Search results for ""Oro Editions""
Oro Editions Landscape Architecture Frontiers 050: Persistent Landscapes
Landscape is a time-space compound shaped by human activities on natural processes; the persistence of a landscape supports its continuity and stability over time, as well as the stable variety of physical environment. For remaining landscapes, the persistence means the stability of natural ecosystems and the harmony of cultural-social contexts. The former emphasises the ability to maintain the dynamism and stability of the landscape system against external disturbances; the latter one, by regarding the landscape as a man-land composite ecosystem, refers to the ability to maintain localities and cultural legacy in response to changes of natural and social environments. For emerging landscapes, persistence manifests the ability to interact and integrate with and adapt to the remaining landscapes. The rapid urbanisation and population growth have caused tremendous changes in urban and rural landscapes worldwide, increasingly undermining the persistence of landscapes: traditional rural landscapes and urban historic neighbourhoods have been replaced with massive industrial scenes; the lack of innovative design ideas, the stagnation of theoretical study, and the limitation of aesthetic awareness have resulted in the neglect of critical ecological, social, and aesthetic values of such heritages, the damage of ecological security patterns, and the disappear of people’s collective memories about vernacular landscapes. Efforts addressing the pressing issues, e.g. the destruction of natural environment, the loss of landscape values, and the culture shock, are expected. Text in English and Chinese.
£26.96
Oro Editions Invisible
Invisible is a book on St. Louis design practice, Axi:Ome led by Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim. A collection of essays, built, unbuilt and conceptual projects which maps the trajectory of the last seven years of work from 2015 through 2022. The book covers 24 projects in different cultures and landscapes around the world with various programs and scales. Nader Tehrani, Eric Mumford, Alan Balfour, Jennifer Yoos, Nanako Umemoto, and Jessie Reiser provide insightful texts supporting and articulating critical frameworks of Axi:Ome, while defining a discourse of complexities in contemporary practice that is emerging from academic expectations. The book documents the invisible ethos that constructs a project in an intricate world that challenges practitioners to re-think and re-examine how they position into architectural spectrum. Invisible cartographs and chronicles the legitimisation of architectural practice that engages the pedago
£44.96
Oro Editions 57 Pavilions
57 Pavilions is a 21st century manual documenting architectural design research at PennDesign examining new potentials for part to whole assemblies where experiments in material expression, morphology, performance and culture fuse with advanced digital design processes and fabrication to produce full-scale architectural consequences. Through the presentation of 54 half-scale pavilion projects and three full-scale pavilions a novel approach is laid out for generating higher ordered physical assemblies. The formations produce a new role of parts, material processes, and aggregations yielding a more autonomous character as discrete objects in a larger assembly. As the pavilion research moves into the world in full-scale installations, these new part to whole relationships provoke unexpected engagement with occupants, the environment, and the larger cultural context.
£16.16
Oro Editions First Additions
Like many small residential practices Illinois-based Cohen & Hacker Architects have made a career of doing house additions. In a practice spanning almost 40 years they have evolved strategies for making additions that represent both a theoretical and philosophical position about altering older buildings. They believe that recycling existing houses, retrofitting them to meet new energy standards, preserving their embodied energy as well as their cultural significance is the most sustainable way to practice architecture. The projects included in this book seamlessly and often invisibly extend the fabric of an existing house. Cohen & Hacker's remodelled architectural interiors, while respectful of the character and scale of the existing house, transform these spaces with ideas taken from modern design, creating spatially open floor plans with traditional details based on the existing architecture. To help illustrate what Cohen & Hacker describe as transformation, this book conta
£44.96
Oro Editions Imaginary Wilds
The myth of a wild, untouched landscape is persistent in American history. Imaginary wilds helped define an American identity in the early nineteenth century when Thomas Cole produced a series of masterwork paintings of American landscapes. And today the myth of imaginary wilds continues to have a major influence on attitudes toward landscape, nature, and the use of resources extracted from the earth. This book presents a series of student-designed architectural projects for a new gallery building sited within the landscape of Cedar Grove, Thomas Cole's historic home and studio in Catskill, New York. Cole's artistic legacy can be interpreted in different ways because he was concerned with landscapes and nature as both material and ideal conditions. Complexities arising from considering landscapes and nature as both real and ideal create a productive frame for exploring how architects might design buildings in relation to landscapes and nature. Throughout the book, these relationship
£26.96
Oro Editions Working in Industrial Los Angeles
Photographs of actual people at work in various industries in Los Angeles and its environs: cloth, wood, metal, oil, and chemicals. Most of us have little sense of how the stuff of our lives is actually manufactured and the places where that happens. Los Angeles is one of the premier industrial concentrations in the United States. This book shows the reader just what they ordinarily do not see. Krieger has visited hundreds of industrial sites in the Los Angeles area. He is invited in about a third of the time, and then he systematically photographs the people — at work — who make clothing, furniture, chemicals, metal parts, as well as those working at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and at the iconic County Hospital of Los Angeles. Up close, we discover the actual work that people do, and the places where they do that work.
£26.96
Oro Editions The Labyrinth of Rooms
The Labyrinth of Rooms is a story with one character, Human, who is an allegorical representation of us all. Human suddenly awakes in a square room with no memory of a prior life. A corridor leads them from that room to the next, then another, and so on until they reach the end of a 63-room labyrinth. As the journey progresses, Human contemplates their surroundings, studying the unique shape of each room and how it affects their thoughts, feelings, and actions. To understand the significance of the rooms' architecture, Human engages in different types of thinking: questioning why the rooms were designed as such, imagining situations the rooms can host, praising what they find geometrically pleasing, speculating about the nature of the labyrinth, and even complaining about their forced existence within it. This variety is reflected in the writing of the book, which intentionally juxtaposes different genres, including storytelling, philosophical reasoning, di
£17.06
Oro Editions The City as a Technical Being: On the Mode of Existence of Architecture
The city is the largest human artefact. It is made by us, yet simultaneously it makes us, as well as all other nonhuman entities. The particular discourse to which this book on the city contributes is the discipline of architecture. It explores a simple question: How does the city effect the mode of existence of its buildings? The tradition within architectural history that identifies the city as the origin of our buildings poses a challenge to us, as architects, to theorise about the city’s form and use in order to rationalise our own actions. In opposition to other disciplinary approaches to the city and its architecture, the book argues not for type (Rossi, Ungers) as the deepest aspect of the architecture of the city. Neither will it be the function (Venturi & Scott Brown, Koolhaas) of the city to explain its material organisation, nor is matter considered (Jacobs, Banham) to be deeper than the real city. Instead, this book argues that the mode of existence of architecture is inherent to the city itself, which originates its architecture as part of its being as a technical object.
£27.00
Oro Editions Writings on the Asian City: Framing an Inclusive Approach to Urban Design
The book examines the contemporary Asian city through the prism of urban design in assimilating new and established drivers of growth. This includes intensified forms of residential development, specialised commercial centres and technology parks, that drive the momentum of the contemporary city, while acting to restructure and reshape forms of capital investment. New spatial patterns are facilitated by tranches of urban expansion, redevelopment, regeneration and suburbanisation that have emerged as by-products of both formal and informal development processes. The book also examines the Asian city language embodied in the local morphology — the essential values of the street, block, temple precinct and monument, and how these can be incorporated as drivers of new urban identities that relate to the changing culture and configuration of city neighbourhoods. All of these continue to impose different levels of impact on the creation of livable cities and the quality of life for their inhabitants. In this way urban design can look to the future while respecting the past. The book frames a perspective on the urban design challenges presented by the rapidly expanding and regenerating Asian cities, and how these can be shaped by memory, meaning and identity while meeting sustainable, resilient and community concerns.
£25.20
Oro Editions Layered Landscapes: The Photographic Art of Jenny Okun
“Okun has extended her gaze to encompass horticulture and the drama of the natural world, while exploiting the potential of digital photography to create subtler impressions of mountains and ocean, clouds and gardens, foliage and cacti.” — Michael Webb Layered Landscapes is a collection of essays and photographs of our beautiful world from just outside our homes all the way to the heavens. The book has introductions by Michael Webb (architecture writer) and Craig Krull (gallerist). Craig Krull aptly points out that Okun’s photographs are a “reconstructed harmony into what we believed to be a ‘real’ landscape.” He writes that “her work has always defined the point that landscapes do not exist in nature, but only in our minds.” Okun’s artwork is a mixture of multiple layers that present a memory of the places she has visited on her many travels. The photographs are as poetic as the essays. Griff Rhys Jones (writer, actor, presenter) explores the colour blue. Kathy Lette (author) becomes a cloud on an Australian beach. Thea Musgrave (composer) explains a tempest in musical notes. Tania Compton (garden designer) talks about meadows balancing wild and formal gardens. Caleb Leech (landscape Gardener) writes about medieval gardens. Annie Gatti (garden writer) and Steve Reich (writer and producer) both talk about happiness in gardening. James Forrest (writer) climbs mountains to become calmer. Richard Sparks (writer, director) and Lee Holdridge (Composer) discuss Okun’s projected design for opera. Layered Landscapes is a meditation on our earthly desires.
£58.50
Oro Editions Pressing Matters 11
Number 11 in the series, this book takes a look back at the academic year 2021-2022 in the Architecture Department of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Summer term welcomes incoming students who do not have a background or degree in architecture and brings them up to speed with Digital Workshops, where they acquire digital design skill sets that are integral to a contemporary approach to design as they enter their first year in graduate school. From there, they will learn how to produce analog materials, such as drawings and models, and then take a summer studio where they will study a site and begin to design a building for that site. This book showcases the three levels of our MArch Program – 500, 600, & 700 – of select students’ work in each of the faculty’s studio sections in both fall and spring. Included are descriptions of the various courses and electives on offer. Also highlighted are various events, such as lectures, book launches, and conferences which took place over the two semesters. There are multiple distinct programs in which students can earn a post-professional degree. The MSD-AAD (Advanced Architectural Design), MSD-EBD (Environmental Building Design), MSD-RAS (Robotics and Autonomous Systems), PhD, and IPD (Integrated Product Design) all have examples of students’ work and original designs.
£29.25
Oro Editions Figments of the Architectural Imagination: And Other Essays
Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary. These sharp and insightful texts, whether addressing the impact of digital technology, the design of an effective hotel, the emergence of the Los Angeles vanguard, or the proper execution of a thesis project, combine frontline reportage, archival scholarship, trenchant prose, and impressive critical acumen to cut through the cacophony of recent architectural discourse with uncommon clarity, intelligence, rigor, and wit. Taken together, these essays provide essential orientation for practitioners, academics, students, and aficionados hoping to understand how contemporary architecture came to be where it is and to speculate on where it might go next.
£26.96
Oro Editions Lifestyle Architecture: Legacy Homes for Generations
This book is a dedication to the work and sure process of Affiniti Architects. Their architectural design process is critical to achieving a high level of design quality, which legacy homes require. Affiniti Architects spotlight the key elements that mould the overall image of legacy architecture for generations. From analysing site plans to capturing the essence of indoor-outdoor living, the firm showcases the fluidity of design that they’ve accomplished through the years.
£31.50
Oro Editions digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future
digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future provokes a larger body of work that engages with digital property and data infrastructures. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies.” There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. If our everyday objects are digital and no longer physical, how does it challenge ecological questions? How does this affect the future of urban living? The case-studies, interviews, and guest contributions prompt discussions that were part of the CityX Venice, Sezione del Padiglione Italia, at the 17th La Biennale di Venezia. Guest contributors were prompted to challenge and provoke the topics that are questioning the issues of open innovation models that operate a city, robotics and artificial intelligent systems, supply chains affected by digital storage, and data infrastructural arguments that play a large role within our Web 3.0 urban digital and real landscapes. Using a mixed-media approach, the book couples a novel exploration of XR (mixed-reality) and AR (augmented reality) into diagrammatic mapping and graphical cartography, and how data interacts with various open innovation models in digital property and real property.
£26.96
Oro Editions The Story of a Section: Designing the Shougang Oxygen Factory
This book is an experiment on constructing a text starting — exclusively and strictly — from the materials of an architectural project. As in an archive, it contains all the documents produced by the design team, which become the only sources of a text that allows the reader to generalise the project’s contents and reflect on its process. An extensive masterplan is transforming the abandoned industrial area of Shougang, on the outskirts of Beijing, into one of the venues for the 2022 Winter Olympics Games. Within this process, the China Room, as a research centre of the Politecnico di Torino dedicated to urbanisation and architecture in China, was involved by Tsinghua University in the transformation of the former oxygen factory into a visitor centre, working on industrial memory as a lever for a renovation of the existing aimed at the overall sustainability of the masterplan. The book overviews and analyses the most important steps that transformed initial design intentions into a defined proposal, passing through different solutions, changes, debates, and negotiations among the different stakeholders called into action along the whole process. Telling the story of this architectural project means thinking about the ways of designing across different contexts in the global market. More particularly, the story is about the skills and experiences that Academia puts in place by addressing real transformation projects through research, with respect to professional practice modalities. In addition, the book is intended to make design practicing transparent to the reader, capable to move around the genesis of the project following the many trajectories occurred along the whole process, similarly to an open archive: retrospectively the final image of the building will incorporate architectural elements brought by socio-technical decisions, enlarging the spectrum of design agency from single authorship to a larger collective of involved stakeholders. Among the project documents, a recurring drawing guided the project exchange between the Politecnico and Tsinghua teams during the two years of joint design work. The cross-section of the factory was the point of comparison about the relationship with the structural skeleton of the original factory and the vertical organisation of the project: from the public playground on the ground floor to the intensive exploitation of the intermediate levels, to the roof that seeks new relationships with the competition area and the natural landscape.
£26.96
Oro Editions Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop V
This book chronicles experimental approaches to the design and production of architectural terra cotta facades and structures. Under the auspices of the Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop (ACAW), a research collaborative supported by Boston Valley Terra Cotta, the largest manufacturer of architectural terra cotta in the United States, architectural firms work with manufacturing to explore material and design innovation. Now in its fifth year, the workshop aims to educate architects about terra cotta through the production of unique prototypes of rain screen facade systems, modular assemblies, columns, and structural systems. Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop V chronicles the work of architectural firms Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), LMN Architects, Smith + Gill Architecture, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Perkins and Will, PLP Architecture, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), Studio Gang, and academic teams Haptek Lab and Alfred University/University at Buffalo.
£19.76
Oro Editions I Love Chicago's Buildings: A Selective Guide to the City
The book is not a typical guidebook, nor a generic history tale and not even a disguised autobiography. It is a listing of select pairs of buildings that each articulates a formal and abstract concept that is part of the culture of architecture, spelled with a capital a. The main idea of the book is to hide the bitter pill of academic formal analysis in a dollop of sugary personal anecdotes and humour. Hopefully, this will be creating unexpected juxtapositions that might elicit shock and new perceptions, cancelling the sleepy accepted dogma we all live under. The essays will be paring the famous and the infamous, the profound and the absurd, the beloved and the forgotten, the monstrous and the miniscule.
£19.76
Oro Editions Landscape Architecture Frontiers 049: Urban Wilderness and Planting Design
There are highly fragmented urban wildernesses remaining and scattering in rapidly urbanised and exceedingly industrialised cities, ranging from crevices along sidewalks to large areas of isolated forests. Although differing in scales with the natural wilderness, urban wildernesses see similar community structures and often offer similar services, with strong vitality and resilience. However, such natural resources are often misunderstood or overlooked as undesirable places and thus, their great ecological, social, economic, and aesthetic values are ignored. Meanwhile, due to constant changes of global and regional ecological environments, lagged design theories and techniques, and limited aesthetic consciousness, urban plantscapes—the most important producer with provisioning and regulating services for both urban wildernesses and constructed ecosystems—are confronting problems such as poor species and structural diversity, high maintenance requirements, and insufficient ecosystem services. This issue hopes to interpret and display the treasured qualities of urban wildernesses and inspire landscape architects to strike the balance between urban wildernesses and human settlements via ecological planting methods that facilitate natural evolution and ecological flows. Landscape Architecture Frontiers attempts to define an “urban wilderness” and its images, connotations, implications, and resources; explore related techniques to provide full play to its irreplaceable role in providing ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation; and focus on urban re-wilding practices and ecological planting theories, aiming at well integrating urban wildernesses into the naturally constructed urban ecosystem to enhance the city’s ecological sustainability and resilience.
£26.06
Oro Editions Performance + Assembly: The Experience of Space
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture’s Performance + Assembly: The Experience of Space covers a range of performance and assembly spaces designed by AS+GG from central spaces in the world’s largest expositions to small, flexible high-technology theatres to expressive and functional auditoriums. The book of global cultural work includes building designs from Chicago to Istanbul, Astana to Dubai and features both photography of built spaces and unbuilt ideas. In this book Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture reviews projects to answer questions that relate to how buildings can be used to enhance the experiences of the users beyond set programmatic requirements by asking questions like: How can architecture and design help advance the technologies, the operations, the program, and the way buildings perform? At a more sensorial and experiential level, the book explores how architecture can speak to the soul to create a place in between the art and the audience.
£29.66
Oro Editions Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House
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-20th century America. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a House is an accessible and universal book — everyone has a sense of home. The book includes 13 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.
£29.66
Oro Editions How Architecture Tells: 9 Realities that will Change the Way You See
The general reading public is likely to think of architecture as buildings. But, with this book, Robert Steinberg would like to help readers understand that architecture shapes lives. Architecture can help communities integrate and thrive. Architecture can touch us, influencing how we feel, and how we interact with others. In short, architecture can fundamentally improve our quality of life. As a young graduate architect fresh from Berkeley, Steinberg began to discover the potential of architecture to shape communities. Working with his father, an architect who had studied with Mies van der Roe (and whose father was also an architect), one of Steinberg’s first projects was to draft and redraft a parking garage in downtown Silicon Valley, CA. As he mediated between the two architects in charge of the project — his father and the city architect — he noticed that with each evolution, the garage became more beautiful and refined. And with each improvement, this garage became more able to succeed in the goal of reviving the dying downtown core of Silicon Valley. The garage was a huge success, and Steinberg began to codify what he had learned. Thanks to the garage, he wrote the first of what would become the 9 Realities of Architecture: Architecture is the Pursuit of Perfection — a magnificent take-away from a humble parking garage project. As Steinberg eventually rose to become CEO of his firm and grew it into a global practice with six regional offices including Austin and New York, and a major office in Shanghai, he used his drive for creating thriving communities to eventually touch the lives of countless people around the world.
£40.50
Oro Editions The Aesthetics of Contemporary Planting Design
Planting design is, rather obviously, a complex topic, spanning as it does art, science, social need, and morality - especially during these days of increasing planetary environmental threat. Although certainly not denying the importance of scientifically appropriate practices, the symposium “The Aesthetics of [Contemporary] Planting Design” addressed planting design today, proposing a renewed concern for the cultural and aesthetic aspects of the landscapes that result. This book, which has been developed from the original presentations at the symposium, presents the thoughts of a select international group of landscape architects and historians who discuss the subject of planting design through the lens of their own work as well as the work of others, both contemporary and historical. They suggest that, as in real estate, the most important factor in selecting plants is “location, location, location.” Certainly the Californian situation is far more forgiving than the aridity and other restrictive environmental conditions endemic to the Sonoran desert, or the frost and short growing seasons of Nordic lands that direct Scandinavian landscape architects to rely on native birches, pines, rowan, and moss. Most of us would agree that there are plants sensible for each climatic zone. Addressing environmental conditions is but the first step in the equation, however. There are also the issues of combination and composition.
£33.30
Oro Editions Johnsen Schmaling: On Rigor
In a world that fetishises 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. Johnsen Schmaling: On Rigor is the firm’s first monograph and provides an in-depth look at thirteen seminal residential and commercial projects. The book reveals how the architects’ unique reading of context and cultural memory translates into an abstract palette of architectural operations that guide the entire design process, from initial concepts to intricate, meticulously detailed material assemblies.The crisply designed book features beautiful photography and delightful graphics that Illustrate how the projects came to life.
£23.36
Oro Editions Ailing Cities: History, Assessment, and Remedy
Ailing Cities is a book written largely to educate and facilitate a dialogue with people of all backgrounds on environmental sustainability, architecture, urban planning, and design. It has been necessitated by urban ills in Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries. Urbanisation has led to the creation of informal settlements within communities in sub-Saharan countries that are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, coupled with the lack of enforcement of planning and building laws that have resulted in spatial chaos and vegetative depletion. Ailing Cities addresses relevant topics essential to give the reader an understanding of how individuals and communities can bring lasting changes to their communities.
£19.76
Oro Editions Practice Practice
The business of architecture - shaped by anti-trust legislation and pro-corporate governmental policies - has created an extractive, inequitable, and precarious environment for its practitioners. These pressures have led many small firms, which make up roughly three quarters of architecture offices in the United States, to adopt diverse, ad-hoc organisational and survival strategies. In their very precarity, these small firms offer fertile grounds to test more resilient structures. One such model, the worker cooperative, offers a critical mode of practice that is equitable, democratic, and addresses the systemic inequalities that plague the profession. Practice Practice addresses the parallel trajectories of cooperatives in the United States and the professionalisation of architecture. This contextual background highlights the coincident struggles of the labour movement and the emergence of the architectural corporation. Within this context, the cooperative model is presented as a challenge to the prevailing conditions of the profession. Logistical frameworks for creating an architectural cooperative - including diagrams, sample operating agreements, and bylaws - are offered for any firm looking to transition or incorporate anew. The book projects the social, economic, and aesthetic benefits of the architectural cooperative by taking stock of cooperatives in other industries. Finally, Practice Practice presents a vision for a cooperative network of small architecture firms as imagined in collaboration with the Architecture Lobby. This book situates, celebrates, and envisions a future for small firms. Throughout the book, interviews, office visits, site visits, and field notes document encounters with over twenty such firms. These offices demonstrate the subversive agency harnessed by small firms. If the cooperative model were to infiltrate such sites, the nature of practice and industry would transform. Built work would reflect ever more diverse sensibilities, minority workers' voices would be uplifted, and workers would earn equity through ownership. Architects would enter the solidarity economy, transforming their communities.
£17.06
Oro Editions Almost, Not: The Architecture of Atelier Nishikata
Almost, Not: The Architecture of Atelier Nishikata is the story of a remarkable architecture practice in Tokyo. Partners Reiko Nishio and Hirohito Ono have built just four residential works, until now remaining little-known outside of Japan. But the extraordinary, almost-ordinary quality of their work warrants the spotlight. It has much to teach students of architecture and experienced architects alike. This book is a hybrid between an architectural monograph and a magic instruction book. Author Leslie Van Duzer, a former magician’s assistant and author of four monographs on 20th-century architecture, draws parallels between the effects and methods of architects and magicians. The introductory essay, “Almost, Not,” presents an overview of Atelier Nishikata’s approach, describing the effects engendered by their architecture and the methods behind the them. The essay is followed by four detailed project descriptions that elaborate on the strategies behind the work. These texts are richly illustrated with process work, diagrams, detailed drawings, and photographs, including before and after views of the renovated spaces, and views post-inhabitation. The volume closes with a lengthy interview with the architects to help flesh out the methods behind their madness.
£23.85
Oro Editions Complements: Eloquence of Small Objects
Complements is a gem, an intimate book to be savoured on first readings and held near as a resource on what is meaningful. It contains 110 luscious photos of small objects juxtaposed in ways that evoke emotions, thoughts, questions, and remembrance of beauty. The photographs tell stories, make wry jokes, and allude to the larger realities of the esoteric. As complements, the objects are more than the sum of their parts. A sentence or two of text accompanies each photograph, creating storylines that draw the viewer into the world of the objects as strongly as if the objects were human, except their not being human allows the viewer a purer sense of the message of their story. David Hume Kennerly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, says in the foreword, “The narrative and pictures reunite twins separated at birth.” The photographs pull the viewer in with their emotional content, then ask the viewer to step back for another look — to both feel and think, to understand truths beyond words. Complements is a gem, an intimate book to be savoured on first readings and held near as a resource on what is meaningful. It contains 110 luscious photos of small objects juxtaposed in ways that evoke emotions, thoughts, questions, and remembrance of beauty. The photographs tell stories, make wry jokes, and allude to the larger realities of the esoteric. As complements, the objects are more than the sum of their parts. A sentence or two of text accompanies each photograph, creating storylines that draw the viewer into the world of the objects as strongly as if the objects were human, except their not being human allows the viewer a purer sense of the message of their story. David Hume Kennerly, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, says in the foreword, “The narrative and pictures reunite twins separated at birth.” The photographs pull the viewer in with their emotional content, then ask the viewer to step back for another look—to both feel and think, to understand truths beyond words. More book information can be found at: www.complementsthebook.com
£20.66
Oro Editions American Industry
American Industry is as much a celebration as it is documentation. Through his unique vision and privileged access, photographer Kim Steele has achieved a spectacular distillation of a variety of icons of power. Some of these places of power are literal: sources of hydro-electric energy, such as dams or atomic and accelerators. Other places of power are more metaphorical: the might of massive construction as only heavy industry can achieve, whether in architecture or ships; or the romance of aviation and the exploration of space. The photographic images are as iconic as their subjects. Formally pure and powerful in their scale and clarity, they mirror the ambitious and inspirational quality of what are now understood to be quintessential and classic symbols of American ingenuity and drive. Together, the seven chapters, Hydro Power, Aviation, Heavy Industry, Energy, Space, Atomic Energy, and The Future, create a visual tapestry of American industrial power in the 20th century. A testimony of a gilded age of American Industrial might.
£27.00
Oro Editions Americana: A Photographic Journey
From sea to shining sea, from Yankee Stadium to Yosemite National Park, Mathew Tekulsky turns his lens and commentary on the greatest topic of them all, the United States of America, in his new book Americana: A Photographic Journey. Following on the heels of his successful book Galapagos Birds: A Photographic Voyage, Mr. Tekulsky’s take on the American landscape includes images such as a barn with an American flag draped along its side; John Lennon’s Imagine mosaic in New York City’s Central Park; covered bridges and antique automobiles; an inflatable Uncle Sam in a front yard festooned with red, white, and blue buntings; John Burroughs’ Slabsides cabin; Mariano Rivera pitching a save at Yankee Stadium; a classic Vermont diner; a roller coaster at twilight; the Beverly Hills Hotel; tourists at Tunnel View in Yosemite National Park; and surfboards in Hawaii. And there’s much, much more in this book. We live in an era of photographic images, and Mr. Tekulsky has provided the reader with 83 of the best photographs of America that you will ever see. According to Wikipedia, Americana is defined as “any collection of materials and things concerning or characteristic of the United States or of the American people and is representative or even stereotypical of American culture as a whole.” As such, Mathew Tekulsky’s book Americana: A Photographic Journey is a piece of Americana itself.
£17.95
Oro Editions A Home to the World: The United Nations and New York City
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. It is fully illustrated with rare archival photographs and architectural drawings, as well as newly commissioned photographs. The book also includes written contributions from UN-affiliated individuals of note, including current and former UN secretaries-general, ambassadors to the UN, mayors, governors, historians, architecture critics, and other luminaries. The book begins by chronicling how New York came to be the permanent home of the UN, including the individuals, institutions, and other forces that helped the city secure the headquarters of the UN - among them the Rockefeller family, William Zeckendorf, and Robert Moses. The book then presents the architectural and urban design journey to create the iconic UN campus by a global team of architectural giants such as Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, and Oscar Niemeyer, with archival photos and architectural drawings and renderings. It also charts how the real estate needs of the UN evolved over time, leading to the creation of the United Nations Development Corporation (UNDC) and its commissioning of three architecturally significant buildings at UN Plaza that have helped keep the UN in New York City. Also included are sections on the $2 billion renovation and restoration of the UN campus and proposals past and present for additional architectural commissions. Additional sections document how New York City and the UN have helped shape each other over the years; and how both continue to change and evolve. Unique for its architectural and urbanistic focus, A Home to the World: The United Nations and New York City celebrates this important global organisation's many accomplishments past, present, and future.
£29.25
Oro Editions Egyptian Places: An Illustrated Travelogue
Egyptian Places: An Illustrated Travelogue, presents an architect's account of visits to 12 of Ancient Egypt's most spectacular sites, a journey that transports the reader from the urban metropolis of Cairo and the Great Pyramid of Giza to the remote desert setting of the rock-cut temple at Abu Simbel; with visits to other monumental temples and towering pyramids which line the Nile River. The book recreates that journey, describing important architectural features of these sacred monuments, their mystic foundations, and religious significance. Over 200 colour hand drawings and graphic studies capture and interpret the character of each site from the architect's unique perspective.
£27.00
Oro Editions Forays
How does one envision architecture? Forays gathers the work of Joe Day and Deegan-Day Design into six diptychs, unified by this question. Working in a wide range of media and scales, Day's work mines the differentials between perspective and projection. Forays is organised in six diptychs, the first two paired projects are books in their own right; the second pair, a clothing line and a first building; the third, two houses; the fourth, two plays on brand identity and design methodology; the fifth, permanent and transient cinema proposals; and the sixth, two series of speculative work in local and global registers. Modelled on a comparison of two classic cameras - the Leica M3 and Polaroid SX-70 - each diptych includes a project with more 'Leica' to it - a more bounded, Cartesian clarity or distilled focus - and another closer to an SX-70 in its moving or folding parts, its shape-shifting adaptability.
£25.16
Oro Editions Sanctuary: Homes and Resorts by de Reus Architects
Sanctuary features a series of 18 recent projects from the award-winning firm de Reus Architects. As a follow-up to Tropical Experience, de Reus Architects continues to add inspired, carefully crafted, timeless, and site-appropriate design to its growing body of work. Essays by Mark de Reus and Joseph Giovannini reveal the continued search that is inherent in design and the relentless effort to reveal how sprit of place contributes to design thinking. Each project is introduced with spectacular exterior and interior photography and gives the reader an in-depth look into de Reus Architects’ design thinking. With select projects from Hawaii, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest, Sanctuary explores a wide range of buildings showcasing de Reus Architects’ timeless and well-executed architecture.
£40.50
Oro Editions Inflatable Planet
A balloon artist and photographer travel the world surprising people with improvised, inflatable crowns and offer a deep view into the nature of joy. The simple act of twisting a balloon for a complete stranger can make people instant friends. This idea animated balloon artist Addi Somekh and photographer Charlie Eckert to improvise balloon crowns for unsuspecting people throughout 35 countries and document their reactions. Part photography book, part sociological study, part spontaneous party, Inflatable Planet features over 200 photos from this international experiment in joy.
£29.25
Oro Editions Werewolf: The Architecture of Lunacy, Shapeshifting, and Material Metamorphosis
As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture’s stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context. These ideas are studied through architectural precedents and framed by critical essays by Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Jimenez Lai, Spyros Papapetros, Kari Weil, as well as the editors. The shift from passive buildings to reactive structures is now imperative, as climate change and political turmoil exacerbate the unpredictability of environments. Werewolf expands on the architect’s agency to critically address political, social, and environmental unrest. Revealing the cunning and agile ways in which architecture can negotiate rather than resist change, this book departs from the fixed Vitruvian man and uses the figure of the werewolf to propose a model where changes of state, mutation, and decomposition are conceptually fundamental.
£24.26
Oro Editions Clean Slate: Images from Dogen's Garden
Clean Slate combines Dogen's poetry with images of plants he might have seen during his lifetime while living in Japan. With the support of Kyoto University and the San Francisco Botanical Garden Library, Marcia was able to complete research that led to a list of plants that are recorded to have existed in Japan during the 13th century. She made it her intention to find and photograph these specimens. The gathering of these images is not to make a scientific analysis, rather to consider and imagine what beauty provoked his writing. Japanese literature is well populated with descriptions of beauty and imperfection. Marcia's pictures isolate and render the plant so that it no longer is a member of a garden, but rather an example, a cue, an object that invites the viewer. Alone in the garden. Throughout the history of literature there are inquiries as to where an author lived; what studio setting a painter worked in; what musical melodies influenced a composer's ater work. Clean Slate brings the rhyme of Dogen together with the glance of things both he and Lieberman might have seen.
£14.36
Oro Editions Dynamic Geographies
Landscapes are forged by many forces and are dynamic, not static. Yet most landscape designs are designed as static; that is, they are designed not to change substantially for 20-50 years. As cities become the dominant living space for humans, allowing non-human forces to contribute to our designs as landscape architects will make for more resilient landscapes and a healthier planet. Making these dynamic landscapes with our non-human partners will require a new landscape aesthetic, changing the public perception of "landscape," and changing maintenance practices. Dynamic Geographies seeks to address these perceptions with a series of our projects as examples. The book is divided into three segments of overlapping geographies: Invisible geographies, Layered geographies, and Unleashing geographies.
£26.96
Oro Editions Beautiful China: Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China
Beautiful China is the title of the Chinese government's broad policy to ensure the traditions and aesthetics of Chinese culture not only survive as heritage but apply to contemporary society and to the future. Beautiful China is also nested within the larger policy concept of creating an 'ecological civilization'. Applied to a nation of over 1.3 billion people and the second most powerful economy in the world, these policies are arguably the most fascinating socio-political experiment taking place anywhere in the world today. This book is the first serious consideration of this policy and what it means for the design professions in contemporary China. Text in English and Chinese.
£28.76
Oro Editions Architecture Beyond Experience
Architecture Beyond Experience is an interdisciplinary work in the service of one goal: the bringing about of a more relational, 'posthuman' and yet humanist strain in architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much architectural production (and the larger economy's too), which is the making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences. The result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around it. This thought provoking essay argues it's time to find a deeper basis for making and judging architecture, a basis which is not personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational from the start. In this context, the word relationaldescribes an architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are beings. When studying architecture, they teach as well as protect; they tell us who we were and who we want to be; they exemplify, they deserve respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are social-relational values, values that both underlie and go beyond experiential ones (sometimes called 'phenomenological'). Such relational values have been suppressed, in part because architects have joined the Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-centre a profession.
£26.96
Oro Editions LA+ Vitality
Vitality is liveliness, to be alive. To be alive is to have the ability to harvest energy for movement, growth, and self-replication. But without health, vitality is just mechanistic. In this issue of LA+ we explore the notion of vitality as a proxy for the health of all things. We explore how design can improve the vitality of people, cities, systems, and landscapes. Articles include: - Sara Jensen-Carr explores the intertwined epidemiology of ecosystems, cities, and human bodies. - Through the intimate case study of a 15th century Roman noblewoman, historian Mirka Benes reveals the role of gardens in maintaining physical and mental health in the early modern era. - Design anthropologist Chuan Hao Chen reflects on vitality through the metaphor of the medical emergency. - Experimental psychologist Colin Ellard explores questions about the roots of our perceptions of life and agency. - Urban designer Julian Bolleter shines a light on the practice of placemaking in contemporary Dubai. - Public health scientists Billie Giles Corti, Jonathan Arundel, and Lucy Gunn explain why urban design is important in creating livable cities. - Landscape architect Clay Gruber captures a case study of the potential for renewal of a rural American landscape drained of socio-economic vitality. - Designer Colin Curley surveys the beautiful ugliness of Newtown Creek, New York's most-polluted waterway. - Biodiversity conservation scientist Andrew Gonzalez explains his multi-year research into designing a comprehensive and practicable green network for the city of Montreal and its hinterlands. - Landscape architect Jake Boswell offers a wide-ranging rumination on ecology and aesthetics. - Psychiatrist and urban health scholar Mindy Thompson Fullilove reflects upon the vitality of main streets in small-town America. - Philosopher Mark Kingwell takes on artificial intelligence in a series of provocative propositions dealing with notions of life and vitality. - Architect and urban designer Christopher Marcinkoski considers Tokyo's landscape future in the face of significant population decline. - Also includes interviews with the celebrated author of Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett, MASS Design Group's Sierra Bainbridge, and The Nature Conservancy's lead scientist for global cities Rob MacDonald.
£14.36
Oro Editions HOK Design Annual 2019
The HOK Design Annual 2019 highlights this leading global design firm's most exceptional recent work in architecture, interior design, planning, and urban design. The projects featured demonstrate the intersection between HOK's thought leadership in specialty areas - including aviation + transportation, healthcare, science + technology, sports, sustainable design and workplace - and its firm-wide commitment to research and design excellence. Geographically diverse, these projects represent a variety of scales and are technically advanced examples of how design can bring significant benefits to clients and the people who experience these spaces. The HOK Design Annual 2019 is a valuable global trends reference source for design professionals, students, and architecture enthusiasts. It provides insight into the creative process of the design teams creating society's next generation of buildings.
£38.66
Oro Editions Street Culture
Street Culture is a stunning collection of photographs representing women and men of colour who exhibit a unique style. Seleen Saleh's photographs reveal individuality, fearlessness, and creativity in the most vibrant beings who collectively represent street style. This style is as varied as the people; it is a personal expression that changes day to day. It is an expression of a person's culture, mood, influences, and aesthetics. Street style originated in the street where top designers look for inspiration for their next collections. The book preserves the integrity of street style and features some of the muses that have been forgotten or were never acknowledged. In the book Seleen combines photographs from her work at Essence Magazine with new images of jaw-dropping, creative and colourful moments. As a lover of fashion, art, and people, Seleen brings out the authentic nature of these known and unknown muses. Each person depicted here can be considered a brilliant artist in his or her own right. These portraits were taken in New York City - the perfect global destination - diverse and open and where people are not afraid to tell you who they are. There is an underfed audience for this book; the world is waking up and wants to see more diversity and more eclectic styles.
£17.95
Oro Editions Land, Sea, Shelter, & Culture: A Story of Modern Architecture in Hawaii: The Architecture of AHL
AHL is the most prominent, prestigious, and progressive architectural practice working in Hawaii. As such, the history of Modern Hawaiian architecture is very much the history of AHL. Over the past 75 years, no firm has built bigger, higher, or more frequently that AHL. This book tells their story and in so doing, tells the story of the making of a modern Hawaii. The output of the firm is extraordinary, ranging from numerous state and federal facilities like the Hawaii State Capitol building to the Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole Federal Building. The first high-rises in Hawaii belong to AHL along with some of most high-profile residential (Moana Pacific), hospitality (Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa), healthcare and education (John A. Burns School of Medicine), and commercial complexes like the American Savings Bank and Pacific Guardian Center Towers, to numerous retail stores, schools and university buildings, churches, and extensive work with the military.
£34.16
Oro Editions Unresolved Legibility In Ten Residential Types
Architectural legibility requires both visual clarity of a building's appearance such that its formal, spatial, and material compositions can be comprehended, as well as a certain clarity of the its social, cultural, and political histories. While the term legibility carries a connotation of conclusiveness or objective qualifications, legibility in architecture is most often inconclusive and unresolved. Such unresolved legibility is particularly visible in houses, which are the source of inquiry in this project. This project proposes new understandings and interpretations of American residential architecture by investigating and graphically illustrating the forms, spaces, and histories of ten residential types. Perhaps no genre of architecture has been written about more than 'the house'. As long-standing subjects of architectural discourse, cultural reflection, and experimentation, houses represent a confluence of architectural and broader cultural phenomena. The house is not only susceptible to, but in fact requires renewal and re-imagination; as an architectural type it reflects shifting societal values and the constant reconstruction of meaning that this shifting entails. Such social, cultural, political and contextual circumstances can best be evaluated under the rubric of legibility. While this might at first seem like an objective undertaking, legibility in architecture is indeterminate and unresolved, revealing the intertwining of architectural expressions with broader cultural circumstances.
£25.16
Oro Editions Working Water: Reinventing the Storm Drain
Water is far too valuable of a resource to be disposed as a waste. Working Water presents the work of Denver landscape architecture firm Wenk Associates, highlighting their projects that treat stormwater, and the infrastructure that controls it, as a resource that supports functioning natural systems and enhanced urban open space. Built projects illustrate how stormwater runoff can be directed to support an intimate private garden, to the large-scale redevelopment of derelict industrial lands in Milwaukee organised around a stormwater park and open space system. Planning projects range from a plan for a surface stormwater system developed incrementally for a redeveloping urban district in central Denver, to a multi-generational plan for restoration of the Los Angeles River that will require profound changes in stormwater management policies and practice for full implementation. The final chapter describes the challenges, strategies, and lessons learned over the firm's 37-year history as part of implementing new approaches to infrastructure design that can withstand the test of time.
£27.90
Oro Editions Gesture and Response: William Pedersen of KPF
The work of Kohn Pedersen Fox is international in scope, collaborative in design, and a product of individual voices focused on a single objective - making an architecture, of our time, which creates strong bonds with the the specific place it occupies. While William Pedersen founded the firm, with partners Gene Kohn and Shelley Fox, he never aspired to be a 'director of design.' They had the components with Gene's entrepreneurial drive, Shelley's management and Bill's design leadership - to be a large firm. 'Directing' the work of a large firm was not Bill's desire, instead he wanted to focus on a body of work which he could call his own. The example that work set would inspire others, and it did. Now there are several voices leading their design - all of them rose to their position within the office. The purpose of this book is to define the work of one of the voices - Bill Pedersen's. Pedersen has worked with many different designers, in close collaboration, throughout his career, though his work speaks with a singular voice. Here it is represented chronologically and concludes with the latest phase - furniture. Working from the largest scale to the smallest has always been a preoccupation of those who lead design in KPF. Many of Pedersen's architectural heroes designed chairs, and he strives to follow in their footsteps.
£42.30
Oro Editions Pratt Sessions Volume 2
Pratt Sessions presents a series of conversations between notable practitioners and thinkers. It is a distributed symposium that is curated and yet open-ended. Based on an ongoing lecture series at Pratt Institute's Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program, each Session brings together two participants as a means of instigating discourse and dissolving and/or reinforcing the artifice of geographically-based discourse networks. Participants are carefully paired together based on the content of their work and the region in which they reside and/or practice. Participants frame their work around a disciplinary provocation in short, non-standard lecture presentations, and engage in an in-depth dialogue. Pratt Sessions is intended as a book series, each volume featuring six conversations, which originally took place over the course of two academic semesters. The six sessions are divided in two areas of focus, exploring and examining how new mediums and new contexts can be defined, redefined, and understood within the realm of architectural design.
£22.46
Oro Editions Poetics of Distortion
Thomas R. Schiff's vivid panoramic photographs capture the iconic buildings and landscapes of San Francisco and the Bay Area in new and surprising ways. The Poetics of Distortion: Panoramic Photographs of the San Francisco Bay Area is a mind-bending, eye-opening, very San Franciscan journey.
£27.00