Search results for ""park books""
Park Books Infra Eco Logi Urbanism – A Project for the Great Lakes Megaregion
RVTR Research Vision Transformation Realization, a design research practice with studios based in Toronto and Ann Arbor, have undertaken a multi-faceted investigation into possible urban futures for the Great Lakes Megaregion of North America. The study is based in the proposition that by investigating interdependent agents, material flows and policies, and by focusing on "back of house" activities of cities and their support systems - such as infrastructures, logistics and ecologies - architects can conceive new distributed urban architectures that have the potential to actively transform the future of cities, settlement patterns and metropolitan life. Utilising tools of urban analysis and formal intervention, RVTR aim to re-conceptualise future boundaries, governance, politics, economies and public architecture. Infra Eco Logi Urbanism presents comprehensively RVTR's findings and proposals. Around 100 images, visualisations and graphics illustrate the text. The book also features essays situating the historical development of the region around transportation, and investigating possible future worlds and utopias within the context of the specific project and more broadly the practice of design-research.
£22.50
Park Books Best of Austria – Architecture 2012—13
Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W) is a publicly funded institution with the aim to present and document modern and contemporary Austrian and international architecture. Since its opening in 1993, Az W has gained international recognition for its work and exhibitions. Best of Austria is published biennially to present award-winning buildings in ten categories, such as living, tourism, culture, industry, education etc., by Austrian architects and projects by foreign architects realised in Austria. Covered are all architecture prizes that have been awarded by public and private institutions or corporations in Austria. The latest edition of Best of Austria features around 170 projects that were completed in 2012 and 2013. Each is presented with 2 - 3 images and a floor plan, section or elevation as well as brief descriptive texts. A critical essay on contemporary Austrian architecture and building culture, a comprehensive index of all featured projects and architectural firms, and information on all architecture awards round out this up-to-date survey of contemporary architecture and building culture in Austria.
£27.00
Park Books Ice Station – The Creation of Halley VI. Britain′s Pioneering Antarctic Research Station
Halley VI Research Station is the first fully re-locatable research station in the world. It was commissioned in 2006 and its unique and innovative structure was the result of an international design competition in collaboration with the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The research facility is segmented into eight modules, each sitting atop ski-fitted, hydraulic legs that can be individually raised to overcome snow accumulation, allowing the module to be towed independently to a new location. Halley VI is designed by London-based Hugh Broughton Architects and AECOM, a global engineering design firm. The new book tells the story of this exciting piece of architecture in an essay by Ruth Slavid. Around 100 photographs, mostly in colour, plans and diagrams document the various modules of the re-locatable station and its present site. Captions offering comprehensive technical information about the structure complement the images. Photographs are contributed by British photographer James Morris, who has gained much international recognition for his work in architectural and landscape photography.
£18.00
Park Books Galli Rudolf Architekten 1998–2014 – Spatial Adaptations
This first monograph on the work of Galli Rudolf Architects presents a selection of their realised buildings at the nexus of urban and topographical design. The Zurich-based firm has built an outstanding range of housing, mixed-use developments and schools. Typological innovation and integrative strategies in preservation of listed historic buildings are hallmarks of their work. With precise framing, complex variation in typologies and generous linking of spaces, Galli Rudolf Architects respond to the current questions of how cities can grow. The book documents the architects' working method, addressing imminent contemporary issues of community building by design and framing of space at the urban periphery. The texts also illuminate their education and cultural attitude, strategies in organising program and space, and their interaction with artists and artistic interventions. It also looks closely at Galli Rudolf's approach to building preservation and constructive detail. Photographs by Helene Binet and others, and a wealth of plans and diagrams provide the visuals to encounter current topics in architecture and urbanism.
£45.00
Park Books Smarch Mathys & Stücheli Architekten
£36.90
Park Books Village in the City – Asian Variations of Urbanisms of Inclusion
'Village in the City' investigates an equally specific and spectacular urbanisation process that many regions in China have been undergoing during the past two decades. The massive scale and the unprecedented speed of this process imply an incredible multiplicity of 'villages in the city'. As such there are as many counter figures as there are "regular" and "normalised" urban environments that engulf these villages. Village in the City opens a window on recent research on the dynamic transformation processes villages in China are undergoing to become (parts of) cities, and contextualises this specific contemporary Chinese phenomenon in a comparative perspective for all of Asia, i.e. including India, South East Asia, and China. And it situates this development also in the history of urbanisms of inclusion.
£18.00
Park Books Walter Mair vs. 03 Architects – A Dialogue Between Photography and Architecture
Munich based 03 Architects have in recent years developed a distinctive way of working with urban spaces. Whether creating a warehouse for building materials, a school, or designing a new neighbourhood, 03 Architects' designs always look closely at the narrative qualities of the city. For this book the architects have invited the photographer Walter Mair to provide a dialogue on their work, concepts and methods. Mair documents 03 Architects' work with great sensitivity for their ideas, but also for the context with which the buildings reflect and enable, and thereby reaches beyond the classic architectural documentation. The architects respond to Mair's images in brief, associative texts. An introductory essay on the fundamental questions and problems of architectural photography by the renowned architectural critic and curator Hubertus Adam rounds out this book with its particular haptic and manufacturing quality.
£36.00
Park Books Gewers Pudewill: Tailor Made Architecture
Gewers Pudewill is one of the most influential and successful contemporary German architecture firms. From their base in Berlin, founding partners Georg Gewers and Henry Pudewill are committed to a wide variety of projects: office buildings, conversions of manufacturing and commercial structures, housing, research buildings, and nursing residences for the elderly. Their designs combine functional and conceptual aspects with a highly expressive formal language. This book presents a selection of Gewers Pudewill’s most exciting buildings realised since 2019, located in Berlin, Hamburg, Regensburg, Rostock, Stuttgart, and Wolfsburg. The lavishly illustrated volume features newly taken large-format photographs by the renowned German architectural photographer HG Esch, supplemented by five essays contributed by architectural publicist Ulf Meyer, who highlights the common threads in the firm’s evolution and explains its philosophy.
£40.50
Park Books Food for Architects: Steib Gmür Geschwentner Kyburz – Exponents of Excellent Housing
The lavish five-volume set of Food for Architects is dedicated to the buildings and cooking of the renowned Zurich-based firm Steib Gmür Geschwentner Kyburz Partners. As enthusiastic housing designers, they have been searching for both the perfect floor plan and the perfect spaghetti for three decades. Volume 1 of this first comprehensive monograph on the firm’s work brings together brief personal texts on the various types of rooms in a house or apartment as well as other aspects of living. Volume 2 offers insights into the evolution and design methods of Steib Gmür Geschwentner Kyburz Partners, documenting 65 key buildings and projects from their portfolio. Volume 3 features floor plans of a total of 168 furnished apartments with concise comments, interspersed with recipes for 12 spaghetti dishes. In a photo essay, volume 4 introduces the inhabitants of 11 apartments from various realised buildings, who also speak about their homes in brief interviews. The dessert of this five-course menu is the concluding volume 5, featuring a conversation with the firm’s four partners — Jakob Steib, Patrick Gmür, Michael Geschwentner, and Matthias Kyburz—as they discuss topics that are key to their architectural work.
£67.50
Park Books ABC
Paris-based Gaëtan Le Penhuel Architectes & Associés have acquired great expertise in the construction of school buildings over nearly 30 years, having made their name in this field with pioneering designs. Based on this wealth of experience, Gaëtan Le Penhuel now presents ABC: Schools of the Future. Best Design Practices, a compact and charming guide to developing school buildings for the future that meet the needs of students.Each of the ten chapters focuses on one key part of these structures, such as the classroom, the school yard, the hallway, the auditorium, and so on. In conversation with architectural publicist Alice Dubet, Le Penhuel outlines pathways to better school architecture, and points out obstacles to overcome and mistakes to avoid. Quentin Vijoux's illustrations provide easy visual access to the concepts of Gaëtan Le Penhuel Architectes & Associés - not only for architects and teachers, but also for students a
£19.80
Park Books Neighbours: A Manifesto, a Play for Two Pavilions, and Ten Conversations
The Swiss Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale exhibits itself and the relations to its immediate surroundings. The exhibition is a conversation over the shared boundary of the pavilions of Switzerland (1952, designed by Bruno Giacometti) and Venezuela (1954, designed by Carlo Scarpa), the only two in the Giardini not fully detached: they share one wall. Artist Karin Sander and art historian Philip Ursprung temporarily open this wall and dismantle the gates from the Swiss Pavilion, thus revealing unanticipated connections between the two neighbours, both distant and close. The complementing book offers a manifesto, a play with the two buildings as dramatis personae, and three brief topical essays. Ten conversations with architectural historian Kurt W. Forster, photographers Paolo Gasparini and Guido Giudi, and Venezuelan architects Elisa Silva and Margarita López-Maya round off this volume.
£22.50
Park Books Information and Formation: About Landscape, Architecture and Cities
This book features the work of Innsbruck-based architecture studio LAAC. Since 2012, this leading Austrian firm has been developing and exploring innovative architectural responses to contemporary urban and landscape challenges. This is done in collaboration with a network of other architects, artists, graphic designers, and experts from other disciplines. In addition to public buildings for culture, education, and sports, commercial buildings, and industrial structures, LAAC has a particular focus on landscape and public space designs. Information & Formation is the first monograph on LAAC and documents 10 realised designs and projects in Innsbruck and other parts of the Austrian federal state of Tyrol, Vienna, and Venice in much detail through photographs, plans, visualisations, and texts. Essays by international authors and a complete catalogue of LAAC’s work to date round out this volume. Text in English and German.
£31.50
Park Books Pichler & Traupmann Architekten: Tension in Space
On the occasion of their 30th anniversary, Vienna-based Pichler & Traupmann Architekten review their body of work to date. This lavishly illustrated monograph documents in great detail their most important designs, built and unrealised, arranged by topic. Internationally renowned architectural publicists and scientists contribute essays that explore the firm’s vision and approach. A complete index of their 250 or so projects and studies rounds out the book. At the core of Pichler & Traupmann Architekten’s ambitious design philosophy is the potential of a given site in the field of tension between polarities. The focus of their work is on commercial, residential, and educational structure. Their key designs include the headquarters of the Austrian motorists’ association ÖAMTC in Vienna (2013–16), the extension of the Kulturzentrum Eisenstadt (2006–12), the Future Art Lab of Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts (2014–20), the RAIQA (Raiffeisen-Quartier) in Innsbruck (ongoing since 2019), and the Pinkafeld Campus of Burgenland University of Applied Sciences (ongoing since 2019). Text in English and German.
£40.50
Park Books Towards Territorial Transition: A plea to large scale decarbonizing
Towards Territorial Transition presents new spatial strategies, concepts, and approaches for shaping large-scale and transnational developments in architecture and urban design towards decarbonisation and ecological transition. The contributions investigate interactions between ecological and resource-related systems and landscapes. They also explore potential solutions to address and deal with the dramatic threats posed by climate change and the emerging social crisis. The book introduces six basic terms of territorial transition — territory, scale, transition, resource, platform, and uncertainty — and visualises them with spatial strategies elaborated at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture Versailles and at Graz University of Technology. Moreover, it presents a selection of transnational projects of territorial transition, such as Luxembourg in Transition (Luxembourg / France), Grand Genève (Switzerland / France), and Top Noordrand (Brussels / Flanders).
£31.50
Park Books Living High: Trinity Tower, Paris La Défense
Located in the futuristic business district La Défense of Paris, Trinity is a 32-storey office tower, built ex nihilo on a concrete slab poured above a seven-lane roadway as a major feat of civil engineering. Designed by Paris-based Cro&Co Architecture, it provides 3,500 square metres of landscaped public space and links the previously disconnected neighbourhoods within La Défense. Diverging from traditional office building design, Trinity is a unique high-rise conceived to facilitate open interaction with its environment, and to enable new forms of working through its shared spaces, terraces and balconies, and an accessible rooftop. It marks a break with the inward-looking buildings that have predominated in La Défense so far and that are indifferent to their surroundings. Trinity offers truly habitable heights with its generous public and semi-public spaces, distinguishing it from other high-rises designed to maximise real-estate returns. This book, published in collaboration with the Paris-based agency Metropolis, shows how the Trinity project’s different views were made, the iterations that led to a system where vision connects, assembles and brings together. It reveals the elements involved in making these various views, destined to disappear as construction advanced. And it explores the tension between these hidden elements and the views that they form.
£28.80
Park Books How Beautiful Are Your Dwelling Places, Jacob: An Atlas of Jewish Space, and a Synagogue for Babyn Yar
On September 29 and 30 1941 more than 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in Babyn Yar, a gorge near Kiev. This event constituted the largest single massacre perpetrated by German troops against Jews during World War II. In commemoration, a synagogue designed in the shape of a book will open on the same site in 2021. When opened, the book building’s inner space and its furnishings unfold. This impressive movable structure was designed by Manuel Herz, whose studio runs offices in Basel and Cologne. This book for the first time shows the Babyn Yar synagogue captured in photographs by celebrated architectural photographer Iwan Baan, as well as through plans and model photos. Yet the core part of the book tells the story of the Jewish people and of Judaism through the medium of space: the Jewish concept of space from biblical times to the present. Space as a leitmotif is understood in broad terms here: territorially, architecturally, psychologically, theologically, intellectually, as well as pertaining to the persecution of the Jewish people. Rather than in an abstract treatise, this story is told through 135 brief and engaging texts by Robert Jan van Pelt, a leading Holocaust researcher and professor of architecture. Each of these reflections is illustrated with drawings and watercolours by New York-based artist Mark Podwal, who is known for his illustration of Elie Wiesel’s works.
£28.80
Park Books Basics of Urbanism: 12 Notions of Territorial Transformation
Urban design today is facing a multitude of challenges. Using 12 key terms, this book connects these challenges to projects in this field. It introduces concepts. presents possible solutions, and describes implementation processes. A special focus is put on the interaction of the built environment with living systems — an approach that is slowly gaining acceptance within the urban design community and that is setting aside a primarily building-oriented practice in favour of an increased appreciation of public space. Basics of Urbanism defines and illustrates parameters with a clearly territorial approach to urban design. Space between buildings is treated as an essential structure for environmental and social change within small-scale neighbourhoods and blocks, as well as at the level districts and even entire cities. This approach includes forward-thinking temporal aspects as well as the implementation of existing resources in the creation of new spatial qualities. Text in English and German.
£31.50
Park Books Swissness Applied: New Glarus and Its Image of Cultural Heritage
Founded by Swiss settlers in 1845, New Glarus in Wisconsin evolved from being a dairy farming and cheese production village to a popular tourist destination. Following a grave economic downturn in the 1960s and 1970s, the community discovered embracing the image of its cultural heritage, particularly traditional architectural details, as a way of survival. Consequently, they began to 'Swissify' their commercial building façades and so to appear even more Swiss. Since 1999, the town has even regulated the production of new buildings via its building codes to preserve this particular aesthetic evoking the familiar traditional Swiss Chalet style. Swissness Applied - New Glarus and Its Image of Cultural Heritage investigates the transformation of European immigrant towns in the United States, exemplified by New Glarus, WI. It features the results of extensive fieldwork on buildings in the village as well as design projections based on the local building code, and evaluates the outcomes through different representation techniques. Expert authors including Whitney Moon, Philip Ursprung, Kurt Forster, and Jesús Vassallo contribute essays that pick up on aspects such as the role of cultural imagery and immigration history in architecture, and on Swissness as a cultural concept in particular.
£40.50
Park Books Modersohn and Freiesleben—Reality: Buildings and Projects 2000–2020
When Antje Freiesleben and Johannes Modersohn opened their own Berlin-based firm Modersohn & Freiesleben Architekten in 1994, the city, which had been divided until 1989, needed to be repaired and re-united. The Potsdamer Platz train station and the office block in the Beisheim Centre in Ebertstrasse, close to this central and now revitalised location, are two significant projects that were designed by the firm in the prevalent spirit of urban renewal of those years. After the millennium, the architects further honed their approach: whether in the city or the countryside, Modersohn & Freiesleben consistently develop the character of their projects in terms of the site, the materials, the construction, and the lives of their clients. Their deliberate engagement with the given environment while simultaneously aiming at an inventive individuality has created an architecture that ensures their houses are functional objects that combine sustainability with aesthetics. This new monograph features 12 built houses alongside other projects from the last two decades. They are located in Berlin, Brandenburg, Sweden, and Canada. Text in English and German.
£31.50
Park Books Johan Celsing: Buildings, Texts
One of Sweden's most renowned contemporary architects, Johan Celsing has created a diverse body of work that spans from housing to public institutions such as museums, libraries, and churches - all of it united by an intense and realistic engagement with the craft of making buildings. Johan Celsing: Buildings, Texts is the first book to comprehensively collect Celsing's designs. It features both built and unrealised projects are featured through working drawings and sketches, watercolours, and images of models, as well as new photographs by London-based photographer Ioana Marinescu. In addition to more than seven hundred illustrations, the buildings are discussed in essays by architects, educators, and critics including Wilfried Wang, Claes Caldenby, Katarina Rundgren, and Elizabeth Hatz. The book also offers a selection of Johan Celsing's own writings.
£63.00
Park Books The Songyang Story: Architectural Acupuncture as Driver for Progress in Rural China. Projects by Xu Tiantian, DnA_Beijing
In 2014, Xu Tiantian, founder of Beijing-based studio Design and Architecture (DnA) began to work in Songyang County, in China's Zhejiang Province. Her exemplary holistic planning concept of Architectural Acupuncture, which has gained the support of local administrative and political leadership, aims at revitalising rural areas and comprises the renovation of production plants and of tourist and technical infrastructure as well as the creation of venues for culture and education and of social housing. Each of Xu's small-scale interventions at local level is unique, only the small budget is common to all of them. Moreover, they are all inter-related with each other and in their entirety serve the broader goal of mutual enhancement. This book introduces Xu's concept of Architectural Acupuncture and discusses the influence of architecture on cultural self-understanding and economic renewal in 21st-century rural China. It features some 20 new buildings and conversions of existing structures with diverse functions. Published alongside are essays by international economists, sociologists, and curators as well as by the secretary of the Songyang County Party Committee, examining the social, political, and economic implications of sustainable planning and collective action in the Chinese province.
£31.50
Park Books Diener & Diener Architects - Housing
Diener & Diener Architects, based in Basel and Berlin and one of Switzerland's leading contemporary firms, have had a special focus on residential architecture throughout its 40 years of existence. The origins of the work are based in the previous studio of Marcus Diener, founded in 1942 and joined in 1976, and taken over entirely in 1980, by his son Roger Diener. This new monograph documents comprehensively this 'recherche patiente' of four decades. It discusses 30 realised designs and unbuilt proposals that exemplify Diener & Diener's philosophy, based on their characteristics and individual urban context. Illustrated with photographs, floor and site plans as well as archival images and plans, and drawing on the firms archive and Roger Diener's collected lectures, the authors investigate the typological design process on which each project is based. Diener & Diener update and adapt fundamental types to the requirements and restraints of each new task. The consistency of this approach constitutes the significance of their work in contemporary housing.
£40.50
Park Books Traffic Space is Public Space: A Handbook for Transformation
Public space is an essence of urban life, of a city's living quality. The (re-) transformation of space today used by the dense traffic prevalent in urban areas into truly public space is a highly effective way to increase its quality and quantity in cities of all sizes and larger metropolitan areas. The starting point of any such increase is to ensure a better balance between the various uses of space: more room for pause and the slow traffic of pedestrians and cyclists, less for handling of goods and the faster, passive mobility by car. Traditional planning principles in urban and traffic design will no longer do; new approaches and instruments are required. This new book introduces to the reader these approaches and instruments, affecting the actual design as well as the planning process, as creative strategies rather than as a rigid set of rules. It is about networking, co-production, involving local businesses, co-usage of space, circular metabolism, and an appropriate aesthetic. Using inspiring reference projects as well as their own work, architects and urban designers Stefan Bendiks und Aglaée Degros offer a forward-looking insight into how traffic space can become much needed public space. Text in English and German.
£31.50
Park Books Imperfection - Atelier Stephane Fernandez
French architect Stephane Fernandez creates a 'silent architecture' that invests the landscape as much as it takes shape. He is a minimalist in expression and maximalist in attention to detail. He models rough, thick and fragile monoliths by digging, by movement of bodies and the generation of tensions between masses. Fernandez articulates his work around a permanent search for materials, the accumulation of models, sketches, plans and words. This first monograph on Stephane Fernandez features five of his realised designs that are emblematic for his approach: a childrens' pavillion (Saint-Raphael, 2005), a media library (Carnoux, 2007), a students' residence and laboratory building (Banyuls-sur-Mer, 2013), a cultural centre (Vertou, 2015) and a primary school (Cannes, 2018). An essay and a conversation with Stéphane Fenrandez by architectural historian Éléonore Marantz as well as a manifesto by the architect himself complement plans of the buildings and photographs of the five buildings by Berlin-based photographers Schnepp Renou. Preface is by Jean-Christophe Quinton. Text in English and French.
£40.50
Park Books Architettura Non-Referenziale: Ideato da Valerio Olgiati - Scritto da Markus Breitschmid
More than ever, architecture is in need of provocation, a new path beyond the traditional notion that buildings must serve as vessels, or symbols of something outside themselves. Non-Referential Architecture is nothing less than a manifesto for a new architecture. It brings together two leading thinkers, architect Valerio Olgiati and theorist Markus Breitschmid, who have grappled with this problem since their first encounter in 2005. In a world that itself increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, Olgiati and Breitschmid offer Non-Referential Architecture as a radical, new approach free from rigid ideologies. Non-referential buildings, they argue, are entities that are themselves meaningful outside a vocabulary of fixed symbols and images, and their historical connotations. For more than a decade, Olgiati and Breitschmid's thinking has placed them at the forefront of architectural theory. Indispensable for understanding what the future might hold for architecture, Non-Referential Architecture will become a new classic. The book's first edition, published in May 2018 by Simonett & Baer, was sold-out within months. This revised and slightly redesigned new edition makes this key text available again. Text in Italian.
£18.00
Park Books Building Additions in Steel: The Architecture of Vertical Extensions
Since the introduction of steel as a building material in the early twentieth century, its superior performance has challenged conventional wisdom about construction, enabling designs of surprising lightness and span. Steel offered the opportunity to significantly expand buildings vertically and thus emerged as a symbol of the conflict between technological progress and the architectural ideal. More recently, the use of exposed steel elements in modern architecture ushered in a rediscovery of buildings' metamorphoses. Building Additions in Steel looks at the largely ignored topic of steel additions in architecture and engineering, documenting an ambitious, interdisciplinary research project by architects, engineers, teachers, and students at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Institute of Constructive Design. The book offers basic theoretical and technical information on a selection of outstanding steel additions alongside more than 100 illustrations, including plans and photographs.
£22.50
Park Books Your Guide to Downtown Denise Scott Brown: Hintergrund 56
Denise Scott Brown has shaped the course of contemporary architecture since the 1960s. She has chartered a rebellious course across three continents - from childhood in 1930s South Africa to education in 1950s England to teaching and practice in the United States. Scott Brown is both renowned and misunderstood for her designs and theories, many developed in collaboration with her companion in life and work, Robert Venturi. From her 1972 research studio on Las Vegas emerged the legendary book Learning from Las Vegas, whose visuals and social impact remain as important today as then. As a younger generation of architects and urban designers engages the complexity she defined, Scott Brown continues to raise her voice as a fierce critic of a modernism ignorant of context, history, and joint creativity. The time has come to rediscover her undogmatic formal language, careful urban interventions, and adventures in mannerism. This groundbreaking new book features previously unpublished material and offers an entirely fresh view of Scott Brown's achievements as a preeminent architectural designer, urbanist, theoretician, and teacher. A fantastic guide to her life and ideas, it also reveals her humanism, complexity, and wit.
£28.80
Park Books Teaching / Practice
For many years renowned British architect Jonathan Sergison has been combining practical work with academic teaching. In this new book he offers personal views on the interplay between these two spheres and the great significance he sees in combining them. At the core of Practice / Teaching is a programmatic conversation on the topic with Sergison, conducted by architect and theoretician Irina Davidovici. In addition, the book offers four previously unpublished texts by Sergison, in which he explores the topic from various perspectives, based on his profound experience both as a practising architect and as a teacher. Published to coincide with an exhibit curated by Sergison at this year's 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, 26 May - 25 November 2018.
£31.50
Park Books A Real Living Contact with the Things Themselves: Essays on Architecture
Contemporary architectural criticism tends to focus on the theories and concepts behind buildings. Yet there is much to be learned by venturing beyond the library walls to contemplate the real buildings - the things themselves. This urge for 'real living contact' is the impetus behind this new and exhilarating collection of essays by renowned British architectural critic and scholar Irénée Scalbert. This new book selects nine essays written throughout Scalbert's career from the early 1990s to the present. They comprise detailed studies of major buildings and pieces that represent broader studies of historical movements and ideas. All texts are based on direct experience, whether through quiet contemplation or candid interviews with architects, builders, or inhabitants. An architect by training, Scalbert writes with the purpose of illuminating the design efforts made and enriching the form of the architecture he describes, and his essays thus contribute to many key moments in the architectural history of the past three decades. Scalbert's incisive and boldly original criticism - together with a wealth of illustrations - make this a book an enlightening read for architects and architectural students or anyone with an appreciation of this important voice in architectural criticism.
£22.50
Park Books Portugal Lessons: Environmental Objects. Teaching and Research in Architecture
Architectural objects confront their environment. They constitute a boundary, a form with an internalised point of view. Understanding architecture as environmental objects suggests a questioning of these dichotomies of separation between the symbolic landmark and the landscape background. It represents an architecture that amplifies nature, attunes to it and makes us aware of it. Portugal Lessons takes Portugal as a case study for such contextualism going beyond an understanding of design as immunisation. Based on the latest research program conducted by EPFL's Laboratory Basel (laba), it explores the topic of this architectural boundary: with whom we live, to whom we open our house, how permeable the boundary should be. The findings are visualised in striking images, graphics and maps. The book also features proposals for architectural interventions by laba's students, all of them tackling issues of housing.
£40.50
Park Books Utopia & Collapse: Rethinking Metsamor - The Armenian Atomic City
Built in 1969, Metsamor, Armenia (then the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic), was intended as a settlement for employees of a nearby nuclear power plant to be completed between 1976 and 1980. But the power plant would never realise the ambitions of its creators. In 1988, an earthquake caused the facility to be shut down and in 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted a complete construction freeze in the city. The symbol of the dream of a technologically advanced nation, Metsamor remained incomplete and fell into decay undiminished by the recommissioning of the power plant in 1995. Utopia & Collapse documents the rise and fall of Metsamor. The book brings together an oral history of Metsamor with essays by Sarhat Petrosyan and a team of contributors and photographic research and visual mapping by Katharina Roters, including more than one hundred images. Among the topics discussed are Armenia's cultural and and architectural histories; the typology of Soviet atomograds, or atomic cities; and the phenomenon of modern ruins. Although today the power plant's workers live in a partly built failed utopia, Metsamor stands as an example of the highly idiosyncratic Armenian variety of Soviet Modernism of the 1960s and '70s, making this a fascinating story for anyone with an interest in Soviet-era buildings and architecture.
£40.50
Park Books Israel Lessons: Industrial Arcadia. Teaching and Research in Architecture
The Middle East is the birthplace of the Neolithic revolution that came to humanise and domesticate the planet. It is also considered the cradle of civilisation as it saw some of the very first developments in human social and technological inventions, such as cities, class-based societies, monumental architecture, writing, the wheel, and irrigation. The 2016/17 research campaign of EPFL's Laboratory Basel (laba) took a critical look at the part of this region that today forms the state of Israel and the role agriculture there played in territorial appropriation and domestication, in structuring the development of urbanisation, in creating a national homeland narrative, and in changing the climate. The research explored the three major types of Israeli agricultural development: the vernacular Palestinian/Bedouin, the socialist utopian Kibbutz/Moshav, and the contemporary high-tech desert farming. 'Israel Lessons: Industrial Arcadia' presents the findings as text as well as visualised in striking images, graphics and maps. It also demonstrates how facts and narratives related to agriculture and the climate crisis are intertwined with geopolitics and sectarian ideals of earthly paradises. Proposals for architectural interventions designed by laba's students round out the book.
£36.00
Park Books Motion Mobility: The Austrian Mobility Club Headquarters
The new Vienna headquarters of ÖAMTC, Austria's motorists' association, emerged out of an interdisciplinary process from choosing a suitable site to completion. Created in close collaboration between the client, architects Pichler & Traupmann, engineers FCP Fritsch, Chiari & Partner, and strategic consultants M.O.O.CON together with Nofrontiere Design agency and SIDE Studio for Information Design, it is a highly innovative structure in terms of design and technology. Moreover, the building sets new standards for corporate culture and working environments. This new book tells the entire story of the new ÖAMTC complex. It documents the project comprehensively and is lavishly illustrated with images, plans, and diagrams. The essays look at the project's complex genesis and architectural concept, completed by interviews with the clients, architects, and with users of and visitors to the building. A glance at the history of comparable 'houses of speed' and a photo essay on the topic of mobility round out this book on a unique and exemplary multi-functional structure. Text in English and German.
£40.50
Park Books Invention of Space – All About Space: Volume I
ALICE (Atelier de la conception de l'espace) is an innovative educational laboratory affiliated to the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne's (EPFL) School of Architecture. Its objective is to provide students with the first essential tools for the trade of architecture. With the new series All About Space, faculty and students aim to share their work with the public. The four books, published annually between 2015 and 2018, combine fact, fiction and speculation with ALICE's approach to work, focusing on the creative understanding of space as a human condition. The initial volume The Invention of Space explores how space is invented in terms of the various cultural practices involved with spatial design. It captures individual experience and investigates common invention and comprehension of space, embracing topics such as the history, metaphysics, or politics of environmental, virtual or simulative space. The book concludes with also exploring the spatial conditions of thought, emotion, fantasy, and imagination.
£22.50
Park Books A Flower for the Dead – The Memorials of Bogdan Bogdanovic
The Serbian Bogdan Bogdanovic (1922-2010)architect, urbanist, polymath, writer and former mayor of Belgrade - created some of the most distinctive memorials in Europe. In particular his Flower of Stone, in Jasenovac (Croatia) and the Dudik Memorial Park in Vukovar (Croatia,1980) gained international attention. Spread across the territories of former Yugoslavia, Bogdanovic's monuments, memorial sites and necropolises (cemeteries) symbolise both the cultural diversity and the tragic history of the Balkans; they all reflect his philosophy which is one of inclusion, the unity of human experience arising from conflict and shared trauma. Friedrich Achtleitner, poet and architectural critic, has visited all memorials, with Bogdanovic and alone. In A Flower for the Dead, he presents what he has seen during his travels in essays and emotive images.
£27.00
Park Books Typology: Hong Kong, Rome, New York, Buenos Aires
Typology, volume 2 of the new series 'Christ & Gantenbein Review', presents more than 150 buildings located in Rome, New York, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires that have been analysed by the chair of Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. This selective and subjective inventory of metropolitan and essentially anonymous 20th-century building production provides a basis for urban project creation. In this new book, the buildings are documented with floor plans, axonometric projections, recent photographs and key information. The theoretical essay by Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein and four texts by other authors explain the interactions between the contexts, especially the governing urban rule sets and the buildings, and show the potential for the design of a contemporary urban architecture. Text in English and German
£36.00
Park Books OMA’s Kunsthal in Rotterdam: Rem Koolhaas and the New Europe
Opened in 1992, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam is a key design in the portfolio of Rem Koolhaas and OMA, the renowned firm Koolhaas co-founded in 1975. It is part of the Museumpark, a park designed by OMA as well and the location of the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut NAi, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and the Museum of Natural History. The Kunsthal's exhibition space is divided into three large exhibition halls and two smaller galleries. The building houses also an auditorium and a restaurant. This outstanding space for art is a prime destination for countless architecture fans every year. Tibor Pataky, architect and architectural historian, celebrates it in this inspiring book. He explains the history, the programmatic background, and the cultural references of the design, which has been adapted several times, and places it in the context of OMA's work of the 1980s and of the intellectual environment of Deconstructivism. Ten captivating photo series highlight the structure's outstanding qualities and its embedding in the park. New plans, especially drawn for this book, illustrate the shear points of OMA's design. The volume is a hugely attractive tribute to one of the most significant works of post-WW II architecture in Europe.
£40.50
Park Books The Last Grand Tour: Contemporary Phenomena and Strategies of Living in Italy
Since antiquity, Italy has been the origin of key themes of Western architecture and culture, many of which have evolved in exemplary and universally valid ways. Many of these continue to provide an inspiring frame of reference until today. Emulating the tradition and itinerary of the classic Grand Tour of European aristocrats, this comprehensive and visually appealing book takes a nuanced look at Italy today. Around the aspect of housing as a hub, it offers new narratives and positions on current issues and developments that are highly relevant also outside Italy. In the format of a graphic and textual atlas, the volume explores Italy at various scales. Zooming in and out of themes, cities, and regions, it allows for associative and non-linear comprehension and reflection. Housing is examined as a complex construct, acted upon by diverging interests and needs as well as historical legacies. The spatial aspect of living, with its huge impact on the limited resource of land and the landscape, is the starting point for the proposals and strategies the book offers. Its audience reaches beyond the professional architecture community, aiming at anyone with an interest in the much-debated topic of (affordable) housing and in 21st-century Italy.
£37.80
Park Books Best of Austria: Architecture 2020_21
This eighth edition of Best of Austria offers a survey of the creative and economic achievements of Austrian architecture firms and the country’s building culture in general, exemplified by the projects and people who have been awarded national and international architecture prizes in 2020 and 2021. The book features 117 buildings through photos, plans and concise texts by renowned authors. In addition, distinguished individuals, architectural teams and institutions are introduced in brief portraits. An introductory essay by Triin Ojari, director of the Estonian Museum of Architecture in Tallinn, analyses architectural events and building culture in Austria with an outside perspective. The book is rounded out by a detailed index providing relevant information on the various awards. Text in English and German.
£45.00
Park Books The New Normal
The New Normal (2017-2019) was a post-graduate program and Speculative Urbanism think-tank within Moscow’s renowned Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture, and Design. Directed by distinguished American social theorist Benjamin H. Bratton, the The New Normal conducted a collaborative research to investigate the impact of planetary-scale computation on the future of cities both in Russia and around the world. The New Normal book, edited by Benjamin H. Bratton, Nicolay Boyadjiev, and Nick Axel, features twenty-two interlinked projects that were part of the research. Published alongside are 17 lavishly illustrated contributions by international researchers and designers that outline the wider scope of The New Normal program's output, held together by concise thematic texts contributed by Benjamin H. Bratton. Contributors include many of the most influential contemporary designers, philosophers, architects, and artists, such as Yuk Hui, Liam Young, Anastassia Smirnova, Lydia Kallipoliti, Lev Manovich, Julieta Aranda, Trevor Paglen, Metahaven, Keller Easterling, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Molly Wright Steenson, Ben Cerveny, Rival Strategy, Geoff Manaugh, Stephanie Sherman, and Patricia Reed. The fields of research include Speculative Megastructures, Human AI Interaction Design, Protocols and Programs, Synthetic Cinema, Alt-Geographies, Platform Econometrics, and Recursive Simulation. This highly topical volume, the only comprehensive survey of research and work produced by The New Normal program, will appeal to all readers interested in the future of cities and urban design.
£45.00
Park Books Angelo Candalepas: Buildings and Projects
Today one of Australia's leading architects, Angelo Candalepas's career lifted off in 1994, when, at the age of twenty-six, he gained wide recognition for his winning project in the international competition for housing in Sydney's Pyrmont neighbourhood. Over the course of twenty-five years, the designs of Sydney-based firm Candalepas Associates have won numerous awards and have been widely published internationally in magazines and journals. They show a development of architectural considerations drawing upon the heritage of past masters such as Louis I. Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, or Le Corbusier, and that of eminent Australian architects Glenn M. Murcutt, Richard Johnson and Colin Madigan. This has evolved into a body of work of a quality rarely found in Australia's contemporary architectural environment. This first full-scale monograph features a selection of on Angelo Candalepas's key designs through photographs, plans and elevations as well as his hand-drawings and sketches. Completed buildings feature alongside unrealised projects that mark milestones in the firm's development, and other not yet built ones, also offering an insight into the firm's future trajectory. Together with topical essays by Alberto Campo Baeza and Laura Harding as well as an insightful text by the architect it offers a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated survey of the outstanding achievements of Candalepas Associates to date.
£45.00
Park Books Access for All: Sao Paulo's Architectural Infrastructures
Like all mega-cities around the globe, São Paulo faces huge challenges. Yet despite these manifold and daunting tasks, the Brazilian metropolis has since the 1960s maintained a prudent policy of investing in communal infrastructure, thus providing inclusive places and spaces for all of its 20m-population. While many cities aim for a 'Bilbao-effect' by funding iconic, tourist-orientated projects such as museums or theatres, São Paulo persistently supports programs and usages that serve its permanent residents. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at A.M. Architekturmuseum der TU München, features a selection of these buildings and programs from five decades. Ranging from a simple canopy over a public park to vast multifunctional buildings, they provide spaces for sports and culture, education, healthcare, or gastronomy. Rather than merely serving a specific purpose, their key role is to be places for people spending time together. With contributions by Renato Anelli, José Tavares Correia de Lira, Fraya Frehse, Vanessa Grossman, Andres Lepik, Ana Luiza Nobre, Daniel Talesnik, and Guilherme Wisnik; and a conversation with Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Marta Moreira by Enrique Walker. Photographs by Ciro Miguel Also available: Wherever You Find People ISBN 9783038600268
£31.50
Park Books Plans and Images: An Archive of Projects on Typology in Architecture 2013-2018
Learning to construct is the objective of the architecture student, who seeks to bring sketches, sophisticated visualisations, material and component choices, and detailed plans and diagrams together in a single grand composition. Plans & Images offers insight into how architects are trained by examining the teaching and research approach of the Laboratory of Elementary Architecture and Studies of Types EAST (Laboratory EAST), a satellite studio of the EPFL School of Architecture in Lausanne. Going beyond the traditional notion of functionally determined typologies, Laboratory EAST is concerned more broadly with the principles of typology in architecture. Richly illustrated with drawings and plans by Laboratory EAST's students, the book also includes essays by faculty and other experts, and an interview with the renowned Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, who discusses the research topics pursued at Laboratory EAST. Four photo essays by Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti round out the book.
£58.50
Park Books The Horizontal Metropolis: A Radical Project
Two contrasting terms are joined to conjugate the traditional idea of metropolis (the centre of a vast territory, hierarchically organised, dense, vertical, produced by polarization) with horizontality (the idea of a more diffuse, isotropic urban condition, where centre and periphery blur). Beyond a simplistic centre vs periphery opposition, the concept of a horizontal metropolis reveals the dispersed condition as a potential asset, rather than a limit, to the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension. Around 1990, Terry McGee, an urban researcher at the University of British Columbia, coined the term "desakota", deriving from Indonesian "desa" (village) and "kota" (city). Desakota areas typically occur in Asia, especially South East Asia. The term describes an area situated outside the periurban zone, often sprawling alongside arterial and communication roads, sometimes from one agglomeration to the next. They are characterised by high population density and intensive agricultural use, but differ from densely populated rural areas by more urban-like characteristics. The new book The Horizontal Meteropolis investigates such areas alongside examples in the US, Italy, and Switzerland. The study highlights the advantages of the concept and its relevance in economical, ecological, and social aspects. The concept reflects a vision of global urbanisation that no longer allows for "outside" areas and that will test the urban ecosystem to its limits.
£31.50
Park Books The City and the Architecture of Change: The Work and Radical Visions of Cedric Price
For his entire professional life, British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) reflected on the mechanisation of society and its effect on people's lives. In the 1960s and 1970s Price searched for a new language in modern architecture. His multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach and his sense of humour and self-irony, also with regard to his own profession, lead him into the fields of art and of social and natural sciences. Tanja Herdt's new book on the work and life of Cedric Price for the first time offers a comprehensive demonstration of his architectural concepts and social visions. Herdt focuses on his view of the city as a socio-technical system, the influence of product and everyday culture on architecture, and the role of science and technology in architectural design. Based on extensive research and drawing from rich and largely unpublished material, she features some of Price's well-known projects, such as Fun Palace (1961) or Potteries Thinkbelt (1964), in context with her new findings. Herdt's thorough analysis of his lesser-known works from the 1970s, including McAppy (1973-1975) and The Generator (1976), also questions the common perception of Cedric Price as an "anti-architect".
£36.00
Park Books Werkgruppe Graz 1959–1989 – Architecture at the Turn of Late Modernism
The Werkgruppe Graz played a major role in post-war Austrian architecture. All four of its members were educated at the Technical University in Graz and began their collaboration in the late 1959, with the first building completed in 1963. The group was an important precursor of what became known as the Graz School in Austrian architecture. Socially progressive, with a participatory as well as scientific approach they created projects that remain significant milestones until the present day. Werkgruppe Graz 1959-1989 is the first comprehensive documentation of the group's work; putting it in historical and international context. With comprehensive details of 30 building projects, it is a complete catalogue of their work.
£36.00
Park Books Cloud-to-ground
“Cloud-to-ground” is the scientific term for lightning that strikes directly into the ground. The title of this book, published in conjunction with the Israeli pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, is derived from this. It investigates the shifts in political power structure that result from the wide-spread use of cloud technology: the storage, processing and analysis of inconceivable amounts of data in computer “clouds”. The focus is on major infrastructure projects currently underway in Israel and the Middle East region. These include Nimbus, a major cloud project pursued by the Israeli government for which Google and Amazon are building new powerful data centres, or the Blue Raman fibre-optic cable across the Negev Desert, also laid by Google, which will bypass Egypt on its way from India to Europe and at the same time revive the ancient trade routes that passed through this country. Cloud-to-ground also documents the decommissioning and demolition of countless telephone exchanges in Israel’s cities that have become obsolete. It thus brings to attention the physical nature of these largely ignored “black box” structures and connects them to the history of the Middle East and recent developments in global communication technology. Essays by prominent Israeli scholars are complemented by numerous photographs, sketches, and archival documents, as well as a newly compiled index of 140 telephone exchanges in Israel.
£22.50
Park Books Flux Redux: 9 Sites of Experimentation in Stocks and Flows
Flux Redux is a book about design experiments undertaken at the Zurich and Los Angeles-based firm agps Architecture over the course of three decades. The story it tells addresses the evolution of a body of work relative to the evolution of environmental discourse, reflecting also on the shifting relations between technology and sustainability in architecture. The nine case studies from agps Architecture’s portfolio record changes in how architecture is thought about and how it is made. Around 500 illustrations in the book are supplemented with texts by Marc Angélil, one of the founders of agps, and Cary Siress, architect and professor at the Nanjing University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Further contributions are provided by Swiss structural engineer Ernst Hofmann and Margarete von Lupin, a Zurich-based scholar of design and media studies and lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts and University of Zurich. Additional texts by Rainer Hehl, architect and visiting professor at Technische Universität Berlin and Yokohama National University, and Alvaro Siza, one of the most distinguished architects of our time, round out this inspiring volume that also offers observations on architects’ never-ending task of trial and error to make each building a more sustainable agent of a larger environmental system.
£28.80