The PAX Monographs editorial team is pleased to announce the second issue in the series: I.M. PEI in CAIRO.

DESIGN HYPOTHESIS
How architecture can adapt to the times considering the COVID-19 pandemic and the adverse effects of Climate change.

Videos

With the success of ArcAce architecture competitions, and all the wonderful and creative work and designs we received. ArcAce is happy to let you in on our next competition! 😍

Videos

Archstorming is launching a new competition in partnership with the NGO Kakolum. We will travel to Casamance, a region in Senegal marked by an identity conflict that started more than 30 years ago and continues to this day. This region, located between Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, faces several challenges, one of which is the lack of classrooms for primary and secondary school children.

Brief: The challenge of the competition is to design a lodging center by repurposing steel grain bins in an innovative way.

SPACE10, IKEA’s research and design lab in Copenhagen, introduce its newest exhibition Kaleidoscopic Home. The exhibition brings the digital platform EverydayExperiments.com to life for the first time to explore how playful interventions in our home can enrich our physical and mental well-being.

Videos

International Symposium
“Industry | Spatial Planning | Design for the Productive Space”
3 sessions, 2 keynotes, 12 speakers

Author: Joseph L. Clarke (University of Toronto, Department of Art History)
Moderated by Mitchell Akiyama (University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty)

Editor: Fadi Masoud (University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty)

Streets in the sky, prefab panel housing estates, raw concrete flying saucers, corn cob-shaped tower blocks; these are some of the constructions that recast Eastern and Central European urban landscapes after WWII.
This playful and engaging book allows readers to explore and learn about the brutalist and modernist architecture erected in the former Eastern Bloc and ex-Yugoslavia, and build some of their most intriguing edifices, from the massive housing estates in Moscow to the brutal skyline of Tbilisi.

In the South of France, sited on a hill of olive trees, pinus pinea, and a vineyard, a family retreat was designed with a key mission
of maintaining the vitality of the site. A small agricultural plot, the
site offered the possibility of amplification. With the introduction
of a garden and many outdoor living spaces, the family had the intention of cultivating the landscape as part of their stewardship. In part a response to a programmatic brief, but moreover, a discursive response to architectural predicaments of geometry, typology, and anomaly, the house is also a response to Preston Scott Cohen’s pedagogies on architecture.

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/1916348366715/WN_ZftnyPALSbqSpzJXb6toOg

Drawing from the unique design experience at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG) as architects of the next world’s tallest tower and several others under-construction, Supertall | Megatall: How High Can We Go? highlights the design, sustainability, innovative technology, programming, and contextualism that
defines supertall and megatall towers. The book is a mixture of under construction and design-only projects divided into several chapters that are organized according to their special characteristics: Innovative Systems, Harnessing Energies, Designing an Icon, Extending Ecologies, and Achieving Megatall. Each project, completed between 2007–2020 at AS+GG, is discovered
through context, program, form, research and development, and performance, highlighting the stories, challenges, and lessons learned.

Urbanism Beyond 2020 explores numerous questions triggered by
the COVID-19 pandemic: Why is city making a health project? How
are ecological and human wellbeing interrelated? How can leadership
and governance help bridge gaps in our unjust cities? How might
we renew our relationship with dwellings and neighborhoods? How
resilient and adaptable are our cities during uncertain times? Amidst
climate change and global warming, is the pandemic a prelude to
the challenges to come?
Addressed to anyone invested in the well-being of our cities, this
collection of essays by an accomplished urban designer and city
planner reminds us why the pointers to our future will not emerge
exclusively from affluent nations or less developed societies alone,
why we live in an interconnected world, and why this pandemic is a
crucial period to reexamine the impact of our cities on our planet’s
future.

This book arose from two observations: that building design in these first decades of the 21st century has come to accept and pursue some increasingly odd and disturbing trends; and that there seems to be insufficient architectural criticism that calls these trends to account. Its mission is to take up that neglected role with respect
to some specific exemplars of these trends, with subjects coming primarily from the worlds of commercial and institutional architecture. Numerous critiques of individual projects, all with hand-drawn illustrations, are presented under main headings of Obscuration, Fragmentation, Deformation, and Degradation. The book takes a somewhat acerbic tone, to distance the narrative from the rather serious and high-minded approach to written material that the subject seems prey to.

This book examines the urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo as
a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop. These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world’s cities.
This book examines five of these patterns that appear conspicuously throughout Tokyo: yokochō alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, low-rise dense neighborhoods, and the river-
like ankyo streets. Unlike many of the discussions on Tokyo that emphasize cultural uniqueness, this book aims at transcultural validity, with a focus on empirical analysis of the spatial and social conditions that allow these patterns to emerge. The authors of Emergent Tokyo acknowledge the distinct character of Tokyo without essentializing or fetishizing it, offering visitors, architects, and urban policy practitioners an unparalleled understanding of Tokyo’s urban landscape.

Philosophy exercises a massive influence on contemporary architectural culture and the understanding of the built environment. Discussions of architects and architectural academics are heavily loaded with theoretical ideas, concepts and views imported from the works of philosophers. At the same time this architectural employment of philosophy rarely goes beyond the tendency to mine philosophical works for ideas, words and phrases and use them, often without much understanding, in order to promote architectural agendas and embellish theoretical claims made by architects and academics. The book presents the history of this phenomenon
for the past hundred years. It describes and analyzes numerous examples of false intellectual pretense across prominent architectural influences of the era and their efforts to bamboozle readers, colleagues and the general public.