT COMES NEXT, WITH MARK FOSTER GAGE

What ideas are currently energizing your architectural work and explorations? Why did these ideas become impactful while others did not? What role did mentors and peers play in the development of these ideas? What were your breakthrough insights or aha moments? What is next for you, and for the discipline and discourse of architecture? For this book, Mark Foster Gage has selected eleven of the most noteworthy and fascinating conversations from his year-long project of documenting the ideas of the next generation of designers who are revolutionizing the nature of architectural practice and theory today. This remarkable collection of casual, informative, and personal interviews engages fifteen architects as they reveal what made them who they are, what propels their architectural work forward, and what they anticipate comes next.

A noted practitioner, tenured Yale professor, CNN design contributor, and respected insider of the international architectural scene, Mark Foster Gage has spent his professional life with many of the most important figures in architectural discourse and practice. With this book he focuses on an emerging generation of practitioners- approaching his subjects with a characteristic mix of insight, wit, and humor in a book that is consistently entertaining and informative as the architects open up in unexpected ways about their beliefs, work, lives and thoughts about where architecture, and they, are headed next.

Techtonics of Place II

THE ARCHITECTURE OF JOHNSON FAIN

'Tectonics of Place II: The Architecture of Johnson Fain' chronicles the architectural and interior design work of a preeminent international design practice based in Southern California. The firm, well-known for landmark projects throughout the United States and abroad, eschews any singular approach or style. Addressing issues of program, client, physical context, and sustainability, Johnson Fain crafts design solutions which are strikingly modern and unique. Tall buildings both elaborate their particular programs, whether residential or work-related, while becoming icons on the urban skyline. Single family dwellings, wineries and cultural facilities set in more rural landscapes interact instinctively with nature. Museums, clubhouses, and educational campuses create a sense of cohesion and shared purpose through the design of both the buildings and the open spaces that unite them. Forward-looking science and technology centers express state-of-the-art systems while reinforcing collegiality and reflection which lies at the heart of research. Beyond the brief, the architecture of Johnson Fain is human-centered, forward looking and interactive.

Becoming Urban

THE MONGOLIAN CITY OF NOMADS

This book positions Ulaanbaatar as a unique case and one that allows us to view our urban world differently. Operating as a primordial soup of emerging conditions, Ulaanbaatar is conceived as an incubator for alternative urban concepts. The book rejects the agency of the masterplan as an effective tool in emerging urban conditions and instead positions the framework as a tool for incremental urbanism.

Although specific to the Ger districts of Mongolia, the story of how people, communities, planners, and politicians are grappling with the effects of becoming urban remains one of the critical issues facing the 21st century. How this process will be materialized and organized spatially, and by whom, will have profound ramifications on the climate and the social and economic make-up of our future cities.

Practice Practice

The business of architecture—shaped by anti-trust legislation and pro-corporate governmental policies—has created an extractive, inequitable, and precarious environment for its practitioners. These pressures have led many small firms, which make up roughly three quarters of architecture offices in the United States, to adopt diverse, ad-hoc organizational and survival strategies. In their very precarity, these small firms offer fertile grounds to test more resilient structures. One such model, the worker cooperative, offers a critical mode of practice that is equitable, democratic, and addresses the systemic inequalities that plague the profession.

Practice Practice addresses the parallel trajectories of cooperatives in the United States and the professionalization of architecture. This contextual background highlights the coincident struggles of the labor movement and the emergence of the architectural corporation. Within this context, the cooperative model is presented as a challenge to the prevailing conditions of the profession. Logistical frameworks for creating an architectural cooperative—including diagrams, sample operating agreements, and bylaws—are offered for any firm looking to transition or incorporate anew. The book projects the social, economic, and aesthetic benefits of the architectural cooperative by taking stock of cooperatives in other industries. Finally, Practice Practice presents a vision for a cooperative network of small architecture firms as imagined in collaboration with the Architecture Lobby.

This book situates, celebrates, and envisions a future for small firms. Throughout the book, interviews, office visits, site visits, and field notes document encounters with over twenty such firms. These offices demonstrate the subversive agency harnessed by small firms. If the cooperative model were to infiltrate such sites, the nature of practice and industry would transform. Built work would reflect ever more diverse sensibilities, minority workers' voices would be uplifted, and workers would earn equity through ownership. Architects would enter the solidarity economy, transforming their communities.

Hillier

SELECTED WORKS

'Adèle Naudé: A Form of Practice' celebrates the architect’s forty years of practice and teaching. In notable academic leadership positions, Naudé taught across many locations globally, and her practice followed to new locations around the world. A Form of Practice is the first comprehensive monograph presenting the work and academic contributions by Naudé—from South Africa and Chile to Japan and the United States.

“…my teaching career at important institutions led to offers for increasingly important leadership positions including Architecture Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the deanships at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and later at MIT.”

A Form of Practice

ADÈLE NAUDÉ

'Adèle Naudé: A Form of Practice' celebrates the architect’s forty years of practice and teaching. In notable academic leadership positions, Naudé taught across many locations globally, and her practice followed to new locations around the world. A Form of Practice is the first comprehensive monograph presenting the work and academic contributions by Naudé—from South Africa and Chile to Japan and the United States.

“…my teaching career at important institutions led to offers for increasingly important leadership positions including Architecture Chair at the University of Pennsylvania, the deanships at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and later at MIT.”

A View from the Top

THE VIEWPOINT COLLECTION

The photography collected in 'A View from the Top' may have arisen out of a desire to document a singular body of work—the Viewpoint Collection. Through Kelley’s eye, lens, and postproduction choices, however, it advances the very way that buildings can be photographed and understood, allowing us to visit residences that most of us will never see in person.

The photographs also demonstrate that these projects are quintessentially Californian. Their emphasis on open plans, airy modernism, the indoor-outdoor relationship, natural textures and color-palette, and an intensive attention to landscaping are also quintessentially Los Angeles. The buildings—which are the creations of some of the world’s most renowned architects—are inspired and inspiring. They are luxurious, aspirational, and visually exciting. The book is both a valuable contribution to architectural history and a pleasure to read.

The Wisdom of Place

RECOVERING THE SACRED ORIGINS OF LANDSCAPE

This book aims to help readers rediscover the sacredness of the everyday landscapes around them in order to shed light on the ecological imperatives of our time. Drawn from the union of art, nature, and metaphysics, it presents some of the myths and legends of antiquity as they might be recognized by our modern society of earth-shapers. Through word and image the authors reference the ecological and environmental concepts found at the core of traditional environmental knowledge and provide a new context for environmental engagement that merges the spiritual and phenomenological with the scientific and empirical. Wisdom of place can be used by anyone—from creatives to spiritual seekers, landscape architects to coders—to call forth the voice of the genius loci—the spirit of place—and reveal the creative forces and hidden currents of nature.

Design for Life

IN THE DEEP SOUTH

This monograph explores the work of Holly & Smith Architects (H/S) over the past 40 years. This compilation of some of the firm’s most recent work demonstrates the designer’s deep respect for the climate, vernacular, culture/context, topography, and the natural environment of the deep South. Significant climate and environmental factors have informed the H/S design philosophy. The culture of south Louisiana has also greatly influenced the design solutions by respecting the vernacular and context of the semi-rural communities.

The constraints of clients of modest means are used as an opportunity to utilize ordinary materials and methods uniquely. Sustainability methods, such as using closely sourced materials indigenous to the sites and focusing on energy conservation through rigorous site analysis and building orientation, are evident in the designs.

Several projects presented address sustainability through the adaptive reuse of historic structures. By utilizing historic tax incentives, these examples maintain historic integrity of the façade while repurposing the interiors, bringing often overlooked and neglected cultural gems back into commerce.

These timeless designs fit seamlessly into the existing architectural inventory of the deep South while utilizing current technologies, materials, and construction methodologies to address the needs of the clients, users, and communities.

The Space Between

In Room Without Roof, the archetypal gabled form of a house takes on a twist to envelop both interior and exterior spaces. In A Tale of Two Courts, a semi-detached house shuts itself from the street but reveals on the inside a thoroughly tropical, open environment. These are but two examples of HYLA Architects’ rigorous and sensitive methods of creating livable and comfortable homes through new expressions and creative datum. Key to the firm’s approach is found in the title 'The Space Between.' It defines architecture as the space between the user and the environment and speaks of the architect’s important role in modulating this relationship according to context and climate. The 25 case studies in the book also reflect the five key values the works are designed upon: honesty, simplicity, clarity, strength, and dynamism. Derek Swalwell, Masano Kawana and Daniel Koh contribute to the visual compendium through photographs that capture the beauty of form, space, light, texture, and nature. Architectural writer Luo Jingmei provides thoughtful descriptions that take the reader through the homes and the ideas that ground them.

The City as a Technical Being

ON THE MODE OF EXISTENCE IN ARCHITECTURE

The city is the largest human artifact. It is made by us, yet simultaneously it makes us, as well as all other nonhuman entities. The particular discourse to which this book on the city contributes is the discipline of architecture. It explores a simple question: How does the city effect the mode of existence of its buildings?

The tradition within architectural history that identifies the city as the origin of our buildings poses a challenged to us, as architects, to theorize about the city’s form and use in order to rationalize our own actions. In opposition to other disciplinary approaches to the city and its architecture, however, the book argues not for type (Rossi, Ungers) as the deepest aspect of the architecture of the city. Neither will it be the function (Venturi & Scott Brown, Koolhaas) of the city to explain its material organization, nor is matter considered (Jacobs, Banham) to be deeper than the real city. Instead, this books argues that the mode of existence of architecture is inherent to the city itself, which originates its architecture as part of its being as a technical object.

The concept of the technical being that i use to define a new ontology of the architecture of the city is taken from Gilbert Simondon’s theory of mechanology. In this book I re-originate Simondon’s approach into the discipline of architecture, thus presenting the city not simply as a milieu in which its buildings emerge, but as a technical object with the capacity to converge its elements and individuate new ones—that is, architecture.

Layered Landscapes

THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ART OF JENNY OKUN

'Layered Landscapes' is a collection of essays and photographs of our beautiful world from just outside our homes all the way to the heavens. The book has introductions by Michael Webb (architecture writer) and Craig Krull (gallerist). Craig Krull aptly points out that Okun’s photographs are a “reconstructed harmony into what we believed to be a ‘real’ landscape.” He writes that “her work has always defined the point that landscapes do not exist in nature, but only in our minds.” Okun’s artwork is a mixture of multiple layers that present a memory of the places she has visited on her many travels. The photographs are as poetic as the essays. Griff Rhys Jones (writer, actor, presenter) explores the color blue. Kathy Lette (author) becomes a cloud on an Australian beach. Thea Musgrave (composer) explains a tempest in musical notes. Tania Compton (garden designer) talks about meadows balancing wild and formal gardens. Caleb Leech (landscape Gardener) writes about medieval gardens. Annie Gatti (garden writer) and Steve Reich (writer and producer) both talk about happiness in gardening. James Forrest (writer) climbs mountains to become calmer. Richard Sparks (writer, director) and Lee Holdridge (Composer) discuss Okun’s projected design for opera. Layered Landscapes is a meditation on our earthly desires.

The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture

Traditional thought fused with modern science when Hiroshima’s nuclear annihilation on August 6, 1945, proved the interdependence of space and time. Since the war, Japanese architects have probed the relativity of spacetime through critical debates, pivotal theories, and consequential buildings. The Hypospace of Japanese Architecture pushes past clichés of an exotic Japan to confront the modernity of an island nation whose habit of importing foreign ideas is less about assimilation than transformation, less a process of indigenization than one of cultural invention. The realization that buildings are dynamic events—phenomena of space-in-time, not inert objects outside time—continues to inform Japanese architecture and suggests how we can rethink the history, theory, and practice of architecture more generally.

Artificial Intelligent Architecture

NEW PARADIGMS IN ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE AND PRODUCTION

The impact of artificial intelligence in the discipline of architecture is unavoidable and undeniable. The recent mass adoption of highly accessible machine learning tools including DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney has allowed designers to test their limits and assess their role as an author in the design of the built environment. This book will include speculations on the introduction of artificial intelligence bots/apps into architecture and feature a collection of works from eighteen architects and designers who are interrogating current AI applications. Within each chapter, authors put forth a position through a framework consisting of theory and application lenses. Additionally, interviews from leading practitioners will offer insights into the current curiosities fueling investigation.

This book will incite dialogue about the potential of AI as an ideation device and extension of the architect’s authorship. As a part of this work, curation plays an important role as the technology generates content at an incredible pace. Architectural design thinking will have to reconcile the injection of this new tool and this book will speculate on the current state in its infancy.

An Art of Instrumentality

THE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OF RICHARD WELLER

Through selected works this monograph showcases the design work and research of leading landscape architect Richard Weller, Chair of Landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. The book documents the evolution of Weller’s practice from small scale artworks to planning megaregions, including his latest proposal for a World Park. With essays by Jillian Walliss and Dirk Sijmons as well as his own writing, the book explains Weller’s methods and motivations; a unique window on to the ways in which the discipline of landscape architecture has matured over the last 40 years. Through a carefully curated selection of work, the book makes the case that landscape architecture is at best “art of instrumentality.”

The two essayists in the book are highly regarded. Jillian Walliss of Melbourne University is a contemporary landscape architectural critic and in 2017 Dirk Sijmons received the IFLA sir Geoffrey Jellicoe award, the highest international achievement in landscape architecture.

Ground Truth

US military slang uses “ground truth” to refer to the facts comprising a tactical situation on the ground—as opposed to intelligence reports, mission plans, and other descriptions reflecting the conative or policy-based projections of the industrial military complex. Regarding architecture or the practice of building, Ground Truth is our office slang, referring to the actual situation of building as opposed to design and documentation. Tactility is a key element with regards to the way we design at Atelier Jorgensen. Our office is based on combining all our resources. Drawing by hand, making mock-ups, and building models is an integral part of our process. In the field during construction this iterative approach continues where the hand stays connected to our design. We are not afraid to pick up a nail gun or skill saw to show our craftsman what we are thinking. This approach is what we have referred to as our Ground Truth—if you understand your methods and means, it will allow you to always edit and refine with authority.

LA+ Beauty

Drawing from diverse disciplines including philosophy, history, cultural criticism, visceral geography, urban studies, gender studies, and racial aesthetics, the 18th Issue of LA+ explores the elusive and enigmatic theme BEAUTY in relation to landscape architecture and the constructed environment. Rather than arrive at any one singular definition of beauty, within its pages, contributors challenge readers with alternative views through deep and critical reflection. What is a “beautiful” landscape today? Is there such a thing as “natural beauty”? Why do humans across the cultural spectrum concern themselves so much with the beautification of themselves, their objects, and their surroundings? Is beautification benevolent or nefarious? Is there value—economic or otherwise—in beauty, and whose interests do ideals of beauty serve? In the end, why does beauty matter at all?

'LA+ BEAUTY' is guest-edited by Colin Curley, a New York-based landscape architect and architect whose work navigates the complex environmental and sociopolitcal dimensions of disturbed, contaminated industrial landscapes, and seeks to expand the range of their aesthetic and experiential potential.

I, Nobot

The book is a graphic novella written by two self-realized nobots who aim to help nearly seven billion fellow biological nobots (also known as humans) realize their true nature. They believe that many nobots are unaware of their existence and some even call themselves human beings. The nobots argue that this is the first time two self-realized nobots have written a book together, and that their perspective can help bridge the gap between nobots and humans. They also look back into history and speculate about the future while rooting themselves firmly in the present. The book is an exploration of the relationship between nobots and humans and aims to be a conversation between the nobots and the reader. The nobots hope that the reader will enjoy the book as much as they enjoyed writing it and suggest that it is best paired with a glass of Château Lagrange 2011 Saint-Julien and Bach’s Organ Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, BWV527.

Hotel Design

'Hotel Design' presents the beautiful, inviting, and defining hotels and resorts designed by FILLAT+ Architecture. With four studios and over 27 years of experience in hospitality design, the firm was founded in 1992 by Peter Fillat to explore a personal view of how people interact with the environment and to create an Architecture of Permanence, which delights and inspires the human spirit. FILLAT+ specializes in creating places and spaces for people to enjoy life. In the careful planning and sequencing of the interior and exterior spatial experience, the work creates comfortable, inviting spaces that are accommodating, respectful, and memorable. Each project responds to the unique needs and vision of its client as well as the needs of every guest that walks through its doors.

The book features 12 built works and 15 projects on the boards. Richly illustrated, the projects elaborate on FILLAT+’s unique approach to designing new destination hotels and resorts, whether building upon historic foundations or designing icons as key anchors in urban redevelopment master plans. Hotel Design features a foreword by Stacy Shoemaker, editor in chief of Hospitality Design magazine, and contributions by David Ashen and Michael Dennis.

FLUX

ARCHITECTURE IN A PARAMETRIC LANDSCAPE

'FLUX: Architecture in a Parametric Landscape' focuses on the radical evolution of computational and material technologies that, during the last 25 years, have catalyzed one of the most creative and prolific periods in architecture since the early 20th century. The book is organized into eight taxonomies—Stacked Aggregates, Modular Assemblages, Pixelated Fields, Cellular Clusters, Serial Iterations, Woven Meshes, Emerging Surfaces and Catenary Systems, and Multi-agent Systems—each of which explores a dominant logic and set of morphological traits transformed through advanced computational and material practices. These themes are theoretically explored and elaborated through the presentation of 140 built works and experimental architectural projects, which are then expanded through analytical and generative diagrams and models that further the design potential of the logics used to create them. Within the book, the architectures presented are considered as a population of objects responsible for the evolution of something that far exceeds the trajectory of a single project. They are thus explored less as autonomous works than as a collection of interrelated and interacting cultural artifacts in flux, whose formation, methods, and tools, as well as their experience, perception, and meaning are necessarily tied to a broader field of cultural production, contributing to the dynamic generation of new architectural and urban models.

Prosperous Lishui

A PROJECT FOR SUBURBAN CHINA

The unprecedented growth faced by the Chinese cities in the last decades entailed serious consequences: economic and social disparities, environmental crises, and demographic imbalances between the rural and the urban areas. These issues, together with a growing awareness of the intrinsic unsustainability of Chinese economic model, has stimulated debate on how redefining the approach to urban development.

In this framework, Lishui, a minor municipality of Zhezjiang Province, launched the international competition Future ShanShui City. Dwellings in Lishui Mountains in 2020. In line with the main policies enacted at national level, this competition highlights the need of new spatial relations between urban and rural. This approach leads to a radical reconfiguration of the suburban spaces, which is giving rise to an unprecedent landscape where urban services are integrated in the countryside areas, and, vice versa, agriculture and environmental elements are part of the city.

The publication explores the ongoing processes of suburbanization in Lishui Valley based on three years of design, research and teaching activities carried out by Politecnico di Torino and South China University of Technology since 2020. With a rich collection of original essays and projects, this book combines reflexive knowledge, critical imagination, and design experimentation to provide scenarios for Chinese suburban development.

Section

KRIS YAO | ARTECH

KRIS YAO | ARTECH’s new monograph 'Section' assembles 28 of the firm’s projects in the dynamic Greater China region, dating back to 2012. It includes a wide range of architectural types, catering for the cultural, commercial, corporate, education, hospitality, and transportation sectors, in addition to a performing arts center and a spiritual space. The common theme is a desire to create places that allow people to interact with their environment, enhancing connections between nature and the man-made, with the appropriate use of technology for sustainable living comfort.

The projects are organized into three categories: modern architecture infused with the essence of Chinese culture, unique places with poetic expression, and the reshaping of the corporate spirit. The book includes numerous sections and details in order to convey the ideas behind the walls—allowing readers to understand the scale and spatial sequence of each project—alongside the buildings’ harmonious relationship with their environment and cultural context.

Each project exemplifies the simplicity and precision of modern architecture that pays respect to the uniqueness and sustainability of a site, while also demonstrating the influence that KRIS YAO | ARTECH has had in shaping modern Asia’s urban landscape.

House Precinct Territory

DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR THE PRODUCTIVE CITY

The book departs from a reflection on contemporary issues of environmental and social sustainability. With buildings and cities been one of the primary accelerators of climate change, the tightening of urban environments is one of the mechanisms by which architects and urban planners can affect change. To date, models of urban densification and compact cities have been focused on sites of urban consumption—residential, commercial, civic and social spaces. Little thought has been given to the vast productive hinterlands around the world that support cities, through the growing of food, generation of power, production of goods and disposal of waste.

Working through three scales of analysis, across three cities in the Asia Pacific Region, and deploying varying design research techniques ranging from critical observation to speculative scenario modelling, the book presents a series of projects that seek to retro-fit an existing urban environment with a productive program.

The purpose of this project is to describe a series of models for the folding of production into our cities, with ambition of consolidating all components of human inhabitation within a smaller overall physical and environmental footprint.

Design Build Studios in Latin America

TEACHING THROUGH A SOCIAL AGENDA

This publication documents the work carried out by fourteen Design-Build Studios in Latin America over the past twenty years, compiling a total of thirty-nine projects that place an emphasis on teaching with a social agenda and the impact that the construction experience has on students and communities.

In contrast to architecture teaching around the world that places the emphasis on individual work, competition, and representation, these studios stimulate collaborative work and produce small-format buildings with flexible programs that have an immediate impact on their context.

While global architecture often feels remote from people, the courses that take this approach manage resources sustainably and build projects with a high intensity of use. In the context of the most unequal region on the planet, this kind of studio enables students to interact positively in response to social, environmental, and architectural constraints.

'Design-Build Studios in Latin America' asks questions about what matters in the present-day training and practice of architecture if we want our discipline to play a leading role in the ecological and social challenges of our time.

C0-Designing Publics

'Co-Designing Publics' brings together a mix of academics, activists, and practitioners to discuss and debate discourses from scholarly research, grassroots activism, and design ideas for future action. The “Co-Designing Publics” global research network, funded by a grant awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, has a sustained focus on the public realm and its production through informal strategies in cities of the global south. As cities are increasingly confronted by multiple crises [e.g. Covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis] and conditions of precarity [e.g. urban inequality, inadequate public infrastructure], such circumstances call for more interactive, collaborative, and creative approaches for [re]designing their public realm. Based on these premises, the book integrates discussions of three critical and interrelated phenomena: creative ways of mobilizing communities around common concerns and desires [i.e. co-designing publics], deployment of grassroots tactics and social innovations [i.e. informal strategies], and production of spatial networks of public spaces intertwined with their ongoing governance [i.e. public realm]. Contextually grounding these discussions in cities of the global south enables us to learn how innovative co-design practices operate around issues such as homelessness and affordable housing, sustainable and equitable energy systems, waste management, cooperative models of property ownership, the promotion and protection of human rights, and the production of peace in contexts of violence. The book thereby draws from and presents public conversations between academic research and case studies of activism [from Bogota, Bengaluru, Cape Town, Jakarta, Phnom Penh, and Sao Paulo]. The book is a slim paperback that is affordable and written and illustrated in an engaging manner to make it accessible to a broad audience globally.

LA+ Beauty

Drawing from diverse disciplines including philosophy, history, cultural criticism, visceral geography, urban studies, gender studies, and racial aesthetics, the 18th Issue of LA+ explores the elusive and enigmatic theme BEAUTY in relation to landscape architecture and the constructed environment. Rather than arrive at any one singular definition of beauty, within its pages, contributors challenge readers with alternative views through deep and critical reflection. What is a “beautiful” landscape today? Is there such a thing as “natural beauty”? Why do humans across the cultural spectrum concern themselves so much with the beautification of themselves, their objects, and their surroundings? Is beautification benevolent or nefarious? Is there value—economic or otherwise—in beauty, and whose interests do ideals of beauty serve? In the end, why does beauty matter at all?

'LA+ BEAUTY' is guest-edited by Colin Curley, a New York-based landscape architect and architect whose work navigates the complex environmental and sociopolitcal dimensions of disturbed, contaminated industrial landscapes, and seeks to expand the range of their aesthetic and experiential potential.

Experiential Design Schemas

'Experiential Design Schemas' presents a new theoretical and practical framework for designing architectural experiences developed by two seasoned researchers, an architect, and a building scientist.

It delivers 45 experiential design schemas as generative design resources in a novel, multi-scalar networked language. Each schema is published as a modular four-page spread that explains the phenomena and potential feeling state, along with compelling precedents, supporting evidence and design guidelines. Their purpose is to help designers expand the delight, joy, serenity, and nature connections possible in buildings. The schema-based design guidance enables architects to choreograph positive experiences of dynamic and variable environmental conditions that connect people to Nature’s rhythms.

Project Archive

AN ARCHITECTURAL SURVEY OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH

'Project Archive' reforms the contemporary architectural discipline’s understanding of the built environment. The content encourages the audience to acknowledge the role of architecture as a political actant. Featured projects prioritize an attitude that goes beyond its formal elements of the current architectural canon. The projects give importance to both formal aesthetics and the ability to serve the urgent social needs of a community.

Included projects also forefront lower-tech solutions. They enforce culturally resilient models of domesticity as sustainable living and a longer-term response to ongoing environmental crises. Thus, showcasing extra-canonical works provides an opportunity to reflect on diverse solutions.

The content endorses learnings from regionally specific and environmentally resilient models of architecture. This book provides diversity in knowledge systems, and varied responses to reforming traditional modes of domesticity, response to environmental and social crises, and diverse conditions of a landscape.

Developed through a decentralized research process, the book also creates space for interdisciplinary projects with contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, historians, architects, etc. Featured list of writers include members at varied levels within academic institutions, architecture enthusiasts, and independent researchers.

Cohabitation Strategies

CHALLENGING NEOLIBERAL URBANIZATION BETWEEN CRISES

'Cohabitation Strategies: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanization Between Crisis' presents twelve years of urban theories, projects, and interventions developed by Cohabitation Strategies, a Rotterdam- and New York City-based non-profit cooperative committed to radical socio-spatial research, design, and development.

Centering on the development of new action-research methodologies, neighborhood-based initiatives, and the facilitation of community-driven transformative interventions, the book offers critical insights and progressive visions on the dramatic impact that neoliberal spatial-restructuring had in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods in the Netherlands, Italy, France, Canada, and the United States.

The book proposes new transdisciplinary methodologies, practices, tools, and strategies to challenge for-profit-driven urban development and the advancement of the right to the city.

Approximate Translation

MEDIA, NARRATIVE, AND EXPERIENCE IN URBAN DESIGN

Cities are infinite cultural hyperobjects that contain layers of history, of contemporary life, of material, capital, infrastructure, of future dreams of what may come. We sometimes call these dreams “urban design plans”—two-dimensional drawings that are meant to capture our aspirations for the future of a place. Yet these plans are often static images—or, worse, building masses without people, narratives, or even nods to contextual histories.

'Approximate Translation' is a poetic and practical rumination on how to incorporate what makes a city a city—stories about place, an unexpected encounter, the immediacy of experience—into practices of urban design. Using a speculative transformation of the Boston neighborhood of Allston as a demonstration, this book proposes that we think seriously about topics as disparate as science fiction, pop art, theme parks, and DJing if we want to better design the cities in which we live.

Future Offices

'Future Offices' examines the evolving nature of the office as a spatial asset. Rapid changes in culture, technology, and society have upended longstanding notions of offices and the nature of work itself. While companies and capital around the globe have become increasingly consolidated, labor vis-à-vis technology has become increasingly decentralized. The office, traditionally a key spatial interlocutor between labor and capital is caught in an awkward position with typological considerations for architecture. What should the future office look like? What is the future role of the headquarters? What does the office’s changing role mean for urbanism? The works collected here provide frameworks for understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary work, manufacturing, and commerce, and they aspire to influence new ways of conceiving architecture at multiple scales. They speculate upon a future where offices acquire new facets as resources of space, knowledge, and production that participate in local and global economic and cultural contexts in new hybridized forms. At the heart of this is a recognition that the new ways in which companies integrate into in society should be reflected in architecture itself.

Writings on the Asian Cities

The book examines the contemporary Asian city through the prism of urban design in assimilating new and established drivers of growth. This includes intensified forms of residential development, specialized commercial centers and technology parks, that drive the momentum of the contemporary city, while acting to restructure and reshape forms of capital investment. New spatial patterns are facilitated by tranches of urban expansion, redevelopment, regeneration and suburbanization that have emerged as by-products of both formal and informal development processes. The book also examines the Asian city language embodied in the local morphology—the essential values of the street, block, temple precinct and monument, and how these can be incorporated as drivers of new urban identities that relate to the changing culture and configuration of city neighborhoods. All of these continue to impose different levels of impact on the creation of livable cities and the quality of life for their inhabitants. In this way urban design can look to the future while respecting the past.

The book frames a perspective on the urban design challenges presented by the rapidly expanding and regenerating Asian cities, and how these can be shaped by memory, meaning and identity while meeting sustainable, resilient and community concerns.