For fifteen years, three architects--James Cathcart, Frank Fantauzzi, and Terence van Elslander--from three different cities have held an ongoing collaboration, creating installations and other works of innovation and art about the act of building. Pamphlet Architecture 25: Gravity catalogs a cross section of their many works, from the portable toilets installed in the facade of New York's StoreFront for Art and Architecture to "Big Orbits," a giant solid and a giant void constructed from 4600 shipping palettes. Although strongly conceptual, their work reminds us that a primary function of architecture is to engage the public.

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

The thirteen projects take as their subject a site of contested transportation infrastructure--the Sheridan Expressway. By proposing new typologies for this site, these studies seek to mediate the spaces in the city where local and regional meet. Referencing the introduction of the modern parkway into the Bronx, the grading of the Central Park transverse roads, and other works that have redefined the relationship between parks and roads, author Jonathan Solomon suggests a system by which large projects might again be built in American cities.

The essential reader on fabrication in architecture for practitioners and producers alike An original and informative reader on the subject of translating architectural ideas from conceptual propositions to physical manifestations, Manufacturing the Bespoke is an essential resource for students and practitioners of architecture, as well as producers and suppliers of architectural products. At a time where roles, methods and capabilities within the disciplines of building production are in unprecedented flux, this book: Provides a unique and highly current treatment on the subject of fabrication in architecture with its emphasis on contemporary technology, cultural history and theory A key source book for students and professionals engaged in manufacturing/fabrication projects Includes extended articles by internationally renowned critics, theorists, educators and designers, such as Mathias Kohler, Nevi Oxman, and Michael Stacey Articles will examine and refer to key portfolios of the 20th and 21st Century including works by Pierre Charreau, Peter Salter and Rural Studio Featuring essays from pioneering architects, engineers, academics and designers from around the world on both existing and yet-to-be-built projects, the book covers architecture across the ages.

This newest addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series, long admired for its willingness to propose architectural solutions to challenging problems addresses the issue of rising sea levels with an interrogation of the concept of floating cities, a field of inquiry gaining increasing relevance and urgency with the impending reality of climate change. The authors explore notions of buoyancy and the amphibious through a typology based on human response and adaptation, to one of the hosting pressing issues of our day.

In 1977 Steven Holl and William Stout created a grittier alternative to mainstream architectural publishing called Pamphlet Architecture. With Holl's Bridges, the landmark series was born, and for 30 years Pamphlet has served as soapbox and laboratory for such notable architects and theorists as Lebbeus Woods, Zaha Hadid, Lars Lerup, and Michael Sorkin. With its twenty-eighth installment, Pamphlet Architecture celebrates its thirtieth anniversary no less bold than when it began. Augmented Landscapes features a landscape architecture practice for the first time in Pamphlet history. London's Smout Allen presents five projects that respond to the way in which man has enlarged the landscape through architecture and infrastructure, manipulating and blurring perceptions of what is natural and what is artificial.

Holl attempts to answer these questions with his idea for "Dense-Pack Villages," a type of courtyard housing that could be built with recycled concrete from fallen buildings and steel and would be hurricane- and earthquake-resistant. Each "village" could house approximately 200 occupants, and the courtyards would be filled with greenery and fruit trees. Holl proposes that these houses use solar cells on their roofs to provide electricity, allowing the villages to potentially operate off the grid. Water can be supplied from desalinization plants in each village, and also from new reservoirs, replacing the outdated reservoirs that were destroyed in the earthquake.