Search

Title:
Zwarts & Jansma architecten : 52°22'21

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$105.00
(available in store)

Summary:
It was their almost obsessive interest in mathematics, fascination with technique and pleasure in designing that caused Moshé Zwarts and Rein Jansma to join forces in 1990. Given the sheer size of their output, it is impossible not to be confronted regularly with projects by Zwarts & Jansma. The major infrastructure works like bridges, viaducts, tunnels, stadiums and sports complexes loom large in our daily environment. What we often do not see is how ingeniously this work fits together and what processes brought it to that stage. In a conversation with collegue-architect Philippe Samyn this aspect is discussed in particular. Zwarts and Jansma themselves also describe in this book their often unusual sources of inspiration and motive forces. Yet for all that, the design process they follow is a rational one that since the 1980s has consistently featured the computer as a design resource. The book gives a complete overview of the work of Zwarts & Jansma Architects. A selection of thirty works are fully documented in site plans, floor plans, sections and details and of course text, plus photographs taken specially for this book by Rob 't Hart.

Title:
Modern architectures in Central America

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$37.50
(available in store)

Summary:
The Architecture Observer offers an overview of different forms of modern architecture in Central America since the outset of the 20th century. Although modern architectures constituted only a small percentage of the total building production in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, they hold in these countries an evident symbolic significance. Such buildings functioned as models for the desired societal, economic, and cultural changes, or as aspirational placeholders for a future state of modernity. With contributions by Mauricio Quirós Pacheco, Andrés Fernández, Hans Ibelings, Gloria Grimaldi, Sandra Gutiérrez, Martín Majewsky, and others.

Title:
Supermodernism : architecture in the age of globalization / enlarged edition

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$29.95
(available to order)

Summary:
There are all kinds of indications that architecture in the nineties has set off in a new direction after the domination of the two last decades by postmodernism as a style or attitude. This trend, which can be seen in the work of architectural firms like OMA, Jean Nouvel, Dominique Perrault, Herzog & De Meuron and Toyo Ito, can be connected with one of the dominant forces of the present time: the globalization that is taking place in virtually every field. One of the consequences for architecture is the erosion of the postmodern (and deconstructivist) axiom of the uniqueness of the site. The context, let alone contextualism, no longer seems to play an important role in an increasing number of designs and buildings. Semiotic expressiveness - another postmodern theme - is also often lacking in this architecture. The author explores this new trend towards abstract, neutral architecture, which in various respects can be seen as the last word of modern architecture of the postwar International Style. This enlarged edition of "Supermodernism" includes a new final chapter in which Ibelings charts the latest examples of supermodernism, as well as a revised introduction and conclusion in which he responds to the numerous reactions his provocative stance has triggered.

Title:
Claus en Kaan building

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$100.95
(available in store)

Summary:
Building - for all its simplicity the title of this book speaks volumes about the work of Claus and Kaan. It reduces architecture to what they see as the essence of their profession. Kees Kaan and Felix Claus once claimed that their ambition was to extinguish the schism between low practice and high theory, between architecture that serves its immediate objective and architecture that speaks over the heads of its users to colleagues and critics. Severity and repose are hallmarks of Claus and Kaan's oeuvre and these qualities are often found in it simultaneously. For even at its most Spartan, their architecture is never harsh. Although one can hardly describe Claus and Kaan's architecture as postmodern, their stance does owe something to postmodernism. This can be seen in their free handling of references, such as Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum or Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, and in their undogmatically broad range of interest, spanning from Heinrich Tessenow to Gordon Bunshaft and from Auguste Perret to I.M. Pei. For them there is no essential contradiction between modernity and classical values. This first comprehensive monograph on Claus and Kaan gives a complete overview of all their projects (250 or so), including those yet to be realized. Of this total, fifty are exhaustively documented and illustrated. With essays by Rafael Moneo, David Chipperfield, Andrea Deplazes, Christoph Grafe, Han Michel, and Felix Claus and Kees Kaan themselves. The book is designed by Karel Martens and Jaap van Triest.

Title:
Nicolas Faure : landscape A

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$66.00
(available to order)

Summary:
Published on the occasion of the exhibition " Nicolas Faure, Landscape A " - Musée de l'Élysée, Lausanne, 17 november 2005 - 5 february 2006. Nicolas Faure has been working on the theme of Swiss landscape since the 1990s, concentrating in particular on the blend between the Traditional and the Modern. The motorway is the meeting point of technology, architecture and a certain concept of Nature, and through his photographs, Faure elicits aspects that characterise Switzerland. A landscape always has a cultural component and landscape is one of the major concerns of Swiss culture. The motorways, which criss-cross the country virtually, divide it. They constitute a whole “new territory”, enlivened by apparently natural but essentially man-made surroundings. These “natural surroundings” are but illusions. These places are the epitome of paradox: built amidst concrete artefacts, they are not accessible to visitors and almost invisible to motorists.

Title:
Hans van Heeswijk : architecture, 1995-2005

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$70.00
(available to order)

Summary:
The Hans van Heeswijk architecture firm was founded in Amsterdam in 1985, and it has designed and realized a great variety of projects, among them offices, public buildings, museums, bridges, renovations, refurbishments, interiors and product design. Those projects are without exception matchlessly lucid and crafted to a standard rarely seen, particularly in an economy where tight budgets are the rule. Their forms, reticent at first, become articulate at close range. Each encounter with them seems right--thus the aura of tranquility, typical for buildings composed with great care and attention. This monograph deals with the works and ideas of Hans van Heeswijk architects over the last decade, including the recent commission for the refurbishment of the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam.

Title:
A10 22: July August 2008

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$18.00
(available to order)

Summary:
Bridging gaps in Budapest

Title:
In Between: The urban architecture Of Donna Van Milligen Bielke

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$35.00
(available to order)

Summary:
For Donna van Milligen Bielke architecture begins and ends with architecture. Even if she never mentions it explicitly, for her, architecture suffices to make architecture. Just as a language comprises all its words, including the ones that are rarely used, architecture is based on all its forms and manifestations. Wittingly or unwittingly, every architect stands in relation to all architecture that has ever been made. Not every architect fully acknowledges this, but Van Milligen Bielke certainly does. In her work it is possible to see the depth of the discipline’s history.

Title:
Courthouse Zwolle: Jo Kruger, Rob Hootsmans

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$39.00
(available in store)

Summary:
For both Jo Kruger (1914–1983) and Rob Hootsmans (1962) the architecture of the Courthouse in Zwolle, the Netherlands, was a long time in the making. Kruger began in 1963 with his project for a combined district and subdistrict court, which took fourteen years to be completed. In 2004, while still working for the Government Building Agency, Hootsmans began exploring how Kruger’s building could be expanded. He finished a new extension in 2013, and completed the renovation of Kruger’s original building in 2016. Even if the architecture of Jo Kruger is very different from that of Rob Hootsmans, it is somehow a meeting of kindred spirits.

Title:
Adrian Phiffer: strange primitivism

Actions:

• Buy book

Price:
$37.50
(available to order)

Summary:
This book from The Architecture Observer (Dutch architecture critic Hans Ibelings) takes readers through some of the unexpected twists and turns in the mind of the Toronto-based Romanian architect and urbanist Adrian Phiffer. It can be seen as an attempt to produce architecture with images and words – a non-linear flow of images interrupted by text, and vice versa. Its point of view is that of a youngish architect, and at times the book takes the form of a distorted self-portrait. He writes, “The cruelty of our profession is that we always have to imagine something special… we are required to make something sophisticated, slightly complex, preferably very expensive.”