La Fábrica, Ricardo Bofill
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La Fábrica is one of Ricardo Bofill’s most iconoclastic creations. A former cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona, serendipitously discovered while driving, the building became the centre of the late Catalan architect’s life, serving both as his home and as the headquarters of his practice since 1973. Here, Ricardo created a world of his own, exposing the concrete(...)
La Fábrica, Ricardo Bofill
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La Fábrica is one of Ricardo Bofill’s most iconoclastic creations. A former cement factory on the outskirts of Barcelona, serendipitously discovered while driving, the building became the centre of the late Catalan architect’s life, serving both as his home and as the headquarters of his practice since 1973. Here, Ricardo created a world of his own, exposing the concrete forms from beneath years of dust and smoke, encouraging nature back onto the structure, and fine-tuning the balance between its monumental scale and a delicate, human sensibility, in one of the earliest examples of the reuse of an industrial building—and it’s still changing. This new edition expands on the book originally published in 2018, featuring exclusive archival imagery courtesy of RBTA and an expansive selection of photographs taken by Nacho Alegre on his visits to La Fábrica over the last decade. He returned in November 2022 to document the building in its current state, closing the book with 32 pages of otherwise unseen images—a portrait of Ricardo’s most cherished work at a moment of profound transformation. With an introduction by Pablo Bofill, the book also features an interview with Ricardo himself by Barcelona-based architects Arquitectura-G and Guillermo López, an extended version of the conversation originally published in issue #11 of Apartamento magazine.
Architecture Monographs
John Pawson: Plain space
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John Pawson's work combines an essential simplicity with a keen attention to the details of everyday life and human experience. His pared-down yet luxurious houses and art galleries were his first projects to gain international attention, and his work has since included Calvin Klein's flagship store in New York, airport lounges for Cathay Pacific, and a kitchen for(...)
Architecture Monographs
September 2010
John Pawson: Plain space
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John Pawson's work combines an essential simplicity with a keen attention to the details of everyday life and human experience. His pared-down yet luxurious houses and art galleries were his first projects to gain international attention, and his work has since included Calvin Klein's flagship store in New York, airport lounges for Cathay Pacific, and a kitchen for Obumex. In the last decade, the scope of his designs has broadened from objects and interiors to include houses, monasteries, pavilions and boats. This change in scale has given his office the opportunity to refine its minimalist aesthetic and further develop its ideas of a fundamental architecture based on the qualities of space, proportion, light and materials. Frequently these projects intervene in existing conditions to create spaces that are simultaneously simple and complex, timeless and contemporary: in the Novy Dvur Monastery in the Czech Republic, elements of the original baroque complex are combined with entirely new architecture to create a mysterious and beautiful sequence of spaces, and in the Baron House in Sweden the vernacular language of the area is refined and abstracted to create a truly modern home. Plain Space presents both this recent body of work and earlier projects from the perspective of someone who has had unique access to the work and archives of the office.
Architecture Monographs
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The need to personalize our surroundings is a defining human characteristic. For some this need becomes a compulsion to transform their personal surroundings into works of art. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has undertaken the mission to preserve these environments, which are presented for the first time in Sublime Spaces and Visionary(...)
Architecture since 1900, Europe
November 2007, New York
Sublime spaces & visionary worlds : Built environments of vernacular artists
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The need to personalize our surroundings is a defining human characteristic. For some this need becomes a compulsion to transform their personal surroundings into works of art. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has undertaken the mission to preserve these environments, which are presented for the first time in Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds. This colorful and inspiring book features the work of twenty-two vernacular artists whose locales, personal histories, and reasons for art-making vary widely but who all share a powerful connection to home-as-art environments. Featured projects range from art environments that remain intact, such as Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in California, to sites lost over the years such as Emery Blagdon’s six hundred elaborate "Healing Machines," made of copper, aluminum, tinfoil, magnets, ribbons, farm machinery parts, painted light bulbs, beads, coffee can lids, and more. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds is the first book to explore these spectacularly offbeat spaces in detail. From the "Original Rhinestone Cowboy" Loy Bowlin’s wall-to-wall glitter-and-foil living room to the concrete bestiary of the "witch of Fox Point" Mary Nohl, each artist and project is described in detail through a wealth of visuals and text. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds reminds us that our decorative choices tell the world not just what we like but who we are.
Architecture since 1900, Europe
Notes from Russia
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The world of Russian public notices is fascinating, bizarre and saturated in tragic-comedy: "An old woman. Left home and has not returned. Small, hunchbacked. Wears: a blue dress, red wool cardigan, a white handkerchief with red flowers on her head, grey slippers on her feet. Does not have memory." The authors and readers of these usually handwritten notices are members(...)
Notes from Russia
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The world of Russian public notices is fascinating, bizarre and saturated in tragic-comedy: "An old woman. Left home and has not returned. Small, hunchbacked. Wears: a blue dress, red wool cardigan, a white handkerchief with red flowers on her head, grey slippers on her feet. Does not have memory." The authors and readers of these usually handwritten notices are members of Russia's underclass, made visible by these acts of public address which so often go unread. In this secret economy of exchange and communication, you can swap a voucher for an airplane or help to find a missing earring lost "during the fireworks on the Day of Cosmonauts." All over Russia, all sorts of surfaces, stationary or mobile, have been papered over with such notices. The folklorist, lexicographer and contributor to the related publications Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volumes I and II, Alexei Plutser-Sarno, has been collecting these public notices from all over Russia for many years. Notes From Russia features the highlights of Plutser-Sarno's collection, which, combined with his commentaries, tells an alternative story of recent Russian culture. Designed as part of Fuel's acclaimed Russian series of books, and printed on an unusual mix of white and brown craft paper, Notes From Russia is a moving and vital contribution to the documentation of vernacular graphics.
Public Space
Kanthy Peng: Ground Sea
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Kanthy Peng’s debut artist book, ''Ground Sea'', weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs. The title takes inspiration from an archaic West Indian term, which anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin used to capture her sensations when observing the Affective Disorder Clinical Rounds, “(Ground-sea is the name) for a swell of(...)
Kanthy Peng: Ground Sea
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Kanthy Peng’s debut artist book, ''Ground Sea'', weaves a visual narrative exploring depression, memory, and loss through 73 photographs. The title takes inspiration from an archaic West Indian term, which anthropologist and feminist Emily Martin used to capture her sensations when observing the Affective Disorder Clinical Rounds, “(Ground-sea is the name) for a swell of the ocean, which occurs in calm weather and without obvious cause, breaking on the shore in heavy roaring billows. A distant storm, out of sight, is often the cause of a ground-sea.” In ''Ground Se'', Peng re-orchestrates photographs spanning over a decade and multiple projects into a new diptych-structured work. The first part, ''Sunset Watchers'', unfolds through black-and-white portraits of three women reenacting a phantom folktale following the 1896 tsunami in Japan—images that also allude to the anxious premonition of those living with depression. Interspersed colored photographs recall Peng’s bodily memory of being bedridden due to illness. The second part, ''Kuafù Chases The Sun'', carries stills from two video works about Peng’s father, who retired from the People’s Liberation Army ten years after his daughter left home. In these images, his body is constantly propelled forward by the cogs of a system, breaking the stagnation of the first part, only to fall into nothingness ultimately.
Photography monographs
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In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her eight-year odyssey took her over ninety thousand miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the(...)
Fifty houses : images from the American road
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In 1988, photographer Sandy Sorlien set out on a series of journeys to document the rich architectural heritage that America is losing to the cheap and banal design aesthetic of tract housing, strip malls, and big-box stores. Her eight-year odyssey took her over ninety thousand miles of back roads to every state in the Union in search of homes that reflect and define the region in which they stand. After making over a thousand "house portraits," Sorlien has chosen one representative image from each state and collected them in Fifty Houses. Shot with black-and-white infrared film, the homes captured through Sorlien's lens range from the grand to the humble, from the historic to the commonplace. Included here are a classic saltbox in Newtown, Connecticut; the House on the Rocks in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay; a mobile home in Bushnell, Florida; a Stick-style folk Victorian in Biloxi, Mississippi; a limestone cottage in Fredericksburg, Texas; a false-front house in Rollins, Montana; a log cabin in Dubois, Wyoming; an adobe dwelling in Sante Fe, New Mexico; and a platform tent in Healy, Alaska. Each image is accompanied by a vignette from Sorlien's road journal, offering details of the house depicted, its owners and history, other houses in the region, or her travel experiences in the state.
History until 1900
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From a converted printing house in Rotterdam and the experimental minds therein that brought you the Pig City project (an analysis of the pork industry’s manufacturing conditions) comes KM3, another contribution from the iconoclastic idea lab and architecture firm MVRDV. The office, which for more than a decade has been studying density as it relates to contemporary life(...)
MVRDV : KM3 excursions on capacities
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From a converted printing house in Rotterdam and the experimental minds therein that brought you the Pig City project (an analysis of the pork industry’s manufacturing conditions) comes KM3, another contribution from the iconoclastic idea lab and architecture firm MVRDV. The office, which for more than a decade has been studying density as it relates to contemporary life and architecture, bases its theories for the uses of space on complex data. Classic projects include the gravity-defying WoZoCo home for the eldery in Amsterdam, the headquarters for public broadcasting company VPRO in Hilversum, the Dutch pavilion for World Expo 2000 in Hanover, and the Housing Silo in Amsterdam. The firm’s buildings overthrow the primacy of an architectural "footprint" for more innovative and varied spatial paradigms. A follow-up to the publication of FARMAX, which sought to question and analyze the growing suburban "greyness" of the Netherlands and to propose new ways of thinking about the homogenization of landscape, KM3 extends that idea to a three-dimensional model, one that "generates space instead of consuming it" and encourages variety in form. This book explores three different strategies each in Rotterdam and Amsterdam on their spatial and technical capacity for creating a "3D city," one of cantilevers and underground connections, airiness and, most of all, diverse spaces. This is thinking at the forefront of a new urbanism. DVD with software and films included.
Architecture Monographs
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For a while now the "Young British Artists" have been soaking up the international limelight thanks to a sensibility that is at once outrageous and thoughtful. Architecture, of course, always takes a while to catch up to the other arts, but now, finally, Britain has emerged as one of the world's most fertile breeding grounds for international design talent. Catalyzed by(...)
British built : UK architecture's rising generation
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For a while now the "Young British Artists" have been soaking up the international limelight thanks to a sensibility that is at once outrageous and thoughtful. Architecture, of course, always takes a while to catch up to the other arts, but now, finally, Britain has emerged as one of the world's most fertile breeding grounds for international design talent. Catalyzed by such leading international architecture schools as the Architectural Association and the Bartlett, a new wave of architects, from home and abroad, is combining local and global styles in exciting new buildings and projects. Post-Imperial British designers are indeed synthesizing foreign cultures with Western conditions in an entirely original way. Profiling Britain's most dynamic and intriguing practices, ‘British Built’ features projects by S333, Caruso St John, Alison Brooks, Foreign Office Architects (FOA), muf, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Gollifer Langston, de Rijke Marsh Morgan (dRMM), Kathryn Findlay, FAT, Adjaye Associates, Sergison Bates, Klein Dytham Architects (KDa), and Deborah Saunt David Hills Architects. "British Built", the sequel to our successful "SuperDutch", includes studio profiles and essays outlining the unique characteristics of the British architect working today and presenting an even younger generation of architects whose stars are only just appearing on the horizon, including atopia, softroom, dECOi, and Tonkin Liu, among many others. Previously priced at $60.00.
sale books
Generation X
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"Generation X" is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s - a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the(...)
Generation X
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"Generation X" is Douglas Coupland's acclaimed salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s - a generation known vaguely up to then as "twentysomething." Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs - "low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture. A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges - landscapes peopled with dead TV shows, "Elvis moments," and semi-disposable Swedish furniture. And from these landscapes, deeper portraits emerge, those of fanatically independent individuals, pathologically ambivalent about the future and brimming with unsatisfied longings for permanence, for love, and for their own home. Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. Like the group they mirror, they have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
Literature and poetry
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Beginning with the inception of the U.S. embassy building program in 1926, and continuing through the 1996 competition for a new embassy in Berlin, "The Architecture of Diplomacy" examines a remarkable(...)
Commercial interiors, Building types
August 1998, New York
The architecture of diplomacy : building America's embassies
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Beginning with the inception of the U.S. embassy building program in 1926, and continuing through the 1996 competition for a new embassy in Berlin, "The Architecture of Diplomacy" examines a remarkable yet little-known chapter in architectural history. It focuses on the 1950s, when modernism became linked with the idea of freedom and the State Department's Office of Foreign Buildings Operations began to showcase modern architecture in its embassies. Architects could build abroad in styles never sanctioned at home, resulting in unusual and sometimes outlandish designs intended to express an "open" America overseas. Indeed, the embassy building program was part of the nation's larger effort to establish and assert its superpower status following World War II. Terrorist threats and espionage scandals also shaped the worldwide building program, and continue to affect it today. "The Architecture of Diplomacy" features the stories behind the Rio de Janiero and Havana embassies by Harrison & Abramovitz, Ralph Rapson's designs for Stockholm and Copenhagen, Gordon Bunshaft's work in Germany, Eero Saarinen's constructions in London and Oslo, and Edward Durell Stone's embassy in New Delhi. Other architects involved in the program included Arquitectonica; Pietro Belluschi; Marcel Breuer; Walter Gropius; Kallmann, McKinnell & Wood; Richard Neutra; and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Author Jane C. Loeffler obtained access to original correspondence, drawings, and photographs that have never been published.
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August 1998, New York
Commercial interiors, Building types