In this book, stories portray the production of our built environment, guided by three characters: Giraffes, Telegraphs, and Hero of Alexandria. Having developed its long neck to reach the leaves of high trees, the giraffe represents the vernacular approach to architecture, in which construction follows forces of nature. The telegraph, in contrast, embodies the modernist paradigm, in which technology reigns supreme and forces nature to adapt. Inspired by Hero of Alexandria, SMAQ subscribe to a third paradigm ? using technology to optimize nature and, inversely, nature to assimilate technology. Their design concepts appear as tools ready to engage our contemporary urban environment, free of today's ecological and technological fundamentalism and in favor of experimentation, pleasure, and play.

This book discusses the protection, planning, and design of sustainable urban water environments. Against the backdrop of environmental changes, it addresses issues of water resource protection and sustainable development in China and Germany at different stages of urbanization, as well as relevant strategies and lessons learned. It focuses on three topics: balance between water environment protection and utilization in the urbanization process; sustainable use of water resources in the urbanization process; and water-related planning and design strategies in urbanization and local cultural development processes. In the context of water resources, China and Germany can learn from each other’s experiences and can support one another in the fields of urbanization and locality. As such, the book brings together Chinese and Germans scientists from various disciplines, such as planning, geography, landscape, architecture, tourism, ecology, hydraulic engineering and history to provide a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective on the topic and examine the challenges and opportunities as well as the planning and design strategies to achieve sustainable, water-related urban spaces. By combining theoretical and practical approaches, it appeals to academics and practitioners around the globe.

Open urban spaces are an ideal stage for public events. An important prerequisite for their design in an increasingly heterogeneous multicultural cityscape is the relationship between design, use, and social function.The book documents both temporary as well as permanent installations of various kinds – from the open-air courtyard of a museum to the design of a river bank promenade, through to a city park.

Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

What makes building materials sustainable? How to reduce the amount of embodied energy in building constructions? And how does a Life Cycle Analysis work? These are questions which are becoming increasingly more common in the context of sustainable construction. The DETAIL Green Book "Sustainable Construction Techniques" offers a thorough guide to ecological building design and sustainable construction methods, which will be particularly valuable for architects. The authors provide an overview of the most relevant databases and certification standards for building products and illustrate how a Life Cycle Analysis is conducted. They also identify key ways of optimising the planning process in line with ecological criteria, while offering advice for the selection of building materials and elements. Detailed documentation from five buildings constructed in Europe and North America serve to illustrate the associated assessment processes in this book.

Through a precise and expansive definition of what a pattern is, this book offers ways to understand and use patterns in contemporary design. From the structure of the universe to the print on your grandmother’s couch, patterns are found in a variety of concrete and conceptual phenomena. For architecture, something that so easily traffics between science and taste demands attention, which partially explains patterns’ recent revival across diverse stylistic and intellectual camps. Yet, despite their ubiquity, their resurgence remains un-theorized and their capabilities underutilized. To date no account has been given for their recent proliferation, nor have their various formal and functional capacities been examined. In fact, the relationship between patterns and architecture hasn’t been addressed in almost 30 years. This book fills that gap by tracking the definitions and applications of patterns in a number of fields, and by suggesting how contemporary patterns might be used in design. Drawing on historical material and recent case studies, it gives shape to patterns’ emerging potential. The Architecture of Patterns provides an updated definition of patterns that is at once precise and expansive—one that allows their sensory, ephemeral, and iterative traits to be taken as seriously as their functional, everlasting, and essential ones. Book design by David Carson. Foreword by Sanford Kwinter. Projects by Atelier Manferdini, Bjarke Ingels Group, Ciro Najle, EMERGENT/Thomas Wiscombe, Foreign Office Architects, Jason Payne and Heather Roberge, Herzog and de Meuron, J. Mayer H. Architects, Reiser+Umemoto, Responsive Systems Group, and !ndie architecture.

Revised and expanded edition How do you turn a paper mill into a gin distillery? Let every country in the Olympic Games take part in making and lighting the Olympic Cauldron? Design a building using an electron microscope? Produce a new bus for London that uses less fuel? Make someone eat your business card? Develop a new kind of mosque? Turn the back door of a hospital into its front door? Grow a meadow in the center of a city? Generate the form of a building in less than a minute? Use saliva as an ingredient of a Christmas card? Create a piece of architecture that represents a nation? This is the definitive publication on one of the world's most exceptional designers. More than 600 pages, 140 projects and hundreds of photographs, illustrations, and sketches, this revised and expanded monograph will excite, inspire, and serve as an invaluable resource for creative solutions and the joy of making for many years to come.