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.
Participants in the Pamphlet Architecture 30 competition were asked to respond to the theme "Investigations in Infrastructure," and propose new directions for architecture, transportation, energy, cities, and agriculture at a continental scale. The winning entry, Coupling, imagined six daring projects: a high-speed rail system across the Bering Strait that also collects freshwater from the seasonal iceshelf; a decommissioned airport transformed into a geothermal data farm and agriculture site; thickening on/off ramps around "big box" stores into circular parking lots; a call to include landfills in the list of preserved open spaces; and a saline terminal lake turned into a water farm, recreational retreat, and habitat haven. Coupling argues that infrastructures behave as artificially maintained natural systems. Rather than a New Deal approach of massive engineering or iconic infrastructure, Coupling employs adaptable, responsive, small-scale interventions whose impacts are global in scale.
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.
Conceived as a set of "Flexible Standards," this new addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series proposes a new way of thinking about roadways in cities. By reexamining the urban expressway as a political, physical, and mythic manifestation of American culture, this compelling pamphlet serves as a design manual for planners, a novel atlas for drivers, and a collection of proposals that reaffirm the role of architecture in urban planning. The thirteen projects take as their subject a site of contested transportation infrastructure -- the Sheridan Expressway. By proposing new typologies for this site, these studies seek to mediate the spaces in the city where local and regional meet. Referencing the introduction of the modern parkway into the Bronx, the grading of the Central Park transverse roads, and other works that have redefined the relationship between parks and roads, author Jonathan Solomon suggests a system by which large projects might again be built in American cities.
Architects Ken Kaplan and Ted Krueger present a blunt criticism of present social and political conditions. In response to the "dogmatic gas" that they perceive as invading today's architectural ideology, they attempt to find an antidote to the "deluded blather" through architectural experimentation.
The competition for Pamphlet Architecture 32 centered on the theme of resilience. By addressing the capacity to cope, the ability to bounce back, and the mitigation and management of risk, participants were asked to showcase a fresh understanding of the architectural opportunities found in resilience. The winning entry successfully takes on the topic through an investigation of the ravaged city of Warsaw, Poland. By identifying, interrogating, and ultimately reinforcing both the physical and immaterial conditions of the landscape, the project allows the space to become something new and yet hold on to what it is, truly exhibiting resilience.
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.
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.
PA 24: Some Among Them are Killers explores unmanaged landscapes, territories that the author calls "wildernesses." These emerge from the cracks of mapping the spaces, at a variety of scales, that literally reside in the margins of error of our abilities to measure and calibrate space. From Yosemite National Park to the ubiquitous one-gallon milk jug, architect David Ross depicts the relationships between architecture and miscalibration and explores the spatial, tactile, and political ramifications of our reliance on modern devices of precision and overdetermination.
The thirteen projects take as their subject a site of contested transportation infrastructure--the Sheridan Expressway. By proposing new typologies for this site, these studies seek to mediate the spaces in the city where local and regional meet. Referencing the introduction of the modern parkway into the Bronx, the grading of the Central Park transverse roads, and other works that have redefined the relationship between parks and roads, author Jonathan Solomon suggests a system by which large projects might again be built in American cities.
