About urbanNext
Greg Lynn
How will the new digital technologies of design and manufacturing impact the future of the urban scale?
Interview by Areti Markopoulou at Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia - IaaC -, Barcelona, October 2015
Architecture: Participation, Process, and Negotiation
Teddy Cruz
Published in Verb Crisis, 2008.
We need to reorient architecture towards sectors of precariousness that are habitually left out of the scope of our practice. An important segment of the current architectural avant-garde has aligned itself with homogenization, privatization, and economic neoliberalism. As architects we are simply dressing-up these conditions, we have stopped challenging them.
Ecatepec, MEX
León Muñoz Santini
With no more than twenty years of existence, on the edge of the city and the country; located on the northern edge of the metropolitan area of Mexico City —a periphery of more than ten million inhabitants—, the Golondrinas colony is a short perimeter of five by five blocks that summarizes in its composition and brief history all the features and conditions of urban informality and precariousness.
About Technology
Areti Markopoulou
Selfthink by Areti Markopoulou for urbanNext.
https://vimeo.com/urbannext/areti-markopoulou/about-technology
Boom Boom Madrid: Disappearance of the Social
Jacob van Rijs
Published in Verb Crisis, 2008.
Can one then consider the affordable status of these apartments as disposable? Is it the purpose to build affordable houses that will disappear after ten years and therefore become “unaffordable?” Or, is it an optimistic suggestion to think that the widespread need for affordable housing is only temporary?
Different Perspectives: Problems & Opportunities
Arna Mathiesen | Emanuel Gianotti
Published in "Scarcity in Excess: The Built Environment and the Economic Crisis in Iceland", 2014
In conclusion, instead of starting new projects which will demand an incredible amount of resources, recycling or retrofitting the neighborhoods on the outskirts seems like a reasonable way forward, and would be an important step for the whole town.
BioMed City
Hilary Sample
Published in Verb Crisis, 2008.
BMC (BioMed City) has a specific architecture that is highly refined both in terms of its programmatic requirements and its adoption of sustainable technologies.
Public Space Acupuncture
Jesús Hernández
Published in "Public Space Acupuncture", 2015
Throughout history, cities have often been compared with living organisms. The analogy between the city and the human body has been explored in depth by figures as varied as Plato, Vitruvius or Leonardo DaVinci. Urban tissue, a city’s heart, arteries and lungs are some of the terms that comprise the extensive urban planning vocabulary that has been created by comparing fragments of the city with organs or elements of the human anatomy. While the human body has served as a recurring metaphor to describe the complex functioning of cities, sickness has often been the allegory used to illustrate urban dysfunction. Above and beyond anthropomorphic conceptions of the city, statements like “Paris is sick”, proclaimed by Le Corbusier [1] in 1929, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s comparison, from 1958, between the cross-section of any city plan and the section of a fibrous tumor, [2] highlight the city’s metaphorical capacity to fall ill. “Sickness”, in this context, is not understood as intrinsic to the natural functioning of any organism, but rather as an evil that must be combated.
Estonoesunsolar
Grávalos & di Monte | Jesús Hernández
Text by Jesús Hernández. Published in "Public Space Acupuncture", 2015.
Principal Designers: Grávalos & Di Monte Architects: Ignacio Grávalos, Patrizia Di Monte.
Promoters: Zaragoza Vivienda (Municipal Housing Society of Zaragoza).
Photographer: Grávalos & Di Monte Architects.
Location: Different locations in Zaragoza, Spain.
Date of Completion: 2012.
Promoters: Zaragoza Vivienda (Municipal Housing Society of Zaragoza).
Photographer: Grávalos & Di Monte Architects.
Location: Different locations in Zaragoza, Spain.
Date of Completion: 2012.
Long-term strategies based on temporary interventions sample in Saragossa by Ignacio Grávalos and Patrizia di Monte, Estonoesunsolar and Zaragoza Vivienda, Spain.
Citizens as Builders: Co-production Strategies
Jesús Hernández
Published in "Public Space Acupuncture", 2015
The motivations that lead so many citizens all over the world to intervene directly in public space autonomously and independently of the authorities are very diverse.
Maintaining Buildings
Robert Engelman
Interview by urbanNext at World Sustainable Building Conference 2014, Barcelona.
Daita 2019: Vernacular Architecture House
Suzuko Yamada
Architects: Suzuko Yamada
Location: Japan, Tokyo
Area: 138 m2
Year: 2019
Photography: Yurika Kono
While designing this house, I remembered the Rwanda forest I visited a few years ago. It is a vast forest around the Virunga Volcanoes, on the border of three countries – Rwanda, Congo and Uganda – where wild mountain gorillas live and roam. When we caught up with a troop of gorillas following the guidance of local people, they were sitting and resting among soft bushes in an open space of the forest. Infant gorillas played in the trees and ran around among the adults, as each adult settled comfortably to groom themselves or to eat grass and tree bark. It was like a scene in a house. They found their places among dense trees and improvised their houses. Although there were no walls or roofs, trees, tall grass and creepers entwined with them; the overlaps and outlines created by unevenness in the terrain enclosed the presence of inhabitant, to form a comfortable density that could be called a house. This is the vernacular architecture in the gorilla forest.
Seseña, SP
Ibai Rigby
The story of the Francisco Hernando neighborhood in Seseña, a town 35km south of Madrid, as well as many other urban developments in Spain at the beginning of the 21st century is well known. The liberalization of land use allowing urban development in almost any corner of the Spanish territory, tax cuttings that forced municipalities to finance themselves through building permits, together with low bank interest rates generated what has been considered to be the biggest real estate bubble in Europe.
Pristina, KS
Ibai Rigby
The defunct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia achieved a certain degree of material well-being, which was reflected in a strong program for social housing or the construction of great public buildings to accommodate the people. Architecture played an important cultural role and Yugoslavian architects, understanding the political climate of their time, rejected Socialist Realism in favor of an International Style with its own characteristics.
NY. Hydrant, Water always Writes in Plural
Manuel Bailo
Cataloging: Environmental modifications and construction of Infrastructures of Trade and Leisure.
Catalyst: Water.
Example: Spontaneous alteration of the urban normality. Street in NY during the summer.
Date: Until today.
Author: New Yorkers.
Address: NY.
Description: Some children from a big dense American city like NY use the accidental water escape of a firemen hose to convert the streets into a place for games. It is an example of how a hazardous situation of minimal resources can transform the city.
Monumental fountains.
The monumental fountains are objects to be thoughtfully observed. They are urban elements that furnish the public space and that in many occasions symbolize the moments in which the city has suffered subsequent transformations or important events. Water spouts, sometimes of great height, turn into urban modals that splash and scare away the pedestrians who look at them from far away, avoiding getting wet.
Museums of the City
David Gissen
Published in "Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions", 2013.
Installation at the Nevada Museum of Art by Geoff Manaugh.
Funding for Museums of the City provided by the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, and the Chalsty Fund & Faculty Development Fund, California College of the Arts.
Funding for Museums of the City provided by the Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, and the Chalsty Fund & Faculty Development Fund, California College of the Arts.
Architectural historian David Gissen offers four provocative images of the city transformed into a museum of itself: often-overlooked landscapes from the city’s own past literally reframed in complicated ways. If the internal space of the museum can be seen as a device for turning everyday objects into historical artifacts and works of art, what happens when museological devices leak out into the city at large?
Auckland Waterfront
Taylor Cullity Lethlean | Wraight and Associates
Principal Designers: Taylor Cullity Lethlean, Wraight and Associates.
Location: Wynyard Quarter, Auckland Waterfront, New Zealand.
Area: 18,000 m2.
Promoters: Auckland Waterfront.
Photographer: Simon Devitt.
Location: Wynyard Quarter, Auckland Waterfront, New Zealand.
Area: 18,000 m2.
Promoters: Auckland Waterfront.
Photographer: Simon Devitt.
Jellicoe Harbor is used for a diverse array of purposes, including container shipping, ferry services and commercial fishing. Previously, these activities were conducted out of the public eye. Now, however, they are central to the public realm experience and integrated as attractions.
Kangbashi, CHN
Ibai Rigby
Kangbashi is probably not the rebirth of the phoenix as the city defines itself in the propaganda brochures that dwell in its hotel rooms, but it’s not either the ghost city by which al-Jazeera and other foreign media try to undermine the credibility of the new global super-power China has become.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Architecture
Sanford Kwinter
Published in "Requiem for the City at the End of the Millenium", 2010.
Ryugyong Hotel (105-floor shell reactivated 16 years after going into dormancy), Pyongyang, North Korea, Unknown 2001
The present appears to be a golden moment for architecture. Public attention to, and general lust for, design is at an all-time high; everyone is doing brilliant and fresh work; architects are increasingly respected and sought out for their ideas on social developments, history, and the city; and it seems that we have all overcome our objections to capitalism. Despite some of these ironies, such developments are in themselves no bad thing.
New Farming Typologies
[bracket] | Mason White | Maya Przybylski
Published in "Bracket 1 [on Farming]", 2010
Farming emerges less as a conscious practice than a collective behavior across mediums. Agriculture, but also information, energy, and labor can be farmed.
Port to Port
Annelie Berner | Juan Francisco Saldarriaga | Laura Kurgan | Spatial Information Design Lab
Project director: Laura Kurgan | Data analysis and data visualization: Juan Francisco Saldarriaga | Design development and D3 interface: Annelie Berner and Scott Murray
A visual exploration of energy shipping routes around the world.
Engaging Cities
Peter Rich
Interview by urbanNext at World Sustainable Building Conference 2014, Barcelona.
The City as a Source of Equity
Alejandro Aravena
Published in Verb Crisis, 2008.
Architects ceased being architects and became officials working for international bodies, urban economists, urban sociologists, etc.
Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture
Sanford Kwinter
The phrase far from equilibrium is borrowed from the field of thermodynamics where, especially in the last four decades, it has come to refer to the special states of a system in which it is most likely to produce radical, productive and unforeseeable behaviors.
UNCHARTED / New Landscapes of Tourism
David Goodman | Fernando Rodríguez | Juan Elvira | Lina Toro | Pablo Oriol | Roger Paez
UNCHARTED / New Landscapes of Tourism has a two-fold objective: to explore new avenues of thought in design teaching, and to do so through research that deals with new architectural landscapes that are linked to tourism.
Suprarural, Architectural Atlas of Rural Protocols of the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas
Ciro Najle | Lluís Ortega
Suprarural, Architectural Atlas of Rural Protocols of the American Midwest and the Argentine Pampas, presents an alternative approach to existing models of relationship between the urban and the natural based on palliative, decorative, or hygienist ethics. Against the grain of these models and overcoming their nostalgic frameworks, the notion of Suprarural seeks to reframe, systematize, and empower the architectural forces latent in rural organizations, focusing in particular on those relating to agricultural production and livestock farming. Rather than naturalizing nature from a functional perspective of the urban, the intention is to develop techniques to straightforwardly urbanize with and through the rural.
Barcelona
Jon Tugores
Jon Tugores’ Barcelona lifts our gaze to a new vantage point over our city, revealing a new territorial scale that has never been shown before.
Critical Prison Design: Mas d’Enric Penitentiary by AiB arquitectes + Estudi PSP Arquitectura
Roger Paez
The prison is an uncomfortable institution and its architecture is often subjugated to technocratic criteria. Mas d’Enric is a new penitentiary that overturns preconceptions and posits architecture as a medium to critically rethink contemporary prisons.
Natural Metaphor: An Anthology of Essays on Architecture and Nature
ETH Zürich | Josep Lluís Mateo
Architectural Papers III
GSD Platform 6
GSD | Rosetta S. Elkin
A year of research through studio work, theses, lectures, exhibitions and events.
What Is Energy and How (Else) Might we Think about It?
Kiel Moe | Sanford Kwinter
Energy and design are currently imprisoned within a narrow framework of commonplaces, moral mediocrity, and outright error. Yet the platitudes that ensue from it continue to claim the attention of both the discipline and the fields of urbanism and design. The history of thought about energy however is anything but this simple or boring. It may be said to carry many of the greatest challenges to a nuanced and rich contemporary imagination, a resource that offers immense inventive possibility to design speculation.
Stardust*. Ephemeral Arts Connection
Carla Athayde | Francesco Ducato | Stardust*
The book aims to reflect about the relation between space, matter and time.
Geographies of Trash
El Hadi Jazairy | Rania Ghosn
Geographies of Trash reclaims the materiality and spatiality of municipal solid waste systems.
Mutations
Daniela Fabricius | Hans-Ulrich Obrist | Nadia Tazi | Rem Koolhaas | Sanford Kwinter | Stefano Boeri
Out of print
In a world redefined today by communication networks and by a progressive erasure of borders lead by economic forces, Mutations reflects on the transformations that the acceleration of these processes inflicts on our environment, and on the space left for architecture to operate.
Essays on Thermodynamics. Architecture and Beauty
Abalos+Sentkiewicz
Essays on Thermodynamics. Architecture and Beauty is a compendium of essays and projects, that creates a projective document able to set up new scenarios for the Architecture of the next decade.
From Urban Shop to New City
Alex wall
Victor Gruen is the commercial architect who became renowned in 1950s America as the “pioneer of the shopping center”, then by his urban redevelopment projects as the “savior of the downtowns,” and by the mid-1960s as the “architect of the environment.”
Thermodynamic Interactions: An Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres
Javier García-Germán
Thermodynamic Interactions: An Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmospheres shows energy and sustainability as a complex topic that needs to address simultaneously core disciplinary values and ideas that come from other fields of knowledge.
Trans-Structures: Fluid Architecture and Liquid Engineering
Matyas Gutai
Trans Structures introduces water as a building material to build unique, responsive-able structures and define a new paradigm for architecture and sustainable design.
Projective Ecologies
Chris Reed | GSD | Nina-Marie Lister
Ecological research applied to current architectural practice.
The Sniper’s Log
Alejandro Zaera-Polo
This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s professional life.
Total Singular Housing: Alternatives to Private Domain
Ricardo Devesa
A selection of houses from the 21st century. New houses in response to new needs: Global Domesticity, resource-enhanced, docile indoor, and colonized outdoors.
Desert America: Territory of Paradox
Irene Hwang | Jaime Salazar | Michael Kubo | Ramon Prat
“Desert America: Territory of Paradox” is a survey of the extreme uses and activities that take place in the area roughly encompassing Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and sections of California and Texas.
Calme Bloc
Avenier Cornejo architects | Chartier-Dalix architectes | Myr Muratet | Sebastien Marot
Architects, authors, and photographers – different viewpoints on a dense and complex building in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. The photographer Myr Muratet, who spent several weeks living there, offers us an authentic reportage of the building’s appropriation by its new inhabitants.
Total Housing
A selection of innovative contemporary collective housing. Total Housing is a demonstration of the virtues of high and medium density multi-family homes, and an antidote to urban sprawl. The new and updated selection of works in Total Housing spans a period coinciding with the height of the housing boom to the crisis period in most “developed” economies in the 21st century.
Total China
Li Xiangning
This publication will present and review the architectural climate and practice progress of contemporary Chinese architecture during the first decade of the new millennium. Through analyzing and reflecting on the best Chinese architectural production, a new cultural era will be shown in Total China.
Bracket 3 [at Extremes]
Lola Sheppard | Maya Przybylski
Bracket [at extremes] includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states.
The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles
Kazys Varnelis
Once the greatest American example of modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now a perpetual city.
Total Landscape: Sensitive Alternatives to the Post-Industrial Landscape
Erica Sogbe | Ricardo Devesa
A selection of landscape projects from the 21st Century. Regeneration, integration and new challenges in contemporary public space.
Total Latin American Architecture: Libretto of Modern Reflections & Contemporary Works
Ana de Brea
A selected, fully open, and deep assemblage, that carries the explicit intent of outlining, conceptual and practical verifications, on critical views and specific projects, concerning the actual architecture in the Latin American territory.
Related publications:
Total Housing
Total Singular Housing
Total China
Total Landscape
Public Catalyst: Against Indifference
Manuel Bailo
Demonstrates the existence of public space catalysts, as well as the need of their presence for an expectant or indifferent place to be activated.
Kerb23 Digital Landscapes
Georgia Aldous, Sophia Horomidis, Rebecca Pike & Robert Williamson | Kerb
It is the identification and manipulation of matter that has the potential to inform, change, align, and drive a physical interaction and making with the world. Kerb 23 examines ways in which ‘Digital Landscape’ discourse can be applied to landscape architecture.
Verb Next
Ramon Prat
“There is an issue in the questions, “Designing Behavior”, we know that part of the equation can be controlled by technological inventions like solar panels, reusable water and so on. But one of the major issue is actually the behavior of the people using the buildings and inhabiting the space”. (Boris Brorman Jensen)
Public Space Acupuncture
Helena Casanova | Jesús Hernández
Acupuncture strategies to renovate infrastructure, landscape elements and public space of a city.
Interdisciplinary Design: New lessons from Architecture and Engineering
Hanif Kara
Architects and engineers both claim to be designers, though how the define design and the approaches they use to realize it vary widely. Their interaction, however, has created some of the world’s most memorable, enduring, and impressive buildings.
Scarcity in Excess
Arna Mathiesen
A guiding model that seeks to address the relationship between the economic meltdown and the built environment in Iceland using ecological approaches. New solutions that aspire a long-term balance between economic objectives and ecological issues.
Donald Judd. Open Enclosed
Gillermo Zuaznabar
In this brilliant essay, Gillermo Zuaznabar sets out to describe Donald Judd as if he were an unknown figure, a great pioneer.
Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions
Geoff Manaugh
Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, curated by writer Geoff Manaugh for the Nevada Museum of Art, explores the future of landscape studies by way of the technical intermediaries—the instruments, devices and architectural inventions— through which humans have come to understand the built and natural environments.
Requiem for the City at the End of the Millenium
Sanford Kwinter
In this small, but provocative book, Sanford Kwinter addresses the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal transformations that characterized the modernization processes set into motion at the turn of the millennium.
Architecture and Violence
Bechir Kenzari
In today’s turbulent times few subjects deserve a closer scrutiny tan the interactions between violence and constructed environment. Modernity’s contradictory histories laid bare the fact that it is impossible to consider architecture simply a benign, passive victim of humanity’s violent vices. Built space is as capable of incarnating violent acts as enacting them, disciplining and silencing the subject in the process.
Architecture & Violence
Bracket 2 [goes Soft]
[bracket] | Lola Sheppard | Neeraj Bhatia
Bracket [goes Soft] examines the use and implications of soft today – from the scale of material innovation to territorial networks.
Verb Crisis
Alejandro Aravena | Alejandro Zaera-Polo | Boris Brorman Jensen | Hilary Sample | Interboro | Jacob van Rijs | Jacobo García-Germán | Jordi Bernadó | Mario Ballesteros | MVRDV | Ramon Prat | Shigeru Ban | Teddy Cruz
Architectural responses to unprecedented conditions: the limits of architectural design and the demands for updated social relevance. Verb Crisis examines architectural solutions to the extraordinary conditions of an increasingly dense and interdependent world.
Bracket 1 [on Farming]
[bracket] | Fritz Haeg | Jason Sowell | Jeffrey Johnson | Joyce Hwang | Mason White | Maya Przybylski | MVRDV | Nathalie de Vries | Studio Lindfors
Bracket 1 is titled “On Farming” and looks at capacity for architecture to address ideas and issues of productive landscapes and urbanisms. Once merely understood in terms of agriculture, today information, energy, labor, and landscape, among others, can be farmed. Farming harness the efficiency of collective and community.
The Self-Sufficient City
Vicente Guallart
The Barcelona Architect in Chief, Vicente Guallart, peals the axes in which the cities must be sustained to adapt them to the new information age, and to generate its own resources.
