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Asymptote : flux
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"Asymptote", an award-winning New York City-based architectural firm, expands the boundaries of traditional practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to computer-generated environments. Recognized internationally as both cutting-edge architects and virtual-reality artists, Asymptote partners Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid have designed and written(...)
Architecture Monographs
May 2002, Londres
Asymptote : flux
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"Asymptote", an award-winning New York City-based architectural firm, expands the boundaries of traditional practice with work that ranges from buildings and urban design to computer-generated environments. Recognized internationally as both cutting-edge architects and virtual-reality artists, Asymptote partners Lise Anne Couture and Hani Rashid have designed and written the first book to document their ‘real world’ (as opposed to virtual) projects completed since 1995. It includes work as diverse as a trading floor for the New York Stock Exchange; a multimedia research park in Kyoto, Japan; a modular furniture system for Knoll; and a centre for art and technology for the Guggenheim Museum in Soho, New York. Rashid and Couture’s work is intriguing because it draws inspiration from a wide range of sources not traditionally associated with architecture – among them the design of airline interiors, sporting equipment, and organic systems like seashells and honeycombs; and various means of communicating and disseminating information. Asymptote presents a seamless trajectory of projects organized in a non-linear fashion and illustrated with installation photographs, collaged photographs, and computer-generated diagrams and environments. The projects are interspersed with descriptive text and the speculative writing that Asymptote is known for. Both partners combine architectural practice with teaching, Rashid at Columbia University and Couture at Columbia and Parsons School of Design.
books
May 2002, Londres
Architecture Monographs
Zero yen houses
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A lean-to in an urban park, featuring a blue tarpaulin roof, a hinged door, and a bamboo blind. A car-shaped cardboard hut, lashed together with rope and sitting on a dolly. Temporary lodging under a bridge, incorporating a piece of playground equipment into its design. Each of these structures is an example of what Japanese artist and architect Kyohei Sakaguchi calls a(...)
Zero yen houses
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A lean-to in an urban park, featuring a blue tarpaulin roof, a hinged door, and a bamboo blind. A car-shaped cardboard hut, lashed together with rope and sitting on a dolly. Temporary lodging under a bridge, incorporating a piece of playground equipment into its design. Each of these structures is an example of what Japanese artist and architect Kyohei Sakaguchi calls a "zero-yen house".Built by the homeless of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, zero-yen houses employ discarded and found materials, including pieces of wood and corrugated roofing, temple ornaments, blankets, shipping pallets, an umbrella, and those ubiquitous blue tarps. They also incorporate into their assembly the imminence of their disassembly: at any moment, they may have to be taken apart and moved.Since his days as a university student at the turn of the millennium, Sakaguchi has been studying the kinds of shelters that street people have created for themselves in Japan's three largest cities. Based in Tokyo, he appears to be obsessed with this peculiar and transient form of "vernacular architecture". Sakaguchi uses images, descriptions, and even facsimiles of the improvised homes of the homeless as a way of celebrating human resourcefulness and ingenuity. These dwellings, he tells us, are worthy of our interest and admiration rather than our indifference, our scorn, or even our pity. They can instruct us on an approach to architecture that is the reverse of overconsumption and resource depletion.
Residential Architecture
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The Nature of Landscape offers an inspiring, personal account of a quest into the meaning and background of the term ‘landscape’. The author, a landscape planner and designer currently teaching at Eindhoven University of Technology, researches the origins of landscape in our civilization and describes different points of view that have helped shape our opinions on(...)
The nature of landscape : a personal quest
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The Nature of Landscape offers an inspiring, personal account of a quest into the meaning and background of the term ‘landscape’. The author, a landscape planner and designer currently teaching at Eindhoven University of Technology, researches the origins of landscape in our civilization and describes different points of view that have helped shape our opinions on landscape. For the author, our notion of landscape is focused around the terms 'nature versus culture' and 'native versus foreign'. These counterparts make up his 'mindscape diamond', a modified matrix that not only explains trends in landscape perception and design, but also helps to define developments in land use, architecture, urban planning and environmental art. On a more metaphorical level, the author's abundantly illustrated quest is symbolized by a number of personal impressions, such as the discovery of a stone circle in the desert, a lesson in the peculiarities of the Russian language, a journey along the industrial heritage of the German Ruhrgebiet and a visit to a town where ‘Bavaria comes to Washington’. Offering an unexpected reading experience, these and other descriptions demonstrate how varied ‘landscape’ can be. In a worldwide overview of 30 landscape related artworks and 30 park designs, the author discusses landscape attitudes past and present. In a final chapter, he brings together recent developments in society, architecture and art to make a forecast of landscape trends in the near future. Themes such as man-made nature and reinvented heritage conclude this unusual book on the essence of landscape.
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March 2001, Rotterdam
Landscape Theory
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The Pan Am Building and the reaction to it signalled the end of an era. Begun when the modernist aesthetic and the architectural star system ruled architectural theory and practice, the completed building became a symbol of modernism's fall from grace. In “The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream”, Meredith Clausen tells the story as both history and(...)
Architecture since 1900, Europe
December 2004, Cambridge, Mass.
The Pan Am building and the shattering of the modernist dream
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The Pan Am Building and the reaction to it signalled the end of an era. Begun when the modernist aesthetic and the architectural star system ruled architectural theory and practice, the completed building became a symbol of modernism's fall from grace. In “The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream”, Meredith Clausen tells the story as both history and cautionary tale -- a case study of how not to plan and execute a large-scale urban project that seems especially relevant in light of the World Trade Center and the ongoing discussions over what should be built in its place. The Pan Am Building was despised by many as soon as the plans were announced in 1958. The star power of the celebrity architects -- those deans of modernism, Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi -- overrode critics' objections. When construction was completed in 1963, it became more than an architectural question; this "mute, massive, over-scaled octagonal slab," as Clausen describes it, built over Grand Central Terminal, blocked the view down Park Avenue, created deep shadows where there had been sunlight, and poured 25,000 office workers on the sidewalks each morning and evening. As Clausen tells it, the story of the building -- which was undistinguished architecturally but important because of its location and its moment in history -- encompasses the end of modernism's social idealism, the decline of Gropius's and Belluschi's reputations, the victory of private interests over public good, the revival of architectural criticism in the press (both Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs emerged as prominent and influential critics), the birth of the historic preservation movement, and the changing culture and politics of New York City.
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December 2004, Cambridge, Mass.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
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"Last Landscapes" is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed ‘cities of the dead’, such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature(...)
Last landscapes : the architecture of the cemetery in the west
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"Last Landscapes" is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed ‘cities of the dead’, such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature in this book include the war cemeteries of northern France, Viking burial islands in central Sweden, Etruscan tombs and early Christian catacombs in Italy, the 17th-century Portuguese–Jewish cemetery 'Beth Haim' at Ouderkerk in the Netherlands, Forest Lawns in California, Derek Jarman’s garden in Kent and the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery. It is a fact that architecture ‘began with the tomb', yet, as Ken Worpole shows us in Last Landscapes, many historic cemeteries have been demolished or abandoned in recent times (notably the case with Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe), and there has been an increasing loss of inscription and memorialization in the modern urban cemetery. Too often cemeteries today are both poorly designed and physically and culturally marginalized. Worse, cremation denies a full architectural response to the mystery and solemnity of death. The author explores how modes of disposal – burial, cremation, inhumation in mausoleums and wall tombs – vary across Europe and North America, according to religious and other cultural influences. And Last Landscapes raises profound questions as to how, in an age of mass cremation, architects and landscape designers might create meaningful structures and settings in the absence of a body, since for most of history the human body itself has provided the fundamental structural scale. This evocative book also contemplates other forms of memorialization within modern societies, from sculptures to parks, most notably the extraordinary Duisberg Park, set in a former giant steelworks in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.
Gardens
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Drivers in the nation's capital face a host of hazards: high-speed traffic circles, presidential motorcades, jaywalking tourists, and bewildering signs that send unsuspecting motorists from the Lincoln Memorial into suburban Virginia in less than two minutes. And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. Little(...)
The Great Society subway : a history of the Washington Metro
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Drivers in the nation's capital face a host of hazards: high-speed traffic circles, presidential motorcades, jaywalking tourists, and bewildering signs that send unsuspecting motorists from the Lincoln Memorial into suburban Virginia in less than two minutes. And parking? Don't bet on it unless you're in the fast lane of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. Little wonder, then, that so many residents and visitors rely on the Washington Metro, the 106-mile rapid transit system that serves the District of Columbia and its inner suburbs. In the first comprehensive history of the Metro, Zachary M. Schrag tells the story of the Great Society subway from its earliest rumblings to the present day, from Arlington to College Park, Eisenhower to Marion Barry. Unlike the pre–World War II rail systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the Metro was built at a time when most American families already owned cars, and when most American cities had dedicated themselves to freeways, not subways. Why did the nation's capital take a different path? What were the consequences of that decision? Using extensive archival research as well as oral history, Schrag argues that the Metro can be understood only in the political context from which it was born: the Great Society liberalism of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. The Metro emerged from a period when Americans believed in public investments suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world's richest nation. The Metro was built not merely to move commuters, but in the words of Lyndon Johnson, to create "a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Schrag scrutinizes the project from its earliest days, including general planning, routes, station architecture, funding decisions, land-use impacts, and the behavior of Metro riders. The story of the Great society subway sheds light on the development of metropolitan Washington, postwar urban policy, and the promises and limits of rail transit in American cities.
Engineering Structures