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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year A Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year “Sharp, revealing, funny.” —The Guardian “An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again... [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.” —The Economist Architecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this fiction on its head, offering a candid account of what it’s really like to work as an architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis. We meet ambitious oligarchs, developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an investment, and layers of bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architect’s idea and the chance of its execution. “This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them... Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.” —Financial Times “This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years.” —Architects’ Journal

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.

At the moment of going to press, a publication irreversibly reaches its final form. Simultaneously, it also reaches an audience. Naturally, this audience very often is oblivious to the many, and sometimes complex, steps towards the construction and montage of (visual) meaning that precedes the actual publication of a book. The contributors to 'Before Publication' consider such construction of meaning as montage and look at materials and processes involved before publication. Their focus is on concrete artistic and visual artifacts such as scrapbooks, book mock-ups, and press layouts by artists, authors, and graphic designers. In particular, they shed light on the relationship between the spheres of privacy and publicity. The new book features a programmatic introduction by the editors Nanni Baltzer and Martino Stierli and eight concisely illustrated topical essays.

Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. It is the heart of the BMW factory complexthe dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation and motion. With an audacious and abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the BMW Central Building challenges the notion of building as static and is definitive evidence of architecture as art. Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at this instant modern masterpiece.

This book highlights the complex issues, tasks and skills that must be mastered by an IP designer, in order to design an optimized and robust digital circuit to solve a problem. The techniques and methodologies described can serve as a bridge between specifications that are known to the designer and RTL code that is final outcome, reducing significantly the time it takes to convert initial ideas and concepts into right-first-time silicon. Coverage focuses on real problems rather than theoretical concepts, with an emphasis on design techniques across various aspects of chip-design.