The Pamphlet Architecture series was founded in 1978 by architects Steven Holl and William Stout as a venue for publishing the works, thoughts, and theory of a new generation of architects. Now in its third decade, this award-winning series continues to build upon its legacy by promoting individual points of view with all of their raw and rough-edged spontaneity. In 1998 we published a hardcover volume collecting the first ten issues of Pamphlet Architecture. We areproud to present the next nine issues in the companion volume Pamphlet Architecture 11-20. This graphically stunning and theoretically stimulating collection includes the early work of many of today's best-knownarchitects, as well as an introduction by Steven Holl.
In this volume, the latest addition to the award-winning Pamphlet Architecture series, the authors examine common architectural forms (chairs, doors, and walls) and programs (a cinema, a health club, a skyscraper) in order to dissect and reconfigure them. In the process they create ten new projects that draw their power from an oscillation between the recognizable and the surreal. Cleverly undermining the conventions and norms of contemporary architectural design, the authors pose a direct challenge to the seemingly endless search for new styles, arguing instead that the greatest potential for architecture in the twenty-first century rests on an imaginative examination of what we take for granted. Designed by authors, Situation Normal... weaves together text, photographs, and drawings. An introductory essay establishes the theoretical and historical position of the book.
Investigates unusual spaces in Italy, ranging from a honeycombed and mazelike series of rooms and stairs for midgets, to the dining chambers of a Pompeiian estate, to a half-buried sphere that serves as a place for ice storage. Ray reveals these quixotic spaces through constructed drawings, collaged photographs, and insightful text.
Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.
This newest addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series, long admired for its willingness to propose architectural solutions to challenging problems addresses the issue of rising sea levels with an interrogation of the concept of floating cities, a field of inquiry gaining increasing relevance and urgency with the impending reality of climate change. The authors explore notions of buoyancy and the amphibious through a typology based on human response and adaptation, to one of the hosting pressing issues of our day.
Pamphlet Architecture was begun in 1977 by William Stout and Steven Holl as an independent vehicle for dialogue among architects, and has become a popular venue for publishing the works and thoughts of a younger generation of architects. Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories. The modest format of the books in the Pamphlet Architecture Series belies the importance and magnitude of the ideas within.
Ambiguous Spaces, the newest installment in the Pamphlet Architecture series and a return to Pamphlet's own progressive roots, features the architectural fictions "The Pregnant Island" and "Nuclear Breeding." These two projects develop alternative urban concepts that address the challenges presented by the specific situations and social dynamicsdescribed in controversial locations such as the Brazilian Tucurui Dam, the Three Gorges Dam in China, and former English nuclear test sites. Using narrative techniques, fictional programs, ambiguous spaces, and building devices, AmbiguousSpaces explores people, communities, and even entire cities oppressed by a lack of freedom.
Holl attempts to answer these questions with his idea for "Dense-Pack Villages," a type of courtyard housing that could be built with recycled concrete from fallen buildings and steel and would be hurricane- and earthquake-resistant. Each "village" could house approximately 200 occupants, and the courtyards would be filled with greenery and fruit trees. Holl proposes that these houses use solar cells on their roofs to provide electricity, allowing the villages to potentially operate off the grid. Water can be supplied from desalinization plants in each village, and also from new reservoirs, replacing the outdated reservoirs that were destroyed in the earthquake.
The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century's dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In "Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, " Malcolm Millais explores the forces and factors that led to the emergence of the Modern movement, arguing that it was based on completely false premises. Millais offers a rarely heard perspective on the Modern movement, explaining its failures and how the well-meaning "revolutionaries" behind it gained and maintained power.
