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Zak Kyes is the creative director and founder of Zak Group where he leads projects for cultural and commercial clients across scales and mediums. From 2006 to 2016, he was the art director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and in 2007 he curated with Mark Owens Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design. In this episode, Jarrett and Zak talk about design as a type of cultural production, what he learned from working with architects, and rethinking our definitions of culture., https://www.librarystack.org/scratching-the-surface-zak-kyes/?ref=unknown

Zak Kyes is the creative director and founder of Zak Group where he leads projects for cultural and commercial clients across scales and mediums. From 2006 to 2016, he was the art director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and in 2007 he curated with Mark Owens Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design. In this episode, Jarrett and Zak talk about design as a type of cultural production, what he learned from working with architects, and rethinking our definitions of culture., https://www.librarystack.org/scratching-the-surface-zak-kyes/?ref=unknown

Zak Kyes is the creative director and founder of Zak Group where he leads projects for cultural and commercial clients across scales and mediums. From 2006 to 2016, he was the art director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and in 2007 he curated with Mark Owens Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design. In this episode, Jarrett and Zak talk about design as a type of cultural production, what he learned from working with architects, and rethinking our definitions of culture., https://www.librarystack.org/scratching-the-surface-zak-kyes/?ref=unknown

This document in front of you is the result of a conversation over lunch, which took place in the early days of Corona in Berlin. Back then, we were simply wondering: in a time in which people are, either by policy or good faith, forced to restrict their spatial radius of interaction to a bare minimum, how do we actually deal with food? Not only in the sense of what we choose to eat conceptually, but how we choose it, literally. Where do we get it, how do we prepare it, and what does something essential like food mean to us in times of crisis?, https://www.librarystack.org/corona-cookbook-the/?ref=unknown

This document in front of you is the result of a conversation over lunch, which took place in the early days of Corona in Berlin. Back then, we were simply wondering: in a time in which people are, either by policy or good faith, forced to restrict their spatial radius of interaction to a bare minimum, how do we actually deal with food? Not only in the sense of what we choose to eat conceptually, but how we choose it, literally. Where do we get it, how do we prepare it, and what does something essential like food mean to us in times of crisis?, https://www.librarystack.org/corona-cookbook-the/?ref=unknown

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties ..., https://www.librarystack.org/crossbenching-toward-participation-as-critical-spatial-practice/?ref=unknown

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties to such an encounter can ultimately control that the result—architecture (unlike real estate), according to Miessen, belongs to no one but affects and is affected by everyone—and this proposition asks that we reframe questions of ethics and politics. They can no longer be the property of an individual but a collective set of interrelations—it is through such profound departure from the terms of architecture that Miessen’s new book demands nothing less than to reimagine how we might finally become citizens.” —Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, https://www.librarystack.org/crossbenching-toward-participation-as-critical-spatial-practice/?ref=unknown

“At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties to such an encounter can ultimately control that the result—architecture (unlike real estate), according to Miessen, belongs to no one but affects and is affected by everyone—and this proposition asks that we reframe questions of ethics and politics. They can no longer be the property of an individual but a collective set of interrelations—it is through such profound departure from the terms of architecture that Miessen’s new book demands nothing less than to reimagine how we might finally become citizens.” —Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, https://www.librarystack.org/crossbenching-toward-participation-as-critical-spatial-practice/?ref=unknown

In this collection of mediations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary. Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing., https://www.librarystack.org/flash-in-the-pan/?ref=unknown

In this collection of mediations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary. Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing., https://www.librarystack.org/flash-in-the-pan/?ref=unknown

In this collection of mediations on what Baudelaire championed (and Michael Fried chastised) as presentness, Lavin investigates the convergence of notions such as liveness, the provisional and the obsolete in revealing qualities of the contemporary. Three sets of essays explore different forms of architectural time, particularly as they shape the differences between history, theory and criticism as genres of writing., https://www.librarystack.org/flash-in-the-pan/?ref=unknown

This eighth instalment in the AA’s widely acclaimed Architecture Words series publishes for the first time in English a collection of architectural writings and essays by the prominent Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Born in 1941, Ito is one of the world’s most innovative architects. Central to a new generation of architects that emerged in Japan in the wake of the radical Metabolist group (its proponents include Kisho Kurokawa and Kiyonori Kikutake), Ito has synthesised the experimental architectural language of Metabolism with his own distinct design sensibility. First evidenced by his Aluminium House, White U and Silver Hut House, his architecture has ..., https://www.librarystack.org/tarzans-in-the-media-forest/?ref=unknown

Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was a prolific architect, designer and thinker, whose work, absorbing her native Italy and then after 1946 her adopted home-land, Brazil, spans across architecture, furniture, stage and costume design, urban planning, curatorial work, teaching and writing. This collection of essays is the first-ever English anthology of her of writings. It includes texts written when she was still living in Italy as well as later contributions to a number of Brazilian newspapers, journals and magazines. An acute critic and a creative thinker, Bo Bardi proposes a series of new parameters for design thinking and practice, such as the ..., https://www.librarystack.org/stones-against-diamonds/?ref=unknown

This collection of a number of key essays by the New York-based architect and writer Mark Rakatansky proposes an innovative framework for architecture to enact the complex tectonic dramas of social and culture space. Following its title, the book is arrayed in three sections: Tectonic, Acts of, Desire and Doubt. In each, Rakatansky covers a series of subjects in a writerly voice that varies from the third-person narrative of the scholarly essays to the transcript of an email exchange with fellow academic Sarah Whiting discussing recent books by architect Greg Lynn. Transformational performances of architectural identity are explored in discussions of ..., https://www.librarystack.org/tectonic-acts-of-desire-and-doubt/?ref=unknown

For almost 20 years, Detlef Mertins has been a critical voice in renewing our understanding of architectural modernity. Architect, historian, professor, his essays have often taken up familiar themes in order to redress inaccuracies and release energies that we were unaware of. These essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, from journals to anthologies – including such noted books as Lars Spuybroek’s NOX: Machining Architecture and FOA’s Phylogenesis – they are now assembled for the first time in this volume., https://www.librarystack.org/modernity-unbound/?ref=unknown

Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, ‘The Map and ..., https://www.librarystack.org/the-house-of-light-and-entropy/?ref=unknown

Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, ‘The Map and the Territory’, written specifically for this volume., https://www.librarystack.org/the-house-of-light-and-entropy/?ref=unknown

This eighth instalment in the AA’s widely acclaimed Architecture Words series publishes for the first time in English a collection of architectural writings and essays by the prominent Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Born in 1941, Ito is one of the world’s most innovative architects. Central to a new generation of architects that emerged in Japan in the wake of the radical Metabolist group (its proponents include Kisho Kurokawa and Kiyonori Kikutake), Ito has synthesised the experimental architectural language of Metabolism with his own distinct design sensibility. First evidenced by his Aluminium House, White U and Silver Hut House, his architecture has recently developed a more dramatic formal adventurousness with buildings including the Sendai Mediatheque, Mikimoto Building, Tama Art University Library and the soon-to-be-completed Taichung Metropolitan Opera House. The texts in this collection cover almost 40 years of writing and feature famous essays as well as previously untranslated writings that shed new light on Ito’s relationship to evolving patterns of architectural thinking and design., https://www.librarystack.org/tarzans-in-the-media-forest/?ref=unknown

For almost 20 years, Detlef Mertins has been a critical voice in renewing our understanding of architectural modernity. Architect, historian, professor, his essays have often taken up familiar themes in order to redress inaccuracies and release energies that we were unaware of. These essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, from journals to anthologies – including such noted books as Lars Spuybroek’s NOX: Machining Architecture and FOA’s Phylogenesis – they are now assembled for the first time in this volume., https://www.librarystack.org/modernity-unbound/?ref=unknown

This collection of a number of key essays by the New York-based architect and writer Mark Rakatansky proposes an innovative framework for architecture to enact the complex tectonic dramas of social and culture space. Following its title, the book is arrayed in three sections: Tectonic, Acts of, Desire and Doubt. In each, Rakatansky covers a series of subjects in a writerly voice that varies from the third-person narrative of the scholarly essays to the transcript of an email exchange with fellow academic Sarah Whiting discussing recent books by architect Greg Lynn. Transformational performances of architectural identity are explored in discussions of fabrication, social parametrics, building envelopes, spatial narratives, animation, migrancy, and in illuminating readings into the works of Louis Kahn, Robin Evans, John Coltrane, Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio., https://www.librarystack.org/tectonic-acts-of-desire-and-doubt/?ref=unknown

Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was a prolific architect, designer and thinker, whose work, absorbing her native Italy and then after 1946 her adopted home-land, Brazil, spans across architecture, furniture, stage and costume design, urban planning, curatorial work, teaching and writing. This collection of essays is the first-ever English anthology of her of writings. It includes texts written when she was still living in Italy as well as later contributions to a number of Brazilian newspapers, journals and magazines. An acute critic and a creative thinker, Bo Bardi proposes a series of new parameters for design thinking and practice, such as the notions of ‘historical present’, ‘roughness’ and ‘tolerance to imperfection’. Presented collectively, her texts present a wealth of inspirational thoughts articulated in a refreshingly simple, straightforward fashion., https://www.librarystack.org/stones-against-diamonds/?ref=unknown

Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) was a prolific architect, designer and thinker, whose work, absorbing her native Italy and then after 1946 her adopted home-land, Brazil, spans across architecture, furniture, stage and costume design, urban planning, curatorial work, teaching and writing. This collection of essays is the first-ever English anthology of her of writings. It includes texts written when she was still living in Italy as well as later contributions to a number of Brazilian newspapers, journals and magazines. An acute critic and a creative thinker, Bo Bardi proposes a series of new parameters for design thinking and practice, such as the notions of ‘historical present’, ‘roughness’ and ‘tolerance to imperfection’. Presented collectively, her texts present a wealth of inspirational thoughts articulated in a refreshingly simple, straightforward fashion., https://www.librarystack.org/stones-against-diamonds/?ref=unknown

This eighth instalment in the AA’s widely acclaimed Architecture Words series publishes for the first time in English a collection of architectural writings and essays by the prominent Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Born in 1941, Ito is one of the world’s most innovative architects. Central to a new generation of architects that emerged in Japan in the wake of the radical Metabolist group (its proponents include Kisho Kurokawa and Kiyonori Kikutake), Ito has synthesised the experimental architectural language of Metabolism with his own distinct design sensibility. First evidenced by his Aluminium House, White U and Silver Hut House, his architecture has recently developed a more dramatic formal adventurousness with buildings including the Sendai Mediatheque, Mikimoto Building, Tama Art University Library and the soon-to-be-completed Taichung Metropolitan Opera House. The texts in this collection cover almost 40 years of writing and feature famous essays as well as previously untranslated writings that shed new light on Ito’s relationship to evolving patterns of architectural thinking and design., https://www.librarystack.org/tarzans-in-the-media-forest/?ref=unknown

For almost 20 years, Detlef Mertins has been a critical voice in renewing our understanding of architectural modernity. Architect, historian, professor, his essays have often taken up familiar themes in order to redress inaccuracies and release energies that we were unaware of. These essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, from journals to anthologies – including such noted books as Lars Spuybroek’s NOX: Machining Architecture and FOA’s Phylogenesis – they are now assembled for the first time in this volume., https://www.librarystack.org/modernity-unbound/?ref=unknown

Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, ‘The Map and the Territory’, written specifically for this volume., https://www.librarystack.org/the-house-of-light-and-entropy/?ref=unknown

This collection of a number of key essays by the New York-based architect and writer Mark Rakatansky proposes an innovative framework for architecture to enact the complex tectonic dramas of social and culture space. Following its title, the book is arrayed in three sections: Tectonic, Acts of, Desire and Doubt. In each, Rakatansky covers a series of subjects in a writerly voice that varies from the third-person narrative of the scholarly essays to the transcript of an email exchange with fellow academic Sarah Whiting discussing recent books by architect Greg Lynn. Transformational performances of architectural identity are explored in discussions of fabrication, social parametrics, building envelopes, spatial narratives, animation, migrancy, and in illuminating readings into the works of Louis Kahn, Robin Evans, John Coltrane, Giulio Romano and Andrea Palladio., https://www.librarystack.org/tectonic-acts-of-desire-and-doubt/?ref=unknown

Originally published in German in 1985 as Die Poetik eines Mauervorsprung, Jan Turnovsky’s The Poetics of a Wall Projection is ostensibly a description of a corner within the breakfast room of the Villa Stonborough in Vienna, designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann. But it is also much more. Working from within an established Viennese tradition (practised most famously by Krauss, Freud, Loos and Wittgenstein himself), Turnovsky’s study elucidates a complex set of ideas from something seemingly trivial – in this case, an analysis of the villa’s corner detail expands into a wider exploration of the logics of architectural syntax and ..., https://www.librarystack.org/the-poetics-of-a-wall-projection/?ref=unknown

AA Words One: Supercritical: Peter Eisenman meets Rem Koolhaas is based on an evening of conversation at the AA in 2006. Each architect states his views about the terms of architecture, including its theories and relationship to the city and other forms of critical and cultural practice. Responses from the audience follow, filtered through a debate moderated by Brett Steele., https://www.librarystack.org/supercritical/?ref=unknown

An ‘object’ is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity. In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture ..., https://www.librarystack.org/anti-object/?ref=unknown

Having Words collects together for the first time ten essays by the pioneering architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown. Educated in the 1940s and 1950s at Witwatersrand University, the AA and the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown has, since the 1960s, taught and led her Philadelphia firm, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, in collaboration with Robert Venturi. The essays in this collection extend from her 1969 text, ‘On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning’ (written three years before the publication of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s seminal book Learning From Las Vegas) to ‘Towards an Active Socioplastics’ from 2007, which offers ..., https://www.librarystack.org/having-words/?ref=unknown

Selected writings of Max Bill – this collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time. Max Bill (1904-1994) – a product of the Bauhaus at Dessau, pupil of Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – was a virtuoso designer whose work overleaped disciplinary boundaries, encompassing architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial and graphic design, as well as education. What unites all the work is a clarity and precision of expression. Through both his designs and his writings Max Bill has long been a major figure of reference in the German-speaking world. This collection makes many of ..., https://www.librarystack.org/form-function-beauty-gestalt/?ref=unknown

Bernard Cache is the principal of the Paris-based practice Objectile – which he founded in 1996 with Patrick Beaucé – and a noted theorist of geometry and computational ontology. He formulated his concept of ‘non-standard architecture’ in his 1995 book Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, a concept that was given the name ‘objectile’ by Gilles Deleuze in his book on the philosopher Leibniz, The Fold. This collection of ten essays brings together a number of key texts by Cache. These include his 1999 ‘Plea for Euclid’ and more recent writing commissioned especially for this collection, including ‘Vitruvius Machinator Terminator’., https://www.librarystack.org/projectiles/?ref=unknown

An ‘object’ is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity. In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture is not only desirable but possible as well.His approach is illustrated with a discussion of works by his office in which he has sought, by various tactics, to avoid objectification. The ideas embodied in these diverse projects have much in common with the Japanese tradition, not of ‘monuments’, but of ‘weaker’ buildings characterised by their use of natural light and natural materials., https://www.librarystack.org/anti-object/?ref=unknown

AA Words One: Supercritical: Peter Eisenman meets Rem Koolhaas is based on an evening of conversation at the AA in 2006. Each architect states his views about the terms of architecture, including its theories and relationship to the city and other forms of critical and cultural practice. Responses from the audience follow, filtered through a debate moderated by Brett Steele., https://www.librarystack.org/supercritical/?ref=unknown

Having Words collects together for the first time ten essays by the pioneering architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown. Educated in the 1940s and 1950s at Witwatersrand University, the AA and the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown has, since the 1960s, taught and led her Philadelphia firm, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, in collaboration with Robert Venturi. The essays in this collection extend from her 1969 text, ‘On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning’ (written three years before the publication of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s seminal book Learning From Las Vegas) to ‘Towards an Active Socioplastics’ from 2007, which offers an overview of Scott Brown’s education and the gestation of her key architectural and urban ideas. In between, eight other essays from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, offer insights not only into Scott Brown’s evolving architectural imagination but touch upon the changing collective ideas and aspirations of design education and practice. The collection is bookended by two additional texts by Scott Brown, a foreword and an afterword, addressing specifically the act of writing about architecture., https://www.librarystack.org/having-words/?ref=unknown

Originally published in German in 1985 as Die Poetik eines Mauervorsprung, Jan Turnovsky’s The Poetics of a Wall Projection is ostensibly a description of a corner within the breakfast room of the Villa Stonborough in Vienna, designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann. But it is also much more. Working from within an established Viennese tradition (practised most famously by Krauss, Freud, Loos and Wittgenstein himself), Turnovsky’s study elucidates a complex set of ideas from something seemingly trivial – in this case, an analysis of the villa’s corner detail expands into a wider exploration of the logics of architectural syntax and his belief that good and poetic architecture is always also practical. Jan Turnovsky (1941-1995) at various times worked as a carpenter, graphic designer, tenor saxophonist, poet and architectural researcher at the Architectural Association and the Technical University in Vienna., https://www.librarystack.org/the-poetics-of-a-wall-projection/?ref=unknown

Selected writings of Max Bill – this collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time. Max Bill (1904-1994) – a product of the Bauhaus at Dessau, pupil of Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – was a virtuoso designer whose work overleaped disciplinary boundaries, encompassing architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial and graphic design, as well as education. What unites all the work is a clarity and precision of expression. Through both his designs and his writings Max Bill has long been a major figure of reference in the German-speaking world. This collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time., https://www.librarystack.org/form-function-beauty-gestalt/?ref=unknown

Bernard Cache is the principal of the Paris-based practice Objectile – which he founded in 1996 with Patrick Beaucé – and a noted theorist of geometry and computational ontology. He formulated his concept of ‘non-standard architecture’ in his 1995 book Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, a concept that was given the name ‘objectile’ by Gilles Deleuze in his book on the philosopher Leibniz, The Fold. This collection of ten essays brings together a number of key texts by Cache. These include his 1999 ‘Plea for Euclid’ and more recent writing commissioned especially for this collection, including ‘Vitruvius Machinator Terminator’., https://www.librarystack.org/projectiles/?ref=unknown

Selected writings of Max Bill – this collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time. Max Bill (1904-1994) – a product of the Bauhaus at Dessau, pupil of Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky and Paul Klee – was a virtuoso designer whose work overleaped disciplinary boundaries, encompassing architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial and graphic design, as well as education. What unites all the work is a clarity and precision of expression. Through both his designs and his writings Max Bill has long been a major figure of reference in the German-speaking world. This collection makes many of his key texts available in English for the first time., https://www.librarystack.org/form-function-beauty-gestalt/?ref=unknown

Having Words collects together for the first time ten essays by the pioneering architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown. Educated in the 1940s and 1950s at Witwatersrand University, the AA and the University of Pennsylvania, Scott Brown has, since the 1960s, taught and led her Philadelphia firm, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, in collaboration with Robert Venturi. The essays in this collection extend from her 1969 text, ‘On Pop Art, Permissiveness and Planning’ (written three years before the publication of Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour’s seminal book Learning From Las Vegas) to ‘Towards an Active Socioplastics’ from 2007, which offers an overview of Scott Brown’s education and the gestation of her key architectural and urban ideas. In between, eight other essays from the 1970s, 80s and 90s, offer insights not only into Scott Brown’s evolving architectural imagination but touch upon the changing collective ideas and aspirations of design education and practice. The collection is bookended by two additional texts by Scott Brown, a foreword and an afterword, addressing specifically the act of writing about architecture., https://www.librarystack.org/having-words/?ref=unknown

AA Words One: Supercritical: Peter Eisenman meets Rem Koolhaas is based on an evening of conversation at the AA in 2006. Each architect states his views about the terms of architecture, including its theories and relationship to the city and other forms of critical and cultural practice. Responses from the audience follow, filtered through a debate moderated by Brett Steele., https://www.librarystack.org/supercritical/?ref=unknown

Bernard Cache is the principal of the Paris-based practice Objectile – which he founded in 1996 with Patrick Beaucé – and a noted theorist of geometry and computational ontology. He formulated his concept of ‘non-standard architecture’ in his 1995 book Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, a concept that was given the name ‘objectile’ by Gilles Deleuze in his book on the philosopher Leibniz, The Fold. This collection of ten essays brings together a number of key texts by Cache. These include his 1999 ‘Plea for Euclid’ and more recent writing commissioned especially for this collection, including ‘Vitruvius Machinator Terminator’., https://www.librarystack.org/projectiles/?ref=unknown

An ‘object’ is a work of architecture that is expressly cut off from its environment. Objects are not exclusive to any particular architectural style, but objectification has long been central to western architecture. Indeed, it might even be said to be the very strategy by which modernism succeeded in conquering the world. It is all-pervasive because it is consistent with the aim of the prevailing economic system: to transform virtually everything into a commodity. In Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma argues that this mindset prevents us from establishing a healthy relationship with the external world and suggests that an alternative form of architecture is not only desirable but possible as well.His approach is illustrated with a discussion of works by his office in which he has sought, by various tactics, to avoid objectification. The ideas embodied in these diverse projects have much in common with the Japanese tradition, not of ‘monuments’, but of ‘weaker’ buildings characterised by their use of natural light and natural materials., https://www.librarystack.org/anti-object/?ref=unknown

Originally published in German in 1985 as Die Poetik eines Mauervorsprung, Jan Turnovsky’s The Poetics of a Wall Projection is ostensibly a description of a corner within the breakfast room of the Villa Stonborough in Vienna, designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann. But it is also much more. Working from within an established Viennese tradition (practised most famously by Krauss, Freud, Loos and Wittgenstein himself), Turnovsky’s study elucidates a complex set of ideas from something seemingly trivial – in this case, an analysis of the villa’s corner detail expands into a wider exploration of the logics of architectural syntax and his belief that good and poetic architecture is always also practical. Jan Turnovsky (1941-1995) at various times worked as a carpenter, graphic designer, tenor saxophonist, poet and architectural researcher at the Architectural Association and the Technical University in Vienna., https://www.librarystack.org/the-poetics-of-a-wall-projection/?ref=unknown

Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen’s “Participation” trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing ..., https://www.librarystack.org/nightmare-of-participation-the/?ref=unknown

Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen’s “Participation” trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change. Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. The book calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs., https://www.librarystack.org/nightmare-of-participation-the/?ref=unknown

Welcome to Harmonistan! Over the last decade, the term “participation” has become increasingly overused. When everyone has been turned into a participant, the often uncritical, innocent, and romantic use of the term has become frightening. Supported by a repeatedly nostalgic veneer of worthiness, phony solidarity, and political correctness, participation has become the default of politicians withdrawing from responsibility. Similar to the notion of an independent politician dissociated from a specific party, this third part of Miessen’s “Participation” trilogy encourages the role of what he calls the “crossbench practitioner,” an “uninterested outsider” and “uncalled participator” who is not limited by existing protocols, and who enters the arena with nothing but creative intellect and the will to generate change. Miessen argues for an urgent inversion of participation, a model beyond modes of consensus. Instead of reading participation as the charitable savior of political struggle, Miessen candidly reflects on the limits and traps of its real motivations. Rather than breading the next generation of consensual facilitators and mediators, he argues for conflict as an enabling, instead of disabling, force. The book calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs., https://www.librarystack.org/nightmare-of-participation-the/?ref=unknown