.Books

“During 2009 I had the chance to visit Iwamoto Scott in San Francisco, a practice lead by Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott. At their office I could see first hand the study models for some of the projects the firm has been involved, such as a mockup for their P.S.1 proposal, Coral Reef, or the lightweight wooden pieces that structure the massive Voussoir Cloud installation at SCI Arc. These small pieces had a lot to tell, not only about the specific project they were part of, but also their iterations. The firm has a recognized expertise in digital fabrication, presented by Lisa Iwamoto at the AIA Convention 2009 during the Emerging Voices forum, and also on her book `Digital Fabrication’ edited by Princeton Architectural Press under their Architecture Brief series. The book presents in a clear way (with very good examples) the methods behind digital fabrication: sectioning, tessellating, folding, contouring, and forming. For most of us these words are pretty much obvious and we often use them as design principles of our projects. But to get the full scope of what they really mean, or for those that want to start understanding -and using- them, this is a recommended reading.” –Arch Daily
Parametric and algorithmic design are two of the fastest emerging and most radical technologies reshaping architecture today. How will these related but distinct techniques affect design practice? This volume contains a compilation of projects from leading practitioners across the fields of parametric and algorithmic design and a compelling, multi-perspective debate on the future of design
Presenting the hottest architectural visionaries from around the world, Digital Architecture Now celebrates the conceptual architects who are pushing digital design and software to their limits. In his introduction and concluding essay, Neil Spiller places this contemporary work in the context of recent developments and considers the future direction of digital architecture. The heart of the book features architects best projects, presented in vivid, colourful and breathtaking detail through texts, plans and renderings that challenge our assumptions about 3-D space and redefine the future of architecture.
Covering current architectural projects designed by Form, the office of Greg Lynn, this text and interactive CD-ROM explore the potential of time-based animation techniques to inform architectural design. Through the use of animation and special effects software, Lynn seeks to transform space and form into highlt plastic and flexible entities. He uses topological geometries to bend, twist, deform and differentiate structure, creating departures from what Lynn sees as preconceived notions of architecture.
Ecology is the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment. Through their teaching at the AA, Michael Hensel and Achim Menges have shown how this definition also suits the discipline of architecture surprisingly well: one of the central tasks for architects is to provide opportunities for habitation through specific material and energetic interventions in the physical environment. Correlating morphogenesis and ecology, they have developed a new framework for architectural design that is firmly rooted within a biological paradigm, and thus concerned with issues of higher-level functionality and performance capacity. They have named this approach Morpho-Ecology.
What will the office look like in the future? How will it operate? These were the questions posed by the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab three years ago. Corporate Fields is the response: a series of projects that propose new kinds of highly collaborative and responsive working environments evolved from an experimental use of technology. In look and feel, Corporate Fields resembles a software manual. It is a piece of design information, offering step-by-step rigorous explanations of the projects through every stage from initial analysis to completed design. The sharing of information is one of the trademarks of D[R]L, a new kind of graduate program that seeks to reinvent post-professional design education by capitalizing on new design networks and today’s interconnected design systems. The visual presentation of the work is rounded off by a discussion of its practical and pedagogical implications in essays by Brett Steele, Mohsen Mostafavi, Christopher Hight, Patrik Schumacher, Tom Verebes, Mark Cousins, and Andrew Benjamin.
In its ten years of its existence, Adams Kara Taylor has become one of the most innovative engineering firms working today. Through frequent collaborations with leading architects like Zaha Hadid, Foreign Office Architects, Norman Foster, and Will Alsop, the members of AKT have become the engineers of choice for ground-breaking projects that redefine the conventional boundaries between structural engineering and architecture. Their holistic approach expands structural thinking to include technical solutions, aesthetics, and advanced research and technologies into strategies capable of adapting to both different architectures and the different design methodologies behind these projects. Organized according to a series of synthetic themes – complexity, trans-scalarity, modelling, process – that cut across these diverse projects and methods, the first monograph on AKT’s work is a manual for new relations between radical engineering and design.
Edited by Mark Rappolt with contributions by: J. G. Ballard, Chris Bangle, Rene Daalder, Sonia Eram, Imaginary Forces, Brian C. Goodwin, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin, Ross Lovegrove, Ari Marcopoulos, Peter Schroder, and Bruce Sterling.One of the most provocative and exciting architects today, Greg Lynn has defined how designers and architects use computers as a medium, operating in an expanded field that fuses cutting-edge technology, contemporary art, and science fiction aesthetics with architectural form. At the epicenter of a debate about the role of digital design in architecture and design, his projects skillfully blend high technology and detailed craftsmanship, driven by modeling software from the film and aerospace industries. Included are contributions from theorists, architects, and artists, and futurists such as J. G. Ballard and Bruce Sterling. Greg Lynn Form offers a window into Lynn’s methods and techniques, theoretical positions, and career trajectory. Rather than a retrospective of Lynn’s career, it is thought-provoking and forward-looking.
It’s a compelling book about a kinetic research project, with an amazing layout design.
Perhaps humans are not meant to operate in the “dry grid” of cubic spaces. A leading Dutch theorist and architect, Lars Spuybroek (principal of NOX) pushes form and substance in astoundingly improbable, winding, curving, globular directions. Jazzed by neurology and philosophy, and influenced by ever-more intricate computer modeling, Spuybroek asks whether building movement ought to more comfortably reflect body movement. “A curve is an intelligent, better-informed straight line,” he writes. In Spuybroek’s realm the operative idea is no longer that form follows function; it’s a unified system where typology precedes topology. His projects thus lead to “soft” offices and sinuous biomorphs. Best known on these shores for envisioning a complex of twisting, porous towers on the World Trade Center site, Spuybroek is commanding increasing attention. This huge compendium of his work and ideas is sometimes dense, but in a challenging, eye-opening way as it navigates the implications of the intellectual dichotomies and design complexities in NOX’s^B vision and projects.
The first publication of all-student work by SCI-Arc. Edited by Florencia Pita, and designed by Roettinger and Lucas Quigley, Onramp includes hundreds of projects from the 2006-7 academic year, organized into duotone spreads color-coded by studio.
Quali sono i rapporti tra architettura e cultura digitale? Come la ‘rivoluzione informatica’, fenomeno pervasivo e trasversale, ha modificato il pensiero e l’operatività architettonica? E quali i suoi effetti sulla ‘rappresentazione e conformazione’ dell’architettura? Il fenomeno dell’interattività e il concetto di ‘ipersuperficie’, così diffusi all’interno della cultura digitale, assieme all’ampliamento delle nostre facoltà sensoriali, potenziate dalla realtà tecno-informatica, come stanno modificando la creatività e la sfera progettuale? Nella didattica, in che misura la diffusione nelle scuole d’architettura di hardware e software accelera e aiuta l’apprendimento e la circolazione delle idee? Il ciberspazio, questo nuovo possibile modello di ’spazio ideale’ – dove acquisisce un diverso valore anche il senso fisico della gravità che caratterizza il nostro reale -, integrando molti dei media precedenti, come modifica la nostra concezione del mondo e le categorie di ’spazio’ e di ‘tempo’? Fino a che punto, in architettura, esso determina e influenza le nostre azioni, o la stessa nozione di realtà? Quanto il ‘medium’ utilizzato incide in termini di trasformazione di pensiero negli scenari del processo progettuale contemporaneo? E poi, in che modo le innovazioni comunicative hanno modificato i ‘modelli espressivi’ dell’architettura? Queste e altre domande entrano nel vivo di un tema affascinante e controverso, che catalizza, a vari livelli, gran parte del dibattito contemporaneo. In questo volume alcuni specialisti di settore propongono un aggiornato punto di vista critico, che pubblichiamo in forma di ‘work in progress’. I saggi raccolti, scritti da autori italiani e stranieri fra i più attenti a quanto accade sulla scena contemporanea internazionale, propongono al lettore ricerche, riflessioni e provocazioni, su alcuni dei tanti temi in evoluzione nel fluido e complesso territorio della cultura architettonica digitale. Un insieme articolato di idee e riferimenti sullo ’stato dell’arte’ della frontiera tecnologica e della dimensione digitale del progetto di architettura, di cui si illustrano statuti comunicativi, potenzialità espressive e applicazioni, mostrandone i limiti e delineandone gli scenari evolutivi.
A journey into everyday life through spectacular microscopic images.This substantial volume brings together extraordinary images produced through the latest technologies in microphotography. Most of the 205 stunning, full-color photographs have been taken using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), allowing us to see our world as never before.

Each image is a close-up that reveals remarkable forms, shapes and colors. The book is divided into six chapters that cover:
- Micro-organisms
- Zoology
- Botany
- Minerals
- The human body
- Technology

Every spread includes complete, informative captions that identify the photograph and describe both the image and the way in which it was captured.
The shift from modern to digital systems of design and production opens up a material work to a deeper relationship between author and perceiver. From the classical work to the modern object and from the modern industrial to ‘computerised’ procedures, the interplay between author and user has become closer, more direct and open. How does this increasing complicity affect architectural practice? How can architecture be conceived as a more fluid informational development? Publishing architectures is much more than displaying a recently finished product in which the architect is the unique author. To make architecture is a real undertaking of numerous authors based on the processing of information before, during and after the materialization of the building. The contemporary relationship between information and authorship in architectural practice, featuring works and texts by Manuel de Landa, Jorge Wagensberg, FOA Architects, Sadar & Vuga, njiric & njiric, Love, Lacaton & Vassal.
“What is fascinating is the inability to separate the real from the digital, because they already form part of the same nature.” So we said in the last issue of Verb. Here we explore how this fusion takes place. Buildings and cities grow, are transformed, and dissolve. How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new architectural organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate space, and how do users and programs animate matter?