AA Files 75 features essays by Freya Wigzell, Kristina Jaspers, Claire Zimmerman, Laila Seewang, Roberta Marcaccio, Rebecca Siefert, Shantel Blakely, Francesco Zuddas, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Francisco González de Canales, Ross Anderson, Salomon Frausto, Theo Crosby, Marco Biraghi and Zoë Slutzky, together with a personal reminiscence by Nigel Coates and a conversation between Thomas Daniell and Shin Takamatsu.
This title features essays by Lilly Dubowitz on Stefan Sebok, the art historian Karin Gimmi on Max Frisch, the architectural historian Irene Sunwoo on AATV, the oral historian Linda Sandino on the oral archive, the design historian Eric Kindel on stencils and a conversation between John Morgan and Sally Potter about her father."
AA Files 76 is structured as a glossary of terms relevant to contemporary debate in architecture. Each entry has been contributed by a different author, and represents a personal position as much as an attempt to frame the topic in a broader context; the issue therefore maps both a landscape of current concerns, interests, and ambitions, and also an overview of diverse positions and forms of practice. The authors of this glossary are practitioners, academics, students, lawyers, politicians, activists, and their contributions do not only seek to explore the potential of the themes put forward, but also to question the ways in which we can discuss space - as designers, as scholars, as citizens.
What can you do with a degree in architecture? Where might it take you? What kind of challenges could you address? Architects After Architecture reframes architecture as a uniquely versatile way of acting on the world, far beyond that of designing buildings. In this volume, we meet forty practitioners through profiles, case studies, and interviews, who have used their architectural training in new and resourceful ways to tackle the climate crisis, work with refugees, advocate for diversity, start tech companies, become leading museum curators, tackle homelessness, draft public policy, become developers, design videogames, shape public discourse, and much more. Together, they describe a future of architecture that is diverse and engaged, expanding the limits of the discipline, and offering new paths forward in times of crisis. Whether you are an architecture student or a practicing architect considering a change, you’ll find this an encouraging and inspiring read. Please visit the Architects After Architecture website for more information, including future book launches and events: architectsafterarchitecture.com
A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.
This edited volume, Modern Architecture and the Sacred, presents a timely reappraisal of the manifold engagements that modern architecture has had with 'the sacred'. It comprises fourteen individual chapters arranged in three thematic sections – Beginnings and Transformations of the Modern Sacred; Buildings for Modern Worship; and Semi-Sacred Settings in the Cultural Topography of Modernity. The first interprets the intellectual and artistic roots of modern ideas of the sacred in the post-Enlightenment period and tracks the transformation of these in architecture over time. The second studies the ways in which organized religion responded to the challenges of the new modern self-understanding, and then the third investigates the ways that abstract modern notions of the sacred have been embodied in the ersatz sacred contexts of theatres, galleries, memorials and museums. While centring on Western architecture during the decisive period of the first half of the 20th century – a time that takes in the early musings on spirituality by some of the avant-garde in defiance of Sachlichkeit and the machine aesthetic – the volume also considers the many-varied appropriations of sacrality that architects have made up to the present day, and also in social and cultural contexts beyond the West.
AA Files is the Architectural Association's (AA) journal of record. Currently under the editorship of Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, AA Files looks to promote original and engaging writing on architecture. It does this by drawing both on the AA's own academic research, public programme, exhibitions and events, as well as by a rich and eclectic mix of architectural scholarship from all over the world. The forthcoming issue of AA Files examines a range of building typologies and histories from Pyongyang to Lusaka and beyond - its geographic remit is broader than any previous issue. It also features articles looking at some of the wider contexts informing architectural practice, including timelines of ecological rupture, ways of measuring the human body, and the emergence of privatised public space. Contributors include Thandi Loewenson, Calvin Chua, Christina Varvia, Elisa Iturbe, Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler among others.
A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.
"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.
