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.
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.
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.
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.
Is the idea of an environment in architecture intrinsically reduced to 'environmental architecture', with its data gathering, percentages, and product lines, like solar panels and catalogues offering insulation solutions? For Ostos and Jackowski the answer is a resolute no, and instead they seek and endorse an alternative reading of 'environment' in which the brutal and lyrical are juxtaposed through a number of visually compelling narrative architectural explorations.
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.
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.
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.
This text is an essay on the relationship between ways of thinking, the rich seams of contemporary thought and the forms of the house, of planning and living in it. The descriptive method is based on seven guided visits to a group of real or imaginary houses that make up a sufficiently extended panorama for understanding what the 20th century has bequeathed to us in the way of a heritage. In order to choose the houses to visit it was necessary to narrow things down, simplify them, by highlighting a series of archetypes defined by their most pronounced features. The reader, then, won't find any of the masterworks built by modern architects -neither the Villa Savoye, nor Fallingwater, nor the Villa Tugendhat-but mostly imaginary houses, houses constructed by manipulating different references. In short, this book invites the reader on a fantasy tour, one whose aim is not just to celebrate the diversity of the 20th-century house but also to stimulate the pleasure of thinking, planning and living intensely, to promote the appearance of a house that does not yet exist.
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.
