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Architecture after Covid

Albena Yaneva

In 2020, the Covid pandemic unfolded and transformed the lives of billions across the world. As the invisible killer marched across continents, causing unprecedented disruption worldwide, architects and designers began rethinking how to design cities and adapt their practice so that we might continue to live together in the future.

Architecture after Covid is the first book to explore the pandemic's transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice - questions which had lain latent in the profession for years, but which the Covid pandemic brought to the fore.

The book explores how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, and looks in detail at how it has transformed building typologies. It also shows how the continuing risk of pandemics leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice - making a compelling argument about the changing agency of architectural design and the importance of designers in re-ordering the post-pandemic world.

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Reading Architecture Second Edition: A Visual Lexicon

Owen Hopkins

This innovative and unique book is a visual guide to the buildings that surround us. Architectural features are pinpointed and labelled on images of buildings so that, unlike with other architectural dictionaries, you don't have to know the name before looking it up. Clear line drawings and extensive colour photographs illustrate each of the main building types, from forts to churches, stately homes to skyscrapers. The individual structural elements and materials common to all buildings are then explained, whether in Classical, Gothic or Modernist style. A comprehensive glossary completes the book. This revised edition includes an expanded section on modern structures and materials, as well as the latest styles and concepts from the last ten years.

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Architectures of Refusal

J Stoner

Over the past decade, and in a more concentrated form over the past two years, there has been increasing recognition of architecture's systemic complicity in constructing and upholding hierarchies of race and class, and privileging colonial paradigms that perpetuate spatial and economic inequity. This AD issuereveals how designers, practitioners, scholars and architects are participating in dismantling the major canons of Western architecture. The work is both literal and figural: taking buildings apart and reconstituting them, and challenging mythologies that include drawing-as-analogue, building-as object, architect-as-hero and nature-as-other.

Architecture has both potential and responsibility for political agency in the public realm. The contributions to this issue foreground emancipatory spatial ideas and practices from around the world, demonstrating that refusal is no longer just absence and denial, but a constructive mode of resistance and action that needs to be approached through subversive urban works, design pedagogy and alliances across multiple disciplines.

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Climatic Architecture: Philippe Rahm Architectes

Philippe Rahm

Architecture and urbanism were traditionally based on climate and health, as we can read in treatises of Vitruvius, Palladio or Alberti, where exposure to wind and sun, variations in temperature and humidity influenced the forms of cities and buildings. These fundamental causes of urban planning and buildings were ignored in the second half of the 20th century thanks to the enormous use of fossil energy by heating and air conditioning systems, pumps and refrigerators, that today cause the greenhouse effect and global warming.

The fight against climate change forces the architects and urban designer to take back seriously the climatic issue in order to base their design on more consideration to the local climatic context and energy resources. Faced with the climatic challenge of the 21st century, we propose to reset our discipline on its intrinsic atmospheric qualities, where air, light, heat or humidity are recognized are real materials of building, convection, thermal conduction, evaporation, emissivity, or effusivity are becoming design tools for composing architecture and cities, and through materialism dialectic, are able to revolutionize esthetic and social values.

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Feasibility Studies: An Architect's Guide

Peter Farrall

Find that you're spending much longer than planned on a feasibility study? Or that you have drifted into detailed design without formalising an appropriate form of appointment? This practical guide details the benefits of a feasibility study. Once you've secured the commission, how do you ensure you're following current best practice? Aimed at architects, it identifies the pitfalls involved in undertaking a feasibility study and explains how to set boundaries, organise the process and manage clients' aspirations. By featuring recent live projects, alongside advice from successful architectural practices, it illustrates how a feasibility study can help achieve positive outcomes and avoid the dangers of a poorly defined brief and service proposal. Presenting the client's, as well as the architect's, perspective, this publication highlights why a feasibility study is a sensible way of establishing viability prior to committing to a full-service commission. It underlines the significance of 'adding value' as an architect.

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Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us

Paul Dobraszczyk

The spider spinning its web in a dark corner; wasps building a nest under a roof: there is hardly any part of the built environment that can't be inhabited by nonhumans, and yet we are extremely selective as to which animals we allow in or keep out. This book considers many different animals, opening up new ways of thinking about architecture and the more-than-human. Looking closely at how animals produce spaces for themselves, Paul Dobraszczyk asks what we might require in order to design with animals and become more attuned to the other lifeforms that already use our structures. Animal Architecture is a provocative exploration of building in a world where humans and other animals are already entangled, whether we acknowledge it or not.

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The Interior Plan: Concepts and Exercises - Bundle Book + Studio Access Card

Roberto J. Rengel

The Interior Plan is an introductory-level text introducing students to the process of interior design space planning. Topics include the design of effective spatial sequences, functional relationships among project parts, arrangement of furniture, planning effective circulation systems, making spaces accessible, and designing safe environments with efficient emergency egress systems. Exercises throughout the book facilitate learning by encouraging students to apply ideas and concepts immediately after reading about them. In the third edition, the author expands on the evolution of design ideas and how they affect interior environments and the people who use them, thinking sustainably, and how interior elevations and reflective ceilings affect the plan.

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Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning

Daniel A. Barber

Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II-before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available-Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design.

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Living Colours: Discovering their Language to Understand and Use them in Decorating your Home

Silvia Botti, Massimo Caiazzo

How do we learn to speak the language of colours? How do we move with ease and confidence through a maze of infinite possibilities? How do we create a colourful, harmonious and beautiful home? In answering these questions, this book provides technical tools, simple rules and practical advice about how we can use colour decoratively and effectively in our own homes, bearing in mind the different variables to be taken into account, which are presented in an easy-to-read and understandable way. It explores the many facets of colour theory and the secret lives of colours, taking the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey through the amazing world of colours, their origins and their idiosyncrasies. We learn why colour grabs our attention and fascinates us to the point of seduction. We are shown how colour influences the way we perceive spaces, how to handle colour combinations, how to balance colour and light, and the relationship between people and colours throughout history. Ultimately this penetrating book on the interaction of colours and the human experience of them makes clear how adding colour to the environments in which we live can be a momentous gesture of consciousness and freedom, an act of love towards ourselves and the people wecare about.

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The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access

David Gissen

A radical critique of architecture that places disability at the heart of the built environment

Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but The Architecture of Disability calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for "the construction of disability," this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world.

Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.

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Foundations of Urban Design

Marcel Smets

The book is structured into twenty-nine essays, each dedicated to a pair of urbanistic concepts.

Discussing historical and contemporary, interpretive and designerly approaches to urbanity, the notions composing the 29 pairs relate dialectically, as theses-and-antitheses. Still, we are warned, 'the presented antagonisms are not a priori in opposition, but rather complementary.

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Cities of Repetition: Hong Kong's Private Housing Estates

Christian J. Lange

Cities of Repetition provides a comprehensive graphic documentation and analysis of the largest Hong Kong housing estates built by private developers, from the late 1960s through to the early 2000s. Original drawings and diagrams illustrate and compare the ultra-dense, mass-produced, highly repetitive built environments in which hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents live. This book studies the practicalities of urban design in limited space, but also the effects of structure, routine, and replication on the human psyche. Its array of colour and black-and-white images will immerse the reader in Hong Kong's uniquely repetitive cityscape.

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Future Public Spaces: Urban Design in Times of Crisis

Roland Krebs, Stefan Mayr

What is required to renew and articulate public spaces? The need for, and demands of, public spaces are highly specific to the local spatial and social conditions under which people live. Action at neighborhood level is crucial, and must involve interacting and co-creating with residents to discover their needs. At the start of the pandemic, superwien was commissioned to develop innovative designs for urban public spaces in three different cities: Dhaka (Bangladesh), Maputo (Mozambique), and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). The main objective of this applied research was to strengthen the capacity of local governments to undertake participatory urban design processes. This book calls upon architects and urbanists to develop place-based solutions in challenging circumstances.

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Eco-Cities

Anna Minguet

The creation of pleasant living environments that avoid the simple container of human beings and build spaces of coexistence receptive to the needs of users has been one of the objectives of architectural practice for decades. The projects presented in this book are magnificent recent examples of how architecture can create attractive residential buildings aware of their social function, promoting interaction between users and the harmonious relationship of the community with its natural and urban environment. Likewise, all of them transmit a great sensitivity towards issues such as sustainability, eco efficiency or the integration and conservation of historical and industrial heritage, using construction methods ranging from traditional techniques to the most modern parametric design systems.

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Atlas of the Senseable City

Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti

A fascinating exploration of how the growth of digital mapping, spurred by sensing technologies, is affecting cities and daily lives.

What have smart technologies taught us about cities? What lessons can we learn from today's urbanites to make better places to live? Antoine Picon and Carlo Ratti argue that the answers are in the maps we make. For centuries, we have relied on maps to navigate the enormity of the city. Now, as the physical world combines with the digital world, we need a new generation of maps to navigate the city of tomorrow. Pervasive sensors allow anyone to visualize cities in entirely new ways-ebbs and flows of pollution, traffic, and internet connectivity.

This book explores how the growth of digital mapping, spurred by sensing technologies, is affecting cities and daily lives. It examines how new cartographic possibilities aid urban planners, technicians, politicians, and administrators; how digitally mapped cities could reveal ways to make cities smarter and more efficient; how monitoring urbanites has political and social repercussions; and how the proliferation of open-source maps and collaborative platforms can aid activists and vulnerable populations. With its beautiful, accessible presentation of cutting-edge research, this book makes it easy for readers to understand the stakes of the new information age-and appreciate the timeless power of the city.

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digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future

Wendy W. Fok

digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future provokes a larger body of work that engages with digital property and data infrastructures. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these "supplies." There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources. If our everyday objects are digital and no longer physical, how does it challenge ecological questions? How does this affect the future of urban living?


The case-studies, interviews, and guest contributions prompt discussions that were part of the CityX Venice, Sezione del Padiglione Italia, at the 17th La Biennale di Venezia. Guest contributors were prompted to challenge and provoke the topics that are questioning the issues of open innovation models that operate a city, robotics and artificial intelligent systems, supply chains affected by digital storage, and data infrastructural arguments that play a large role within our Web 3.0 urban digital and real landscapes.

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