Rem Koolhaas (born in 1944) has been part of the international architecture avant-garde since the nineteen-seventies. His numerous worldwide awards include the Pritzker Prize in 2000 for his lifetime achievement.This book interprets his many buildings and projects for the first time through his own comprehensive theoretical oeuvre, comprising polemics manifestos, books about cultural studies such as Delirious New York, and so-called “design patents”. Rem Koolhaas developed an evolutionary design method that linked theory and practice, whereby an idea is applied to several projects and combined with others in different ways, so that it is continuously evolving. The book not only combines this architectural knowledge with the intellectual history of the concepts, but also reinterprets the function of the authors or the architects and their originality.

The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme - hence, "archi(tecture)-gram."".

Der Open Call in Flandern (dem flämischsprachigen, nördlichen Teil Belgiens) ist mehr als nur ein weiterer Architekturwettbewerb: Jede Behörde oder öffentliche Einrichtung kann sich bei jedem Bauprojekt für einen Open Call entscheiden. Seit seiner Einführung durch den ersten Vlaams Bouwmeester bOb van Reeth im Jahr 2000 wurden mehr als 700 Bauaufgaben auf diese Weise ausgeschrieben und davon knapp 350 öffentliche Architektur- und Infrastrukturprojekte realisiert. Es ist an der Zeit, das Verfahren, seine Funktionsweise und die Resonanz, die es erfährt, ausführlich zu betrachten. Darüber hinaus ist die Beschäftigung mit der außergewöhnlichen Architektur öffentlicher Bauten in Flandern längst überfällig, bedenkt man ihren Vorbildcharakter für andere Länder. Celebrating Public Architecture dokumentiert anhand von 70 Beispielen aus ganz Flandern die erstaunlich hohe Qualität dieser Projekte. Die gebauten Beispiele zeigen eindrucksvoll, dass öffentliche Architektur tatsächlich zum Nachdenken anzuregen vermag und gleichzeitig gewagt, gemeinnützig und gut gemacht sein kann. Mit Bauten von 51N4E, Bovenbouw Architectuur, Dierendonckblancke, Zaha Hadid, KAAN, Maxwan, Hideyuki Nakayama, Ney & Partner, noAarchitecten, OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, RCR Arquitectes, Robbrecht en Daem, Sergison Bates, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Xaveer de Geyter und anderen

In the first volume of Makers of Modern Architecture (2007), Martin Filler examined the emergence of that revolutionary new form of building and explored its aesthetic, social, and spiritual aspirations through illuminating studies of some of its most important practitioners, from Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to, in our own time, Renzo Piano and Santiago Calatrava. Now, in Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume II, Filler continues his investigations into the building art, beginning with the historical eclecticism of McKim, Mead, and White, best remembered today for New York City’s demolished Pennsylvania Station. He surveys the seemingly inexhaustible flow of new books about Wright and Le Corbusier, and continues his commentaries on Piano’s museum buildings with an essay focused on the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles. There are less well known subjects here too, from the Frankfurt urban planner Ernst May to Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. Filler judges Edward Durell Stone—the architect of the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, the Huntington Hartford Museum in New York City, and the Kennedy Center in Washington—to have been “a middling product of his times,” however personally interesting he may have been. And he looks back at James Stirling, who in the 1970s and 1980s was “a veritable rock star of the profession,” responsible for what Filler considers some of the very few worthwhile postmodernist buildings. The essays collected here are not entirely historical, however. Filler also focuses on some of the most recent projects to have attracted critical and popular attention both in the United States and abroad, including Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building in Beijing and Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum in Athens. He argues that Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa’s New Museum in New York City is “one of those rare, clarifying works of architecture that makes most recent buildings of the same sort look suddenly ridiculous.” He calls Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s brilliant reimagining of the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia “a latter-day miracle...a virtually unimprovable setting” for its art. He finds Michael Arad’s September 11 Memorial at Ground Zero “a sobering, disturbing, heartbreaking, and overwhelming masterpiece.” And he argues that Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and their work revitalizing the High Line and Lincoln Center in New York make them today’s “shrewdest yet most sympathetic enhancers of the American metropolis.” Filler remains, in these nineteen essays, a shrewd observer of the pressures on architects and their projects—money, politics, social expectations, even the weight of their own reputations. But his focus is always on the buildings themselves, on their sincerity and directness, on their form and their function, on their capacity to bring delight to the human landscape.

From the myth of Arcadia through to the twenty-first century, ideas about sustainability – how we imagine better urban environments – remain persistently relevant, and raise recurring questions. How do cities evolve as complex spaces nurturing both urban creativity and the fortuitous art of discovery, and by which mechanisms do they foster imagination and innovation? While past utopias were conceived in terms of an ideal geometry, contemporary exemplary models of urban design seek technological solutions of optimal organisation. The Venice Variations explores Venice as a prototypical city that may hold unique answers to the ancient narrative of utopia. Venice was not the result of a preconceived ideal but the pragmatic outcome of social and economic networks of communication. Its urban creativity, though, came to represent the quintessential combination of place and institutions of its time. Through a discussion of Venice and two other works owing their inspiration to this city – Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital – Sophia Psarra describes Venice as a system that starts to resemble a highly probabilistic ‘algorithm’, that is, a structure with a small number of rules capable of producing a large number of variations. The rapidly escalating processes of urban development around our big cities share many of the motivations for survival, shelter and trade that brought Venice into existence. Rather than seeing these places as problems to be solved, we need to understand how urban complexity can evolve, as happened from its unprepossessing origins in the marshes of the Venetian lagoon to the ‘model city’ that endured a thousand years. This book frees Venice from stereotypical representations, revealing its generative capacity to inform potential other ‘Venices’ for the future.

A practical guide to research for architects and designers—now updated and expanded! From searching for the best glass to prevent glare to determining how clients might react to the color choice for restaurant walls, research is a crucial tool that architects must master in order to effectively address the technical, aesthetic, and behavioral issues that arise in their work. This book's unique coverage of research methods is specifically targeted to help professional designers and researchers better conduct and understand research. Part I explores basic research issues and concepts, and includes chapters on relating theory to method and design to research. Part II gives a comprehensive treatment of specific strategies for investigating built forms. In all, the book covers seven types of research, including historical, qualitative, correlational, experimental, simulation, logical argumentation, and case studies and mixed methods. Features new to this edition include: Strategies for investigation, practical examples, and resources for additional information A look at current trends and innovations in research Coverage of design studio–based research that shows how strategies described in the book can be employed in real life A discussion of digital media and online research New and updated examples of research studies A new chapter on the relationship between design and research Architectural Research Methods is an essential reference for architecture students and researchers as well as architects, interior designers, landscape architects, and building product manufacturers.

DIVLearning a new discipline is similar to learning a new language; in order to master the foundation of architecture, you must first master the basic building blocks of its language – the definitions, function, and usage. Language of Architecture provides students and professional architects with the basic elements of architectural design, divided into twenty-six easy-to-comprehend chapters. This visual reference includes an introductory, historical view of the elements, as well as an overview of how these elements can and have been used across multiple design disciplines./divDIV /divDIVWhether you’re new to the field or have been an architect for years, you’ll want to flip through the pages of this book throughout your career and use it as the go-to reference for inspiration, ideas, and reminders of how a strong knowledge of the basics allows for meaningful, memorable, and beautiful fashions that extend beyond trends./divDIV /divDIVThis comprehensive learning tool is the one book you’ll want as a staple in your library./divDIV /div