PURCHASE BOOK
‘Project Archive’ reforms the contemporary architectural discipline’s understanding of the built environment. The content encourages the audience to acknowledge the role of architecture as a political actant. Featured projects prioritize an attitude that goes beyond its formal elements of the current architectural canon. The projects give importance to both formal aesthetics and the ability to serve the urgent social needs of a community.
Included projects also forefront lower-tech solutions. They enforce culturally resilient models of domesticity as sustainable living and a longer-term response to ongoing environmental crises. Thus, showcasing extra-canonical works provides an opportunity to reflect on diverse solutions.
The content endorses learnings from regionally specific and environmentally resilient models of architecture. This book provides diversity in knowledge systems, and varied responses to; reforming traditional modes of domesticity, response to environmental and social crises and diverse conditions of a landscape. Developed through a decentralized research process, the book also creates space for interdisciplinary projects with contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, historians, architects, etc. Featured list of writers include members at varied levels within academic institutions, architecture enthusiasts and independent researchers.
This book chronicles experimental approaches to the design and production of architectural terra cotta facades and structures. Under the auspices of the Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop (ACAW), a research collaborative supported by Boston Valley Terra Cotta, the largest manufacturer of architectural terra cotta in the United State, architectural firms work with manufacturing to explore material and design innovation. Now in its fifth year, the workshop aims to educate architects about terra cotta through the production of unique prototypes of rain screen facade systems, modular assemblies, columns, and structural systems.
‘Architectural Ceramic Assemblies Workshop V’ chronicles the work of architectural firms Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF), LMN Architects, Smith + Gill Architecture, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Perkins and Will, PLP Architecture, Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM), Studio Gang, and academic teams Haptek Lab and Alfred University/University at Buffalo.
‘Creatures Are Stirring’ is an optimistic manifesto that rescripts the anthropocentric narratives of Western architecture with new myths for a playfully compassionate and co-habitable future. The book reconceptualizes buildings as our friends by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, these qualities initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeforms. Addressing a broad audience, ‘Creatures Are Stirring’ uses the apparent subjecthood of familiar objects like plush toys and sports mascots to guide readers towards a novel way of seeing, reading, and making creaturely architecture. The book combines the authors’ essays and memoirs (narrated from buildings’ points of view) with contributions from contemporary architects whose work collectively defines an architectural territory that is at once grounded in disciplinary rigor and urgent realities, and liberated to elicit fantastical futures.
‘Way Beyond Bigness’ is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilizes a three-part, integrative design-research methodology, structured as: Appreciate + Analyze, Speculate + Synthesize, and Collaborate + Catalyze. To do such, ‘Way Beyond Bigness’ realigns watersheds and architecture across multiple scales (sites to river basins), disciplines (ecologists to economists), narratives (hyperboles to pragmatics), and venues (academics to professionals), defined as Watershed Architecture. The research critiques and recasts Oxford Dictionary’s two very different definitions for a “watershed”: 1) “An area or ridge of land that separates waters flowing to different rivers, basins, or seas" and 2) “An event or period marking a turning point in a situation in a course of action or state of affairs” and its two very different definitions for “architecture”: 1) “The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings” and 2) “the complex or carefully designed structure of something.” The book highlights the author’s comprehensive work of over more than a decade, including in depth field research across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine, along with a diverse body of academic and multi-disciplinary professional collaborations and contributions, ranging from the speculative to the community-based.
For a long period of time, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people, and for people only. Today, as some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative research still struggles to emerge. This book collects, reconstructs, and discusses archetypal models of posthuman architecture, from the cabin of Henry David Thoreau to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This book aims to show how architectural, landscape, and industrial designers, be they professional practitioners or not, redefined their tools in order to meet the functional and symbolic needs of new and different kinds of subjects. All this in ten monographic architectural tales, thought to trace the evolution of an extended idea of coexistence between humans and other species or technologies.
COMPANY HOME ABOUT NEWS CONTACT CATALOG NEWSLETTER TWITTER INSTAGRAM LINKEDIN FACEBOOK
COMPANYHOMEABOUTNEWS CONTACT NEWSLETTER
QUICK NAVIGATIONARCHITECTUREART, PHOTOGRAPHY, & DESIGNINTERIOR DESIGNLANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE / SUSTAINABILITYMONOGRAPHSERIESURBAN DESIGN
IMPRINTSORO EDITIONSGOFF
CONTACT USUSA - San Francisco Bay AreaTel: +1(415) 883-3300USA - New YorkTel: +1(646) 322-2466Asia - Singapore & ChinaTel: +(65) 9068-1860Tel: +(86) 755-84556863
CONTACT USUSA - San Francisco Bay AreaTel: +1(415) 883-3300Asia - Singapore & ChinaTel: +(65) 9068-1860Tel: +(86) 755-84556863
© 2023 Applied Research And Design / ORO Editions. All Rights Reserved.
