Eero Saarinen now stands as one of the great masters of twentieth-century American architecture. It was not always so. A lightning rod for controversy, Saarinen languished in critical purgatory for decades after his untimely death in 1961. As the son of the revered Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen, he fought...
A visual essay of Ilkka Suppanen's designs that showcases the poetry of light manifested in different contexts, including essays from eight contributing writers.
Ilkka Suppanen (born 1968) is a Finnish architect and designer whose studio philosophy is to "improve environments through material and immaterial lightness." In 1995, he founded Studio...
An investigative record of the architectural movement emblematic of the Soviet Orient.
Given its geographical location, developed resources and multicultural history, Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, continues to be one of the most important centers of Central Asia. Since the Soviet era, numerous efforts have been made to conserve and...
With more than 150 illustrations, this monograph offers the first in-depth look at the genesis of the Steiger House, a masterpiece of modern Swiss architecture, situated in the Doldertal in Zurich near other modernist houses, such as the Doldertal Houses by Roth and Breuer (1936) and the Fellowship Home (1960)....
A guide to the pioneering modernist work of Konstantin Melnikov, as displayed through architectural models and their accompanying preparatory materials.
The architecture of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s was integral to shaping 20th-century modernism. Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974) was a key figure of this movement, with many...
During the Renaissance, the contest to decide the order of rank among the fine arts, architecture, painting, and sculpture was an issue that also occupied the famous architect Andrea Palladio. He was convinced that architecture spoke for itself and did not require any ornamentation through painting. Nevertheless, frescos adorn the...
From personal reflections on the connection between architecture and activism to working with the material earth and with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh: German architect Anna Heringer seeks to highlight situations, people, challenges and solutions that are often not given enough attention. This book presents her contemplations on light in its...
Characterized by shared, self-managed access to food, housing, and the basic conditions for a creative life, the commons are essential for communities to flourish and protect spaces of collective autonomy from capitalist encroachment. In a narrative spanning more than three centuries, Against the Commons provides a radical counterhistory of urban planning...
Essays and visual analyses of the material and conceptual ramifications of data in the urban environment.
Data is the glue that holds our digital society together: self-driving vehicles, satellites, global internet cable networks, data centers and humanoid robots provide tangible evidence of the complex and connected world we inhabit. Yet...
The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic...
What kind of relationship do we foster with the material world? Do we see it only as a resource to plunder or can we find ways of being in kinship with it? And how are these opposed modes of relating reflected in our personal relationships? The Material Kinship Readerreckons with the...
Speculative fiction, art, social science and ornithology take flight together in this imaginative reader proposing a multispecies dialogue with birds.
Following the runaway success of A Tree, With a Bird, is the second installment in Onomatopee's five-year, five-volume publication series creating "rich encounters between folklore and critical research." As a...
To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from...
Offering a novel approach to contemporary landscape studies, Explosivity unearths the hidden legacies of violence that have shaped the physical and cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. As he sifts through the historical debris of previous centuries, Javier Arbona-Homar analyzes a series of explosions that took place between 1866...
Inspired by comic-book culture, Pop art, psychedelia, the space race, sci-fi, Constructivism and Buckminster Fuller, the hugely influential British collective Archigram was the epitome of 1960s avant-garde architecture. Their self-published, lo-fi but materially ingenious magazine Archigram, begun in 1961, announced their ideas for such visionary concepts as "Walking City," "Plug-In City" and "Instant City." It also served to connect the international avant-garde of the 1960s. Archigram forged links with the Metabolists in Japan, Frei Otto, Utopie and Haus-Rucker-Co in Europe, and Buckminster Fuller in the US. They were also championed by critics such as Charles Jencks and Reyner Banham, who brought Archigram's famous fourth pop-up issue to the US in 1966. Today Archigram is one of the rarest major small-press publications of the 1960s, with individual issues selling for a minimum of $600.
Archigram's influence has proved enduring, perhaps most famously in its widely acknowledged impact on Richard Rogers' and Renzo Piano's Centre Pompidou. Its members also taught and influenced the likes of Bernard Tschumi and Zaha Hadid, and inspired a later generation of nineties and noughties modernists embracing the potential of technology such as Future Systems, Foreign Office Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
A long-overdue English translation of Munari's seminal tract on the everyday value of architecture and design education
The first ever English translation of Bruno Munari's Design and Visual Communication (1968) fills a gap in Munari's output for the English-speaking world and provides a highly relevant guide to bridging architecture and...
Print on demand has revolutionized publishing. Digital printing and online platforms such as Blurb, Lulu and Kindle Direct Publishing allow anyone to publish work immediately and without financial risk, opening up spaces beyond the trade book world and ostensibly democratizing production. Today an entire subculture is exploring print on demand...
For Corita Kent, printmaking was a populist medium to communicate with the world around her. This activist spirit came most alive in the 1960s, when her posters and murals addressed subjects such as racism and poverty, US military brutalities in Vietnam and conflicts between radical and conservative positions in...