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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.

In 1986, the New York Times called William Zeckendorf Jr. “Manhattan’s most active real-estate developer,” a judgment borne out by Zeckendorf’s fascinating memoir. The second generation of
a legendary family of developers, “Bill” Zeckendorf was a developer with a social conscience, not only putting up buildings but opening neglected parts of the city and transforming whole communities. Among the projects Zeckendorf chronicles in detail—and with rich documentary illustrations—are the Columbia, which set off a building boom on the Upper West Side; the four-acre Worldwide Plaza, a landmark in West Midtown; Queens West, the first residential project on the waterfront in Queens; the enormous Ronald Reagan Office Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.; and numerous projects in Santa Fe, his beloved second home.

This book examines the social, political, and cultural factors that have and continue to influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Reaching beyond the disciplines of architecture and urban design, Occupation:Boundary distills the dual roles art and culture have played in relation to the urban waterfront, as mediums that have recorded and instigated change at the threshold between the city and the sea.
At the moment in time that demands innovative approaches to the transformation of urban waterfronts, and strategies to foster resilient boundaries, architect Cathy Simon recounts her career building at and around the water’s edge and in service of the public realm. In so doing, the work of contemporary architects is presented, while the origins and principles of a guiding design philosophy are located in meditations on art and observations on coastal cities around the world. The port cities of New York and San Francisco emerge as case studies that structure the reflections and mediate a narrative that is at once a professional and personal memoir, richly illustrated with images and drawings.
Comprising three parts, the first two corresponding parts of Occupation:Boundary draw connections between the past and present by tracing the rise and fall of urban, industrial ports and providing context—in the forms of textual and visual media—for
their recent transformations. Such reinterpretations, achieved via design, often serve the public through environmentally conscious strategies realized through inventive approaches to cultural and recreational programs. The work of visual artists, both historical and contemporary, appears alongside architecture, poetry, and literary references that illustrate and draw connections between each of these sections. The third section features select architectural work by the author, framed by critic John King and the architect and urbanist Justine Shapiro-Kline. Introduced with a foreword by the prominent landscape architect Laurie Olin, Occupation:Boundary draws on artistic and cultural intuitions and the experience of an architect whose practice negotiates the boundary between urban contexts and the bodies of water that sustain them. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence
the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.

MASTERcrit was inaugurated in 2015 as a hybrid series of events that encompassed lectures, critiques and a charrette. Modeled on the traditional notion of a “Master Class” the workshop enlisted the best graduating students from the school as nominated by the faculty to work in an intensive pedagogic setting with a world-class practitioner. The so-called invited “MASTERcritics” were MOS in 2015, Andrew Zago in 2016, and Jürgen Mayer H. in 2017. In all cases, these architects were tasked with presenting a project brief to the team, which reflected a current pre-occupation in their own discursive production. Students in turn were asked to produce artifacts that manifested their responses. In addition to documentation of the workshops and resultant work, the book includes the briefs and transcripts of conversations.

RESIDENSITY: A Carbon Analysis of Residential Typologies is the culmination of a seven-year study analyzing nine building typologies to understand the relationships between building densities and the amount of land and infrastructure required to support them. The book investigates how much embodied and consumed carbon is used in each typology and how it affects density and open space from the viewpoint of sustainability, carbon emissions, and carbon sequestration. The study determines which building typology is
the most sustainable on a comparative basis. Nine prototypical buildings were designed—Megatall, Supertall, High-Rise, Mid-Rise, Low-rise, Courtyard, Three-Flat, Urban Single-Family, and Suburban Single-Family—set within nine prototypical communities. The study designates an archetypal residential community of 2,000 units with an average unit size of 150 sm as a reasonable and representative cross section of different housing typologies.

Shaped Places of Carroll County, New Hampshire expands upon an award-winning speculative urban design project by the architecture and design practice EXTENTS, led by McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo. The project investigates the complex reciprocity between who we are and the shape of where we live; between identities and the built environments that support them. In doing so, Shaped Places creates a dialogue between seemingly disparate discourses spanning from critical geography, to formalist art criticism, to the urbanization strategies of the early twentieth-century Russian avant garde. The role of the rural-urban divide in affirming the divided political landscape in the United States is a central theme in the work. The project culminates in the design of three linear cities in Carroll County, New Hampshire. In each speculative urban design proposal, rural and urban patterns of development and divergent lifestyles are combined in urban design proposals intended to produce a functional body politic from a sharply divided population.

Since the mid-1990s, when China allowed its architects to practice independently from government-run design institutes, a new kind of architecture, distinguished by unique regional characteristics, has emerged. China Dialogues is a rigorously selected collection of insightful interviews that the book’s author Vladimir Belogolovsky has conducted with 21 leading Chinese architects during his extensive travels in China. At the time when so many buildings that are being built around the world are no longer rooted in their place and culture, the leading Chinese architects succeeded collectively in producing unique architectural body of work that could not be confused with any other regional school. The interviews are accompanied by over 120 photographs and drawings of beautifully executed projects built throughout China since early 2000s. China Dialogues opens up the thinking process of the country’s top architects, as they share their ideas, insights, intentions, and visions in unusually revealing and candid ways.

Working Water demonstrates better approaches of managing urban water resources in ways that support more efficient water use, clean urban runoff, support natural systems, and enhance the vitality and livability of our cities. Exploring the potentials of urban water resources is an important part of Wenk Associates’ practice, and the focus of this book.

For a long period of time, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people, and for people only. Today, as some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative research still struggles to emerge. This book collects, reconstructs, and discusses archetypal models of posthuman architecture, from the cabin of Henry David Thoreau to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This book aims to show how architectural, landscape, and industrial designers, be they professional practitioners or not, redefined their tools in order to meet the functional and symbolic needs of new and different kinds of subjects. All this in ten monographic architectural tales, thought to trace the evolution of an extended idea of coexistence between humans and other species or technologies.

Emerging from the vivid landscape of California’s Central Valley, architect Maria Ogrydziak’s iconic, light-filled houses reflect a region where growth abounds, rich soil runs deep, and blue sky goes on and on. She designs for a new California dream, outside the hustle of the big cities, far from the deep turquoise of the Pacific.

As you crest the ridge, the green valley below and the ocean beyond come into view. This is Shobac, a seaside village featuring an ensemble of buildings that, on first glance, looks like a monumental work of Land Art. What is this place? A fishing village from the future? A monastery teleported here from another planet? A utopian colony with a message for the world?

In a world that fetishizes aesthetic frivolity and iconographic bombast at the expense of substance and nuance, the critically acclaimed work of Johnsen Schmaling Architects stands out for its conceptual rigor, profound simplicity, and quiet repose. Formally restrained and informed by innovative tectonic and material experimentations, Johnsen Schmaling’s precisely crafted architecture creates poetic atmospheres of enduring clarity.

Within the human-machine collaborations cultivated in the digital age, crafts and materials are playing an increasingly important role in forming various ways of matter aggregation for architecture. Based on the pedagogical exploration of the design studio—Matter Aggregation at UVA, the book seeks new values of wood craft for contemporary architectural design, by introducing digital design and robotic fabrication techniques into the design process for timber building. The book integrates explorations of traditional crafts with digital fabrication technique, establishing a digital crafting as a new field for contemporary practice. The book explores the computational mechanisms and diagrammatic grammar within these craft-based aggregation systems, paying close attention to geometrical configurations, material effects and fabrication details and take advantage of these qualities to produce a unique spatiality.