For the first time, the speculative in architecture becomes a topic of critical research. It is investigated not as idealistic but as strategic acting within endless modernity. This modernity implies that speculation, as strategic acting, is not only applied to economic but also to political and aesthetic values. Values become mobile, valuations become a play with highs and lows, authors (architects) become winners or losers, and culture becomes fashion. Includes projects by NL Architects, MVRDV, Aristide Antonas, FAT, Ralf Schreiber, Pascual Sisto, Ant Farm, Caspar Stracke, OMA, JODI, Kevin Bauman and others. [From publisher's website].

How to Read Architecture is based on the fundamental premise that reading and interpreting architecture is something we already do, and that close observation matters. This book enhances this skill so that given an unfamiliar building, you will have the tools to understand it and to be inspired by it. Author Paulette Singley encourages you to misread, closely read, conventionally read, and unconventionally read architecture to stimulate your creative process. This book explores three essential ways to help you understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture. This book erodes boundaries between the frequently compartmentalized fields of interior design, landscape design, and building design with chapters exploring concepts of terroir, scenography, criticality, atmosphere, tectonics, inhabitation, type, form, and enclosure. Using examples and case studies that span a wide range of historical and global precedents, Singley addresses the complex interaction among the ways a building engages its context, addresses its performative exigencies, and operates as an autonomous aesthetic object. Including over 300 images, this book is an essential read for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of architecture with a global focus on the interpretation of buildings in their context.

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.

This volume collects about 20 contributions on the topic of robotic construction methods. It is a proceedings volume of the robarch2012 symposium and workshop, which will take place in December 2012 in Vienna. Contributions will explore the current status quo in industry, science and practitioners. The symposium will be held as a biennial event. This book is to be the first of the series, comprising the current status of robotics in architecture, art and design.

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education and professional practice. It reflects on the theoretical, methodological and ethical issues shaping contemporary engagements with digital learning and offers insights for both analysing and intervening in digital learning practices. This insightful volume fills a gap in the current literature by bringing together experiences from Sociocultural Studies of Learning, Science and Technology Studies, and Design Studies. Each chapter is an innovative case study, examining a different aspect of digital media’s role in research, education and professional practice by exploring topics such as: Learning practices and digitalized dialogue Digital design experiments Digitally mediated collaborations Ethical digital inquiry and design Expertly researched and written, this book is a unique resource for scholars, researchers and professionals working in the fields of digital design, applied technology and the learning sciences.

Over the last forty years, graffiti and street-art have become a global phenomenon within the visual arts. Whilst they have increasingly been taken seriously by the art establishment (or perhaps the art market), their academic and popular examination still remains within old debates which argue over whether these acts are vandalism or art, and which examine the role of graffiti in gang culture and in terms of visual pollution. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study working with some of the world’s most influential Independent Public Artists, this book takes a completely new approach. Placing these illicit aesthetic practices within a broader historical, political, and aesthetic context, it argues that they are in fact both intrinsically ornamental (working within a classic architectonic framework), as well as innately ordered (within a highly ritualized, performative structure). Rather than disharmonic, destructive forms, rather than ones solely working within the dynamics of the market, these insurgent images are seen to reface rather than deface the city, operating within a modality of contemporary civic ritual. The book is divided into two main sections, Ornament and Order. Ornament focuses upon the physical artifacts themselves, the various meanings these public artists ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their material form. Using two very different understandings of political action, it places these illicit icons within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Order is focused more closely on the ephemeral trace of these spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. Exploring thematics such as carnival and play, risk and creativity, it tracks how the very residue of this cultural production structures and shapes the socio-ethico guidelines of these artists’ lifeworlds.

The Art of Agile Practice: A Composite Approach for Projects and Organizations presents a consistent, integrated, and strategic approach to achieving "Agility" in your business. Transcending beyond Agile as a software development method, it covers the gamut of methods in an organization-including business processes, governance standards, project ma

Presented over two volumes, Visual and Multimodal Urban Sociology A and B explore the use and potential of visual materials and methodologies that expand the level of analysis and ways of seeing in urban sociology.

Through essays, interviews, and narratives by Bruce Sterling, Fiona Raby, Sam Jacob and other significant voices in the field, this volume questions the initial discourses around “design fiction”—a broad category of critical design that includes overlapping interests in science fiction, world building, speculation, and futuring. Made Up: Design’s Fictions advances contemporary analysis and enactment of narrative and speculation as an important part of practice today. Essays, interviews, and narratives by: Julian Bleecker, Benjamin H. Bratton, Anne Burdick, Emmet Byrne, Stuart Candy, Fiona Raby, Tim Durfee, Sam Jacob, Norman M. Klein, Peter Lunenfeld, Geo Manaugh, Tom Marble, m-a-u-s-e-r, Metahaven, China Miéville, Keith Mitnick, MOS, Susanna Schouweiler, Bruce Sterling, Mimi Zeiger. Co-published with Art Center Graduate Press