In the past few decades, cepezed has gained renown with transparent, sustainable and technologically progressive architecture that is remarkably usable and humane. Unaffected design, sober but stylish materialization, and careful finishing are just as characteristic of Cepezed's oeuvre as the integration of spatial and construction-technical aspects. The design and building processes at cepezed are also integrated: the use of prefab components and the application of industrial building methods guarantee an optimum alignment of design and realization, in which time, quality, and costs are meticulously planned and controlled. Prototypes documents a large number of key projects and deals extensively with the various aspects of product development, building process and architecture. The layout and form of the book make it very similar to a cepezed design: celar, logical and efficient. It offers very incisive insight into the office philosophy that cepezed has drawn straight through architectural history. In addition to the timeless aesthetic pleasure that can be experienced in the designs and the craftmanship displayed at detail level, the much-discussed role of the architect in the design process today is examined in the book. A must read for every architect who wrestles with the threatened depreciation of the discipline.

Prototypes have acquired much prominence and visibility in recent times. Software development is perhaps the case in point, where the release of non-stable versions of programmes (beta versions) has become commonplace, as is famously the case in free and open source software. Prototyping has also become an important currency of explanation and description in art-technology contexts, where the emphasis is on the productive and processual aspects of experimentation: Medialabs, hacklabs, community and social art collectives, dorkbots, open collaborative websites or design thinking workshops are spaces and sites where prototyping and experimentation have taken hold as both modes of knowledge-production and cultural and sociological styles of exchange and interaction. Experimentation has also been at the centre of recent reassessments of the organisation of laboratory, expert and more generally epistemic cultures in the sciences. An interesting development is the shift in emphasis from the experimental as a knowledge-site to the experimental as a social process. This book brings some of the leading scholars in the fields of anthropology, social studies of science and technology, and critical design thinking, in a theoretical and ethnographic dialogue to explore the affordances of the ‘prototype’ as a figure of our contemporary. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy.

Overzicht van het werk van het Nederlandse architectenbureau

The Prototype Laboratory initiated and maintained by the Chair of Product Development at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft, has set an example in architectural education for hands-on ‘learning-by-making’ for students. According to the authors of this book, in the current curriculums time spent on practical work is not rewarded and students are educated in an abstract concept of architecture, not getting a proper feeling for materialization. A semester of designing, engineering, producing and building a prototype with their own hands after their own design often gives students a boost in their education. The Delft Prototype laboratory was the base of around 1,000 students, now professionals. Some architect’s offices make prototypes regularly as their designs are quite experimental and require more insight for the designing architect, before the realization of his building. Prototypes of technical components are often developed parallel to the building process. The Prototype Laboratory at the Faculty of Architecture was supervised for almost 18 years by Peter van Swieten. He describes his experiences in this book, in collaboration with the initiator, professor Mick Eekhout. Marcel Bilow took over the Bucky Lab, as it is called, from 2012 onwards.