During the last thirty years, the use of digital technologies in
architecture has exponentially increased. New computational tools
and methods are significantly changing the way we design and
perform our buildings.
The book analysis the current digital evolution of architecture through
a series of considerations related to several aspects of the ongoing
digital era, ranging from the problem of authorship and human
creativity in computational design to notions related to architectural
pedagogy, professional practice, and robotic construction. This
publication aims to identify an alternative and possible understanding
of architecture in the current digital era based on the relationship
between technological development and human progress

Source Books in Architecture No.14: Rem Koolhaas / OMA + AMO
Spaces for Prada is the most recent volume in the Source Books
in Architecture series. Among the topics discussed in the book
are the long-standing relationship with Prada and how the early
objectives in that relationship have both maintained and shifted.
An underlying theme to the conversations held with students and
faculty of the Knowlton School community is the topic of architectclient relationships, their history, their problems, and how they
have contributed to the discipline over time. Explicitly, a focus of
the conversation is a number of projects that OMA has developed
or completed with Prada, a large number of which are installationscale environments that manifest in the form of runway shows and
exhibitions. The challenge of such projects is to retain a commitment
to the political and cultural agenda that OMA embeds in the larger
and permanent buildings. Given the ephemerality and role of these
environments as literal backgrounds to highlighted events, the
projects are ideal scenarios in which to develop an architecture that
lacks the permanence of buildings while still carrying potency and
contributing to larger cultural discussions involving, for example,
event, place, concept, product, staging, the crowd, lighting, and
materiality.

Tramonto is a contemporary single-family home that integrates the
natural beauty of the adjacent state park and ocean views. The
placement of the home overlooks the canyon, the surrounding Santa
Monica Mountains, and the California coastline. The diffusion of the
built form defines the approach for this 17,000-sqft, single-family
residence (14,500-sqft main house and 2,500-sqft accessory
building) into the surrounding landscape. The two-acre site embraces
the steep topography, contending with the context to inform the
building’s siting and orientation. The project is terraced into the
natural contours of the hillside, breaking up the overall building mass
while using its sub-grade structure to reinforce the hillside. The book
provides a look into the 17,000-sqft home and its indoor-outdoor
lifestyle. Emphasis on significant custom elements highlights the
detail-oriented approach that can be found throughout the entirety
of the home. From the initial conceptualization of the exterior form
to the construction process and key moments, this book presents
the visual story of the home’s integration into the Southern California
landscape. Tramonto embodies a truly contemporary Southern
California attitude, the essential principles of indoor/outdoor living
afforded by embracing the temperate region and the natural beauty
of the coastal landscape.

Although the hierarchically organized office, with its claim to individual authorship, still dominates the architectural landscape, horizontally organized collectives with alternative approaches to planning and thinking about architecture are increasingly emerging.

Haute Couture Architecture: The Art of Living Without Walls by Anneke van Waesberghe is so much more than a book about tented green building architecture. The book is part design manifesto, part personal diary, and part manual for future sustainable living. One in which rampant consumerism has been replaced by a more thoughtful design from the excesses of modern times to a new state of being for living sustainably and in harmony with the rhythms of the planet. It is the tale of one woman’s odyssey living alone in the jungle finding true meaning in life and manifesting its beauty into a way of sustainable living that may set a blueprint for our future existence on Earth. The author leads readers to encounter a new paradigm by showing the luxury of simplicity and the beauty of small things.

Creatures Are Stirring is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future. The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms. Addressing a broad audience, Creatures Are Stirring uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors’ essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings’ points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.

Photographer Richard Silver traveled to 50 countries over the last decade to assemble this book of 154 exquisite photos. Talking his way into churches and cathedrals across the world, creating a truly unique photographic format, and capturing what everyone strains their neck to glimpse, Silver has published a masterpiece of religious proportions. A foreigner and non-practicer in almost every location, Silver is able to see beyond the denomination and display the epic beauty beyond (and above) the calling.

This book advances a much-needed and transformational agenda for making architecture today through a close reading of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and its material unit, the CLT blank. Both matter-of-fact and multivalent, economical and excessive, the blank has untapped potential for experimentation, innovation, and research in architecture at various scales. Blank brings together texts and work from a wide range of theorists and practitioners who make CLT central to their inquiry and, in turn, suggest design approaches that broaden the material’s cultural, spatial, and technological significance for architecture, education, engineering, and industry.

Coinciding with the 75th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations charter, this visually driven book tells the story of the special relationship between the UN and New York City through the interrelated lenses of architecture, real estate, and urban planning.

For reasons both obvious and mysterious, even as our cultural and social constructions of domesticity change, the house remains a fundamental site for advancing modern architectural theory and practice: because it accommodates a full diurnal and annual cycle of life, and because it intricately stages ritual and routine, this most private of programs has become a medium of publicity and polemic. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House both participates in and critiques this contemporary tradition. The reader’s attention in this examination is directed not only to LEVENBETTS’ houses, but to all houses, and all parts of houses—pieces of home and rhetorics of domesticity that show up in our collective memory: from a stolen moment on a staircase in a John Cassavetes film, to the sturdy knife-edged contractor modernism of suburban late to mid-twentieth-century America. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House is an accessible and universal book—everyone has a sense of home. The book includes thirteen texts on domestic pieces that make up the house, comparative diagrams, construction metrics and anecdotes, informal photos, and structural details all in the interest of taking the house apart in order to put it back together.

Article 25’s 10x10 online art auction is open for bidding and will be accessible until 8.30 pm on the 1^st of December. Now in its eleventh year, 10x10 features work from over 100 artists, architects, sculptors, photographers, and designers offering their reflections on our urban outdoor spaces and bringing together the likes of Banksy and Sir Antony Gormley, with leading architects including Sir David Adjaye. Proceeds will go towards Article 25’s humanitarian design and build projects focusing on housing, safe schools and effective clinics and hospitals worldwide.