Following the success of the inaugural call for entries, which produced the Pamphlets 23–30, Pamphlet Architecture, with renewed support from the National Endowment for the Arts, announces the 2014 competition.
I recently got the chance to review Pamphlet Architecture Coupling / Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism. From bringing a terminal lake back to life and using landfills as an open space connectors to actively anticipating the future of the Caspian Sea’s oil rig field and turning Canada’s northern regions into a more active destination, this work explores ways infrastructures can become soft multivalent systems instead of the hard systems we see today. This challenges the antiquated ideas of buildings simply being geometric formal objects. With the interconnected world, buildings themselves have become infrastructural to the larger systems. Keller Easterling states, “No longer simply what is hidden or beneath another urban structure, many infrastructures are the urban formula, the very parameters of global urbanism.”
Table of Contents following the break.
By addressing the capacity to cope, the ability to bounce back, and the mitigation and management of risk, proposals are welcome that showcase a fresh understanding of the possibilities and opportunities of resilience in architecture, from the large to the small scale. Whether resilience stems from natural disaster, civil conflict, global warming, catastrophe, and so on, is the applicant’s discretion. Please visit the submission site for more details.
