Architectural Association Spring 2011 Catalogue

Architectural Association

AA PUBLICATIONS CATALOGUE

SPRING UPDATE 2011

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NEW AND FORTHCOMING

ARCHITECTURE WORDS Architecture Words is a series of texts and essays on architecture written by architects, critics and scholars. The words are edited and the pages designed in a way that acknowledges the ability of graphic forms to communicate architectural ideas; not only the ideas contained within each volume, but also the power of written ideas to challenge and change the way all architects think. Previous authors in the series include Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas, Kengo Kuma, Jan Turnovsky, Denise Scott Brown and Max Bill.

NewARCHITECTURE WORDS 6PROJECTILESBernard CacheWith an introduction by Mario CarpoTranslated by Clare Barrett and Pamela Johnston144 pp180 x 110 mm, paperbackMay 2011 978-1-902902-88-3£12

Bernard Cache is the principal of the Paris-based practice Objectile and a noted theorist of geometry and computational ontology. He formulated his concept of ‘non-standard architecture’ in his 1995 book Earth Moves, a concept that was given the name ‘objectile’ by Gilles Deleuze in his book on the philosopher Leibniz, The Fold. This collection of eight essays brings together a number of key texts by Cache, including his 1999 ‘Plea for Euclid’ and more recent writing commissioned especially for this collection, including ‘Vitruvius Machinator Terminator’.

NewARCHITECTURE WORDS 7MODERNITY UNBOUNDDetlef Mertins200 pp180 x 110 mm, paperbackFebruary 2011 978-1-902902-89-0£12

Collected from over 20 years, these essays elaborate on such key modernist tropes as transparency, glass architecture, organicism, life and event, sameness and difference. Previously published in a variety of different venues, they are now assembled for the first time in this volume.

ForthcomingARCHITECTURE WORDS 8TARZANS IN THE MEDIA FOREST Toyo ItoWith an introduction by Thomas Daniellc 160 pp180 x 110 mm, paperbackApril 2011 978-1-902902-90-6 £12

This book publishes for the first time in English a collection of architectural writings and essays by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Born in 1941, Ito is one of the world’s most innovative architects. The texts in this collection cover almost exactly 40 years of writing and feature famous essays as well as previously untranslated writings that shed new light on Ito’s relationship to evolving patterns of architectural thinking and design.

ForthcomingARCHITECTURE WORDS 5–8BOX SETLimited editionJune 2011 978-1-902902-91-3£55

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AA AGENDASAA Agendas is a series of books designed to capture work generated through any number of the school’s design units, courses and other AA events and initiatives. Through the range of projects illustrated, the series reveals the breadth of the AA’s teaching practices and the vitality of the resulting student and staff work.

New AA AGENDAS 9MAKING PAVILIONSEdited by Martin Self and Charles Walker 184 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills249 x 170 mm, paperbackMarch 2011978-1-902902-82-1 £15

Over the past six years the students of the Architectural Association’s Intermediate Unit 2 have designed and built a series of experimen-tal pavilions. Structured to follow a year in the life of the unit, this book presents the pro-cesses of the pavilions’ design and production, from concept ideas to workshop fabrication. Essays by the unit’s tutors, Charles Walker and Martin Self, explain the ambitions and pedagogic basis of the programme, rooted in the idea of experiential learning. Through the voices of students, tutors and critics, both the educational value of this innovative design-build programme and its architectural output are explored and debated.

NewAA AGENDAS 11MEDIATING ARCHITECTUREEdited by Theo Lorenz and Peter Staub120 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills249 x 170 mm, paperbackMarch 2011 978-1-907896-01-9£15

Mediating Architecture demonstrates the extended role of the architect through the applied work of AA's Diploma Unit 14 within London's Thames Gateway over three consecutive years. A series of essays reflect this methodology from the multi-disciplinary perspectives of architecture, urban design, landscape design and philosophy.

Forthcoming AA AGENDAS 12DESIGNING FABRICATION Edited by Alan Dempseyc 96 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills249 x 170 mm, paperbackApril 2011978-1-907896-03-3£15

Designing Fabrication gathers the collective research and a selection of award-winning projects from the last two years of the FAB Research Cluster at the AA, which demon-strate the pioneering use of digital design and fabrication technology in projects that range in scale from furnishing to infrastructure. Projects are shown in their completed form and in development through drawings, models and prototypes to demonstrate the increasingly close relationship between material and information in architecture.

NEW AND FORTHCOMING

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ForthcomingAA BOOK: PROJECTS REVIEW 2011c 352 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills249 x 170 mm, paperbackJune 2011978-1-907896-10-1£20

Published annually to accompany the end-of-year exhibition and to record a year in the life of the AA School, the AA Book: Projects Review 2011 contains texts, reviews, graphics, photographs and, above all else, projects selected from across the entire school.

Forthcoming51N4EPeter Swinnenc 296 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills307 x 215 mm, paperbackJune 2011978-1-907896-09-5c £20

51N4E is a Brussels-based architectural practice led by Johan Anrys, Freek Persyn and Peter Swinnen. Founded in 1998, it has drawn increasing attention and renown through projects for the C-mine cultural centre in Genk, the Groeningemuseum and the TID Tower and Skanderbeg Square both in Tirana, Albania. This book, accompanying an exhibition on the practice at the Architectural Association, features these and 17 other projects alongside essays by Lars Lerup, Dominique Boudet and Stefan Devoldere.

ForthcomingNET WORKS: AN ATLAS OF CONNECTIVE AND DISTRIBUTIVE INTELLIGENCE IN ARCHITECTUREEdited by Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzalez de Canalesc 368 pp, extensive col. & b/w ills297 x 210 mm, hardcoverOctober 2011978-1-907896-14-9£40

Net Works is the second volume of a trilogy by Brett Steele and Francisco Gonzalez de Canales exploring the changing conditions of architecture in relation to modern technologies and experimentation. The book surveys the relationship between architecture and networks – as a way of thinking, as an organisational diagram and as a pedagogical tool. The atlas documents a longer and deeper history of the modern connective intelligence in architecture. The aim of this book is to unfold the genealogy of the engagement by architects with the network and machines of modern architectural life, showcased by more than 100 paradigmatic examples, presenting a pre-history of today’s architectural cultures.

FORTHCOMING

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New20/20: EDITORIAL TAKES ON ARCHITECTURAL DISCOURSEEdited by Kirk Wooller276 pp216 x 135 mm, paperback February 2011978-1-907896-00-2£10

20/20 brings together editors from 20 leading contemporary architectural magazines to collectively discuss the role editors play in shaping architectural discourse. Each of the contributors has responded to a set of 20 questions on the multiple conditions under which particular ideas and words enter architectural discourse through publication. The resulting critical positions are as diverse as the magazines from which they originate.

ForthcomingMANIFEST DESTINY: A GUIDE TO THE ESSENTIAL INDIFFERENCE OF AMERICAN SUBURBAN HOUSINGJason GriffithsWith an afterword by Martino Stierlic 120 pp, extensive col. illsPaperback April 2011978-1-907896-05-7c £15

On 18 October 2002 Jason Griffiths and Alex Gino set out to explore the American suburbs. Over 178 days they drove 22,382 miles, made 134 suburban house calls and took 2,593 photographs. In Manifest Destiny, Griffiths reveals the results of this exploration. Structured through 58 short chapters, the anthology offers an architectural pattern book of suburban conditions all focused not on the unique or specific but the placeless. These chapters are complemented by an introduction by Griffiths and an afterword by Swiss architectural historian Martino Stierli.

ForthcomingONE MILLION ACRES AND NO ZONINGLars LerupWith an introduction by Edward Dimendbergc 272 pp250 x 174 mm, hardback April 2011978-1-907896-04-0£22

Routinely dismissed as ‘mere sprawl’, the suburban city is the black hole of recent urbanism, absorbing human energy and resources but seldom revealing the principles of its operation. For the past 20 years Lars Lerup has explored Houston as its prototype. In this book he broadly approaches this complex conurbation so as to develop a vocabulary to interpret its urban forms. Loved by its inhabitants, defined by huge potential and difficult problems, Lerup’s Houston is a test-case for twenty-first-century urbanism and our understanding of unregulated cities everywhere.

Forthcoming BEYOND ENTROPY: WHEN ENERGY BECOMES FORM Edited by Stefano Rabolli Panserac 160 pp, extensive col. & b/w illsPaperbackMay 2011978-1-907896-06-4£15

This book marks the conclusion of the Beyond Entropy cluster, and is produced in tandem with an exhibition on show at the AA in May 2011. The theme of the book derives from the urgency with which the idea of energy has been raised in recent years in political, economic and scientific debates. The book charts the efforts of architects to reappropriate this theme and to address the debate in a wider cultural sphere.

NEW AND FORTHCOMING

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ForthcomingSHARP WORDS: SELECTED ESSAYS OF DENNIS SHARPWith an introduction by Brett Steelec 224 ppPaperback May 2011978-1-907896-07-1£15

To commemorate the life and work of Dennis Sharp (1933–2010), Sharp Words collates together a variety of essays that touch upon each of his architectural fascinations – among them, glass architecture, picture palaces, masters of concrete and English modernism. Punctuating these texts are a number of editorials from his days as editor of AAQ, which graphically as much as intellectually offer emblems of his time at the AA.

ForthcomingO-14: PROJECTION AND RECEPTIONJesse Reiser With essays by Brett Steele, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin and Sanford Kwinterc 276 pp, extensive col. & b/w illsPaperback June 2011978-1-907896-08-8£18

O-14: Projection and Reception explores the groundbreaking exo-skeleton office tower in Dubai by New York-based architects, Reiser+Umemoto. This monograph will not only provide exhaustive documentation of O-14’s design and construction but delves further into the complex interrelationships this architectural model weaves between technology, expression and politics in the context of the ‘nowhere place’ of the global city. The book is both an account of a design’s realisation and a manifesto, and contains Jesse Reiser’s explanatory and theoretical texts on the tower as well as a number of critical essays.

ForthcomingADAPTIVE ECOLOGIES: CORRELATED SYSTEMS OF LIVING Theodore Spyropoulos With essays by Patrik Schumacher, Mark Burry, John Frazer, Frédéric Migayrou and othersExtensive col. & b/w ills240 x 185 mmJune 2011978-1-907896-13-2£ tbc

Recent architecture has found itself having to cope with new social and cultural complexities that demand networked systems that are time based, reconfigurable and evolutionary, and a corresponding model of urbanism defined as an adaptive ecology. It is against this backdrop that the AA’s graduate Design Research Lab (DRL) has pursued its recent studio agenda through project-based research focusing on alternative models of housing. Integral to this research is a notion of architecture that looks towards designing systems that seek higher ordered goals emerging through an intimate correlation of material and computational interaction. This book presents the results of this research and with it constructs a generative view of space and structure and the exploration of behaviour-based models of living through patterns found in nature.

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AA FILES AA Files is the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s journal of record. Launched in 1981 by the AA School’s then chairman Alvin Boyarsky, the journal appears twice a year and is sent out to members of the Architectural Association, individual subscribers and is distributed to a global network of bookshops. Currently under the editorship of Thomas Weaver, AA Files looks to promote original and engaging writing on architecture. It does this by drawing both on the AA School’s own academic research, lecture programme, exhibitions and events, and on a rich and eclectic mix of architectural scholarship from all over the world.

ForthcomingAA FILES 6296 pp, extensively illustrated in col.297 x 245mmApril 2011ISSN 0261 6823ISBN 978-1-902902-99-9£15

Features essays by the architectural historians Mathew Aitchison on townscape and Mark Crinson on James Stirling, the editor and theorist Thomas McDonough on fire and architecture, the critic Sony Devabhaktuni on Merce Cunningham, the writer William Firebrace on the undersea, the historian Pier Vittorio Aureli on Ludwig Hilberseimer and a conversation with photographer Tim Street-Porter about riding bicycles in the desert.

ForthcomingAA FILES 6396 pp, extensively illustrated in col.297 x 245mmOctober 2011ISSN 0261 6823ISBN 978-1-907896-11-8£15

Features essays by the architectural historian André Bideau on Oswald Mathias Ungers, the editor Pamela Johnston on the birds and the bees, the critic Irénée Scalbert on John Winter, the scholar Karin Jaschke on Herman Haan and a conversation between historian Sabine von Fischer and architectural patron Hedi Weber.

By annual subscription: UK £32, overseas £33 inc. P&PBack issues (nos. 1 to 56) – subject to availability – at £6 each.

NEW AND FORTHCOMING

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Bedford Press, initiated by the Architectural Association in 2008, is a private press with the dual purpose of establishing an on-site facility for the production of printed matter for the AA School and to create a new typology of publications that extends beyond the Architectural Association’s existing pro-gramme. This initiative builds upon the AA’s renowned legacy of independent publishing. The press aims to establish a more responsive model of small-scale publishing, nimble enough to encompass the entire chain of production in a single fluid activity, from initial commission to the final printing. The products of the press include publica-tions, as well as ephemera such as pamphlets, posters and limited edition prints.

TRANSLATED BYEdited by Charles Arsène-Henry and Shumon BasarDouglas Coupland, Rana Dasgupta, Hu Fang, Julien Gracq, Jonathan Lethem, Tom McCarthy, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Sophia Al Maria, Hisham Matar, Adania Shibli, Neal Stephenson144 pp, b/w ills105 x 175 mm, softcoverFebruary 2011978-1-907414-17-6£10

Translated By accompanied the exhibition at the AA, which gathered eleven literary writers and eleven literary places and subjected these to an act of immaterial translation: via the voice. The stories run through Ramallah, recollect turn-of-the-century Sofia, remember the space-ship looking-Sheraton Hotel in Doha, wander through the ‘Metaverse’ and end at the end of the world in West Vancouver. Each of the authors invent or interpret place. Mundane, marginal, infamous, impossible. Together, the texts create a strange and beautiful territory that traverses distance and time. Includes essays by Charles Arsène-Henry and Shumon Basar.

CIVIC CITY CAHIER 3: DISTRIBUTED AGENCY, DESIGN’S POTENTIALITYTom Holert60pp, one col. ills180 x 110 mmSoftcover with dust jacketMarch 2011978-1-907414-12-1£8

Tom Holert intends to reframe and re-imagine design in post-capitalist terms. By tracing the appearance of the term ‘design’ in contempo-rary critical theory he develops an optimistic micro-political approach, which tries to go beyond well-rehearsed figures of critique, namely, those accusing design of being complicit with capitalist commodification and, ultimately, exploitation.

CIVIC CITY CAHIER 4: AFTERLIVES OF NEOLIBERALISMNeil Brenner, Jamie Peck and Nik Theodorec 120pp, b/w ills180 x 110 mmSoftcover with dust jacketJuly 2011978-1-907414-18-3£8

The global financial collapse of 2008 was widely interpreted as discrediting the neoliberal project and its false utopia of market rule, though it remains to be seen whether the death of neoliberalism has in fact been greatly exaggerated. Brenner, Peck and Theodore raise the question: will late-neo-liberal regulatory reforms and modes of crisis management usher in a truly post-neoliberal political settlement, or will the neoliberal project continue to stagger on in the form of a leaner and meaner politics of austerity, a politics that fails to fundamentally disrupt prevailing neoliberalised regulatory settle-ments and sociospatial relations? And finally, how can a rejuvenated ‘civic city’ emerge from within the interstices of the fractured, polarised urban spaces of late neoliberalism?

BEDFORD PRESS

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AA PUBLICATIONS The Architectural Association publishes titles that explore developments in architecture, engineering, landscape and urbanism as well as the fields that touch on them – philosophy, history, art and photography. The AA is an independent school of architecture. Courses are divided into two main areas – the undergraduate programmes, leading to the highly regarded AA Diploma and to RIBA/ARB Parts I and II; and the MA, MSc, MArch, MPhil, PhD and AA Graduate Design programmes, which include specialised courses in housing and urbanism, sustainable environmental design, history and critical thinking, landscape urbanism, emergent technologies and design, as well as a short course in building conservation. For further information on the school or to make online purchases, visit www.aaschool.ac.uk or www.aaschool.ac.uk/publications

LONDON BOOK FAIR 2011Visit AA Publications at the London Book Fair from 9 to 11 April at Earls Court – stand K720

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Cover image: One Million Acres and No Zoning by Lars Lerup

Produced by AA Print Studio. Art Direction: Zak Kyes. Design: Claire McManus

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