Our publishing house focuses on the integration of architectural themes into contexts of future-oriented discussion. Planning, process, method, and examples are the keywords of our current publications; rather than monographs or ephemeral whims of the Zeitgeist. We cooperate with the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, The New Museum, New York, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Princeton University School of Design.

The Adjaye Studios 2008–2010: Co-Authoring sets out to examine the intersection of art and architecture, not through the tradition of art within architecture, but through non-standard modes of collaboration. From 2008 to 2010 David Adjaye taught three studios at the Princeton School of Architecture. Each year, an artist —Teresita Fern.ndez, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie—was invited to collaborate with the studio and share their approach to three vastly different sites: New Jersey, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the city of Mérida in the Yucatan. Through non-standard modes of questioning, developing, and testing, the studios set out to overturn expectations associated with the conventions of architectural design and representation. The Adjaye Studios 2008–2010: Co-Authoring features a curated selection of recent projects from David Adjaye and the three featured artists, interviews, essays, and archival material that unpacks and offers a new look at the shared space of art and architecture.

From 2008 to 2010, Madrid-based architects Mansilla + Tuñón taught at the Princeton University School of Architecture. The Mansilla + Tuñón Studios 2008–2010: From Rules to Constraints brings together the essential ideas of the studios held by the architects. The book focuses on the atmosphere of the studios through the lens of each discussed site: the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, the Spanish Royal Collection Museum, and the Gran Via, both in Madrid, Spain. In addition, the book includes a series of photo essays by photographers Dean Kaufman, Luis Asin, and Luis Baylón, and texts by Stan Allen, Enrique Walker, Sarah Whiting, and Agustin Perez Rubio.

Madrid-based architects LUIS M. MANSILLA and EMILIO TUÑÓN, winners of the 2007 Mies van der Rohe Prize, are best known for their influential cultural buildings throughout Spain. They trained at the studio of Rafael Moneo before founding their own practice in 1992. Mansilla + Tuñón’s work exposes the constraints of the architectural project—social, political, historical, and environmental—in order to create new rules from which to play. It is an ongoing conversation between the building and the place. GIANCARLO VALLE, born 1981, is an architect living in New York City.

With True City, a photographic essay on the “global city” of the twenty-first century, photographer and sociologist Charlie Koolhaas weaves a dense photographic patchwork of images of the historic commercial centers of London, Guangzhou, and Houston and the emerging centers of commerce Dubai and Lagos. For her research, the author has visited these cities and taken photographs which reflect contemporary life in a concentrated way. The images illustrate current issues such as the contradiction between cultural homogenization and local diversity at a time of globalization.

True City starkly contrasts the various urban landscapes with their inhabitants to reveal the differences and similarities between the cities, their cultures, the architecture, and the people living in them. The book is part street photography, part raw documentary and intense observation. Literary text collages by the author supplement the visual explorations and form an associative network with them.

Design: Charlie Koolhaas with Lars Müller

Using a typological structure (landscape, park, square, garden, promenade, etc.), Günther Vogt describes the theoretical foundation on which the successful projects of Vogt Landscape Architects are based. In recent years they have realized international projects in Europe and the United States, including a new type of city park for the Tate Modern in London (with Herzog & de Meuron); an “all-weather garden” with great poetic power at the Hyatt Hotel in Zurich (with Meili, Peter
Architekten); an indoor tropical garden for the Novartis Campus in Basel (with Diener & Diener); and the exterior spaces of the Allianz Arena in Munich (with Herzog & de Meuron). The updated edition shows the finished projects that were presented as plans in the previous edition.

As health becomes a central focus of political debate, are architects, urban designers, and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda to address these concerns? Imperfect Health looks at the complexity of today’s health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret Campbell, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, and Sarah Schrank deal with different aspects of the topic of health in the context of architecture such as: “An Architectural Theory of Pollution” and “Strange Bedfellows: Tuberculosis and Modern Architecture—How ‘The Cure’ Influenced Modernist Architecture and Design.”

The book is published in collaboration with the CCA, Montreal on the occasion of the exhibition Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture, curated by Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture, and Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator.

Color Light Time sets out to examine the current work of New York-based architect Steven Holl, one of the most outstanding representatives of contemporary American architecture. For nearly three decades now, Steven Holl has developed his architectural idiom and his reflections on architecture with striking consistency. The success of his work can be attributed to its sculptural shaping, his interest in the poetics of space, color, light, and material, and his fascination with scientific phenomena. Numerous illustrations and three essays closely examine archetypical aspects of visual perception, which play an essential role in Holl’s work.

Steven Holl is an American architect, perhaps best known for the 1998 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, the 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the praised 2009 linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Following Written in Water (2002), this is the second publication devoted to Steven Holl’s legendary watercolors. Four hundred watercolors represent the creative process of this renowned and influential American architect and reveal his highly personal method developed over many years, containing preliminary ideas and sketches of all major projects.

Holl is known for his sculptural architecture and his virtuosic use of light, and watercolors are the ideal means to visualize these characteristic aspects of his work. At a time of rapidly changing technology in the service of architectural design, these watercolors become spectacular examples of a low-tech method. The results are invariably original works of art. The water colors are juxtaposed with photographs of the built architecture and emphasize the crucial aspect of scale.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Dan Graham, one of North America’s most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces in the context of postmodern everyday culture represents an extremely important facet of his work.

This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham together with original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, as they were taken in the same locations, the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham photographed in the sixties. Creating a fascinating, multilayered reference system of repetitions and differences, both spatially as well as temporally, it raises questions about architecture and public space and their function in society.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Five North American Architects brings together five architectural practices that, while all distinct, share a particular sensibility for the impact of craftsmanship and climate on the generation of form, as well as a concern for the expressive tactility of material and the effect of light on the articulation of structure.

Designed with a passion for detail, the book offers an indepth survey of recent work by Steven Holl (New York), Rick Joy (Tucson), John and Patricia Patkau (Vancouver), Stanley Saitowitz (San Francisco), and Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe (Toronto).

The regional specificity of the work is considered against a larger North American context, allowing one to assess the practice of its architecture today.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Since it was set up in 1989 the office of Gigon/Guyer architects has conceived an impressive series of projects. The most important designs arried out include museums, housing projects, and office buildings. The recently completed Prime Tower and its annex buildings on the Maag site in Zürich have been internationally acclaimed.

The monograph provides a sharply focused insight into how Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer understand architecture. The various concepts as well as the different constructions, materials, forms and colors that they employ in their projects are presented in an exhaustive documentation of their work that uses numerous photographs, plans and short texts. The three essays as well as a discussion between Patrick Gmür, Martin Steinmann and the architects offer in-depth reflection and contextualization.

With essays by Gerhard Mack, Arthur Rüegg and Philip Ursprung

Design: Gigon/Guyer with Integral Lars Müller

We sit on them, write with them, ride them, listen to music through them, and live inside them. The furniture, product, and interior designs of Swiss designer Hannes Wettstein, who died in 2008, have left their mark on everyday life and shaped contemporary conceptions of design—in the form of a pen by the brand Lamy, a watch by Nomos, or as interiors for the Hotel Grand Hyatt in Berlin. Hannes Wettstein Seeking Archetypes documents his life’s work for the first time in monograph form. The volume features images from the world of this exceptional designer—works, sketches, and personal objects. Their diversity reveals the essence of his creative achievement. A comprehensive catalogue raisonné provides a complete overview of Wettstein’s works. Supplemented by quotations from Wettstein, anecdotes from his life, essays, as well as statements by personalities from the worlds of design and architecture, this monograph provides a multifaceted portrait of an extraordinary designer.

With essays by Max Küng and Volker Albus and a text collage by Thomas Haemmerli

Design: Prill Vieceli Cremers

Gregor Eichinger argues that since the beginning of modernity the concept of surface has been neglected by architecture. A tendency for simplification, for a reduction to the abstract space and the material are the reason that today the topic is given such short shrift.

Based on his research as a professor at the ETH Zürich, Eichinger calls for a serious discussion about the architectural user interface. In an intensive conversation, he and architect Eberhard Tröger discuss what alchemy has to do with architecture, why a good bar has to be a sketch, how one reads ornament, why we no longer look up at the ceiling, why cleanliness gets in the way of everything, how architecture is created from the inside, and much, much more. The text of this conversation is interwoven with a variety of related quotations and complemented by a series of images that deal with the relationship between architectural surfaces and people.

Design: Ecke Bonk

In contemporary architecture, “landform building” is much more than just a formal strategy. New technologies, new design techniques, and a demand for enhanced environmental performance have provoked a rethinking of architecture’s traditional relationship to the ground.

Landform Building sets out to examine the many manifestations of landscape and ecology in contemporary architectural practice – not as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon (architects working in the landscape) but as new design techniques, new formal strategies, and technical problems within architecture. The book offers a comprehensive overview of the subject and documents current projects with illustrations and maps. It presents work by Iñaki Ábalos, Tacita Dean, Steven Holl Architects, Junya Ishigami, Toyo Ito, Tsunehisa Kimura, Atelier Peter Kis, Mansilla+Tuñón, Michael Maltzan, Adam Maloof+Situ Studio, Giancarlo Mazzanti, Walter Niedermayr, Ryue Nishizawa, Dominique Perrault, Philippe Rahm, and Chris Taylor. Essays by experts complete this work of reference.

With contributions by Stan Allen, Michel Jakob, Kenneth Frampton, Reyner Banham, David Gissen

Design: Thumb, New York

The islands of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea are places of pilgrimage for friends of contemporary art and architecture. Alongside works in public spaces and site-specific installations, the islands also feature numerous museums and collections of contemporary art. They are home to buildings by architects such as Kazuyo Sejima and Ruye Nishizawa (SANAA), Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sambuichi, as well as works of art by Richard Long, Christian Boltanski, and Mariko Mori, among many others.

This publication offers a comprehensive documentation of this unique cultural landscape surrounded by Japan’s inland sea. The photographs by the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan that move between tiny details and grand panoramas create a comprehensive portrait of the islands and their fluid transitions between nature, art, and architecture. Numerous texts introduce readers to the individual areas and projects either on permanent display or that have taken place temporarily on the islands. Essays explore the history and historical predecessors of the islands, the role of architecture and art in the context of this unique landscape, and the island as a cultural concept and phenomenon.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

Design: Integral Lars Müller

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1977 to identify and encourage excellence in architecture and other forms of intervention in the built environment of societies with Muslim presence. The award is given every three years and recognizes all types of building projects that affect today’s built environment. Smaller projects are given equal consideration as large-scale buildings.

The book presents the shortlist of nineteen projects, including the five award recipients. In their variety across culturally diverse areas of the globe, what these projects have in common is a commitment to design excellence despite constraints of budget, resources, climate, technology, or politics.

With essays by Omar Abdulaziz Hallaj, Salah M. Hassan, Gökhan Karakus, Yu Kongjian, Hanif Kara, Farshid Moussavi, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Alice Rawsthorn

Design: Irma Boom

The Zürich architects Fuhrimann Hächler take on the most diverse building commissions. The present volume is devoted in particular to private residences, most of them realized for clients who are at home in the architectural and art scenes. These homes captivate by virtue of the clarity and simplicity of their constructive materials, their economically effective construction, and their haptic, sensual surfaces and flowing spatial transitions. Outstanding examples of their architecture include the Haus Presenhuber in Vnà (2007), the Haus Müller Gritsch in Lenzburg (2007) and their own residence in Zurich (2003).

The text contributions take the reader beyond the featured residences while situating these within the overall oeuvres of the architects.

With contributions by Hubertus Adam, Kurt W. Forster, Gianni Jetzer, Marie Theres Stauffer and the architects

Photographs by Valentin Jeck

Design: norm

Günther Vogt and his landscape designers bring a lot of passion to their research and to their search for ideas for transforming undesigned sites or tracts of land into landscapes. They don’t want to depend just on knowledge acquired from books. They venture out into the landscape at all times of the day and year and interrogate what they see there. They make room for art and science in their studies and use the same tools to turn their landscape designs into reality. Most of their “field trips” begin out of curiosity based on something they’ve seen, heard, or read. Against this backdrop, they explore, among other things, fortifications in France, the Upper Rhine in Switzerland, and national parks in England. The results of their “field trips,” research projects, and practical implementations are collected in this publication. “Distance and Engagement” takes up where “Miniature and Panorama” left off and shows not only what Günther Vogt is working on but also, and above all, how he works.

Exotic trees in England and a rainforest in Zurich, a seed bank on the arctic island of Spitsbergen and urban agriculture in Tanzania, trade in old trees in China and biodiversity in Senegal. Tree Nursery. Cultivating the Urban Jungle uses the example of plant production throughout the world to demonstrate the manifold relationships that exist between human beings and nature. Numerous essays and detailed accounts examine current phenomena like desertification in the Sahel, greening projects in Shanghai and the genesis of rooftop gardens in London. Travelogues from Europe, Africa and Asia consider the role played by a range of economic and historical factors in the significant influence that tree nurseries have come to exercise on urban planning and landscape architecture.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Architectural Papers series is edited by the Josep Lluís Mateo Chair at the ETH Zurich since 2005. Covering the wide range of topics related to teaching and architectural culture in general, it is aimed at expanding the narrow boundaries of the discipline. Its fifth issue concentrates around the new conditions for architectural practice and around the new epistemologies that may inform it in the next future. That is, in the period after the financial bubble has collapsed and living and working conditions have significantly changed. Essays, studies and interviews, along with a selection of indicative projects, tackle the actual issues of growth and shrinking, economy and ideology, craftsmanship and social space in the city, materiality and sustainability in architecture. In a logical sequence, they depict the current reality of architecture. 

With contributions by Iñaki Ábalos, Solano Benitez, Alexander Brodsky, Isabel Concheiro, Frederick Cooper Llosa, Hans Ibelings, Krunoslav Ivanisin, Julio Martinez Calzon, Josep Lluís Mateo, Richard Sennett, Wang Shu and Ramias Steinemann

This rich collection of writings and criticisms by structural engineer and Princeton University professor Guy Nordenson, brings together previously published essays on structural engineering, architecture, design, and seismic research from 1973 to 2008.
Decade by decade, Nordenson’s essays provide the unique viewpoint of the structural engineer and design collaborator, adding context that relates not only to the history of architecture and engineering, but locates these fields in a larger network of cultural relevance. Originally commissioned by publications like The New York Times, Domus, The Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Lotus, Earthquake Spectra, and MoMA’s Tall Buildings exhibition catalog, Nordenson’s writings investigate a wide range of genres: from technical reports on seismicity, methods and technologies in structural engineering, architectural criticisms, the importance of collaboration in design, to the metaphor of tall buildings, design democracy at Ground Zero, and engineering history and theory. This compilation is a wonderful reflection on Nordenson’s career thus far and the changing pace and stature of structural engineering.

In 1960, Brasilia was celebrated as the realization of an urban planning vision based on designs by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. At the same time, the sectoral city of Chandigarh was rising according to plans by Le Corbusier. The “test tube city” arose as an export of modernity from a Western planning euphoria that displayed utopian traits. In both cities, foreign architecture entered into a harmonious relationship with indigenous culture, forming new and independent identities. This publication addresses the question of how modernism has been appropriated in both cities, and how the people who live in them deal with it. Commonalities and differences are identified and images of everyday urban life showcased. On the initiative of the publisher, the young photographer Iwan Baan has taken stock of contemporary life in both cities. 

With commentary in the form of essays by Cees Nooteboom on the photographs and by Martino Stierli on the architectural and planning history.

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the métier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. 

This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work.The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out.

Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings – seen either as a method of discovery or for themselves – are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred – mostly unpublished – drawings by Kahn and his associates are woven together with a lively and informed commentary into an intimate biography of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 – 69) the drawings form a narrative which not only reveals the richness and hidden dimensions of this unbuilt masterpiece, but provides compelling insights into Louis Kahn’s mature culture of designing.

Kahn – long considered an “architects’ architect” – emerges as a vivid and instructive guide, provoking reflection on questions which continue to remain relevant: on how works are conceived, on how they might be perceived, on how they become part of human experience. Fascinating not only in their beauty, the drawings open a new and stimulating perspective on one of the past century’s great architects.

After the successful conclusion of the centenary celebrations of Andrea Palladio’s birth, there are still many unanswered questions about his work. Antonio Foscari retraces Andrea Palladio’s life and offers new perspectives on the architects built and unbuilt work. The author reveals an image of Venice that differs from the one we all know: a city that projects herself into the modern age by abandoning the accepted principles of late medieval culture that had so profoundly influenced its formation.

Translated by Lucinda Byatt

Steven Holl has set up a documentation centre for the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859 –1952) on Hamarøy, in northern Norway. This unconventional building reflects the author's no less unusual personality. The centre in the barren landscape of Hamarøy, where Hamsun lived and worked, the silence and solitude, challenge visitors to involve themselves with him and his work. The book records the connection between Hamsun, the architecture and the landscape. Photographer Iwan Baan relates the landscape and the building to each other, and historical documents illustrate Hamsun's contradictory life and influential work, et al. the novel Hunger (1890), with which Hamsun achieved his fame. In 1920 the poet was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. “Ecological Urbanism” approaches the city without any one set of instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary approach. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.

With contributions by Homi Bhabha, Stefano Boeri, Chuck Hoberman, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Bruno Latour, Nina-Marie Lister, Mohsen Mostafavi, Matthias Schuler, Sissel Tolaas, Charles Waldheim, among others

Today we are witnessing a renewed enthusiasm for space exploration, with scientific expeditions, satellite launches, and the emergence of space tourism pushing us to reconsider our relationship with our planet.

Other Space Odysseys has nothing to do with Space Architecture or architecture in outer space. It is not a celebration of high-tech architecture and imagery or extreme physical and mental conditions. Instead, this book proposes a letting go of architecture understood as the production of -material goods in favour of architecture as the production of ideas.

How can thinking about space lead to fresh perspectives on earth? Greg Lynn, Michael Maltzan and Alessandro Poli present different avenues for approaching this question. Their odysseys, real and virtual, ultimately promise a rediscovery of our own world.

In “Ideas and Integrities” Buckminster Fuller describes the revolutionary designs and concepts he has pioneered – among them the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion world map, the Dymaxion 4-D house, the Dymaxion 4-D automobile, and the countless other structures and creations that have changed the face of America and the world. And he sets forth his amazing and challenging ideas for the world of the future – ideas that would revolutionize everything from university education to bathroom design, ideas that, above all, demonstrate how we can and must make far more imaginative and efficient use of the resources now available to us to ensure a better standard of living for all men.

Buckminster Fuller’s prophetic 1962 book “Education Automation” brilliantly anticipated the need to rethink learning in light of a dawning revolution in informational technology – “upcoming major world industry.” Along with other essays on education, including “Breaking the Shell of Permitted Ignorance,” “Children: the True Scientists” and “Mistake Mystique” this volume presents a powerful approach for preparing ourselves to face epochal changes on spaceship earth: “whether we are going to make it or not... is really up to each one of us; it is not something we can delegate to the politicians – what kind of world are you really going to have?”

During three spring seasons between 2006 and 2008, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa taught at the School of Architecture at Princeton. The SANAA Studios explored Japan's contemporary society as a context for architecture and considered its particular perspective on space, the personal and the public realm. Design exercises were situated within the specific demographics and social variables of three distinct sites in Japan. This book forms an attempt to capture the atmosphere in which the studios were conducted and register some of the findings gained out of exploring the office, its methods and its context. As an overall thematic it asks: What can we learn from SANAA? It tries to frame SANAA’s compassionate search for new architectures within a larger societal context. It combines analyses, essays, documentary, design proposals and “objets trouvé” within one book. For this publication, Iwan Baan, Dutch architectural photographer, has revisited the 3 sites where the studios took place to capture the spirit of its context and the SANAA buildings in use.

With Photographs by Iwan Baan

Soon, more than two thirds of all human beings on the planet will live in cities, and the number of increasingly mobile people who shuttle effortlessly between major cities is constantly growing. Every year, various city rankings choose the “top ten” cities in the world. But what makes a city livable? The familiar rankings offer a very unsatisfactory answer to this question. Their economically oriented, quantitative criteria are often taken out of context and presented as universally desirable, and as the sole determining factors in evaluating quality of life. But personal experience is much more multilayered than this. Design2context began by studying established city rankings, then analyzed scenes from everyday urban life and developed criteria that make it possible to rationally examine urban quality of life from “softer” and more emotional perspectives. The result is fifty criteria and a questionnaire that invites the reader to actively reflect on his or her own personal criteria for urban quality of life. Essays by the researchers illuminate the scientific background of the study.

With contribution by Kurt Aeschbacher, Martina Baum, Andres Bosshard, Regina Bittner, Mathis Güller und Michael Güller, André Vladimir Heiz, Margit Kaiser, Sébastien Proulx, Denis Rioux, Walter Schenkel, Renato Soldenhoff, Regula Stämpfli and Brigit Wehrli

The book contains a collection of essays by scholars and artists from a range of different fields including art, art history, architectural theory and philosophy. The essays are based on papers given at a symposium in Copenhagen in June 2008 and refer to the following considerations: When spectators confront and designers invent works of art and architecture, vital questions regarding their appearance arise. These are not simply questions about what appears, also what does not, i.e. what withdraws when works are experienced and created. How do we cope with this withdrawal, with latencies that escape concretization? What are the productive paradoxes associated hereto and how do they influence the processes of making? Based on multiple discourses on these subjects, contemporary positions in art, architecture and philosophy draw up new challenges, especially with regard to the creative practices. Within and between these positions emerge potentials for modes of thinking and doing with a new sensitivity.

With contributions by Michael Asgaard Andersen and Henrik Oxvig, Renaud Barbaras, Andrew Benjamin, Olafur Eliasson, Sanford Kwinter, David Leatherbarrow, Martin Seel, David Summers and Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Snøhetta is a leading team of architects with offices in Oslo and New York. This first-ever publication to document their work presents the most important projects of these architects, who have been active internationally for fifteen years. These projects include the Library of Alexandria (2002), the New Opera House in Oslo (2008), and the Gateway Project in Ras Al-Khaimah, Dubai (2011), and the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion. Snøhetta’s works and projects revolve around a collaboration and interchange between various disciplines. Each of their projects is freshly observed and discussed according to the fundamental aspects of site, landscape, and context, in order to enable solutions to be discovered and developed. In this interweaving of disciplines Snøhetta involves locally and internationally renowned artists in the development of their projects. Working together with artists early on is also an expression of the curiosity and creative openness on the part of this internationally successful office, which is respected for its progressive working conidtions.

Cities are hybrid entities based on multilayered and sometimes contradictory organizing principles. As complex networks of geographic, economic, political and cultural segments, they are caught up in a constant process of differentiation. How are we to understand such dynamic processes, especially the complex connections between individuals, whose movements and interactions leave traces in the urban landscape? This publication offers architects, urban planners and general readers interested in city design and growth a novel approach, a mapping tool that creates a framework for understanding the continually changing configuration of the city. With transparent slides, the tool allows one to superimpose various realities like layers and build new urban connections. It invites readers in short to immerse themselves in the complexity of our cities.

With contributions by Catherine Ingraham and Keller Easterling

Robots build! At their program in architecture and digital production at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich), the architects Gramazio & Kohler have installed a research facility that is unique in the world. It is based on a computer-controlled industrial robot that produces construction elements directly from design data. The robot works flexibly with a tremendous range of tools and materials. In this way Gramazio & Kohler probe the exciting potential of digital design, construction, and manufacturing techniques for architecture. In their projects they incorporate insights and discoveries from the field of computer-aided production into the architectonic design process, using computers to develop innovative construction techniques and architecture. First structures using robots have already been built, for example the much noted Gantenbein vineyard in Fläsch (CH) or the installation at the Swiss Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice.

With the publication of the Dymaxion House in 1929, Buckminster Fuller became an overnight sensation in the world of American architecture. It was an uncompromising design and spectacularly novel. The living areas were hexagonal and attached around a central supply tower, and the multistory interior was fully climate-controlled. The house was conceived as completely self-sufficient – all the necessary supply modules were contained in the tower. The rooms were equipped with the most modern furnishings and fixtures. The approximately 150 m2 house weighed just 3 tons, cost no more than a car, and was designed to be constructed and dismantled anytime and anywhere. The house reflected Fuller’s basic technological principle, his determination toachieve the greatest possible utility at the smallest possible cost in terms of energy and materials by making use of everything that science and technology have to offer. The author examines and compares Fuller’s Dymaxion House in the context of the international development.

With a preface by Mark Wigley

Utopia or Oblivion is a provocative blueprint for the future. This comprehensive volume is composed of essays derived from the lectures he gave all over the world during the 1960’s. Fuller’s thesis is that humanity – for the first time in its history – has the opportunity to create a world where the needs of 100% of humanity are met. “This is what man tends to call utopia. It’s a fairly small word, but inadequate to describe the extraordinary new freedom of man in a new relationship to universe — the alternative of which is oblivion.” R. Buckminster Fuller.

And it Came to Pass – Not to Stay brings together a selection of Buckminster Fuller’s lyrical and philosophical best, including seven “essays” in a form he called his “ventilated prose” which address global crises and his predictions for the future. These essays, including “How Little I Know,” “What I am Trying to Do,” “Soft Revolution,” and “Ethics,” put the task of ushering in a new era of humanity in the context of “always starting with the universe.” In rare form, Fuller elegantly weaves the personal, the playful, thesimple, and the profound.

One of Fuller’s most popular works, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, is a brilliant synthesis of his world view. In this very accessible volume, Fuller investigates the great challenges facing humanity. How will humanity survive? How does automation influence individualization? How can we utilize our resources more effectively to realize our potential to end poverty in this generation? He questions the concept of specialization, calls for a design revolution of innovation, and offers advice on how to guide “spaceship earth” toward a sustainable future.

The new building for the New Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in December 2007, houses the first museum developed from the ground up in Lower Manhattan. The seven-story building, with a total floor area of 60,000 square feet, was designed by the renowned architectural duo SANAA – Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa. This book presents the design and building of the new museum in a series of interwoven stories, documents, and dialogues. The building expands the museum and its distinct role within the city and at the same time testifies to an important moment in the history, art, and life of the city. The photographs by Dean Kaufman emphasize the dynamics of the life of the building, whose unpredictability and disorder seem to be in conflict with minimalist form and order.

With Photographs by Dean Kaufman

Mega-city regions are currently a frequent topic of discussion. Researchers are exploring the fundamentals for understanding the role of metropolitan regions and their social, economic, and cultural developments on a national and European basis. The responsible decision makers in politics and business are calling for new measures for greater urban areas. But that is just the start of the problem: Europe seems to lack an awareness for metropolitan regions. For the majority of politicians, planners, institutions, and residents the features of mega-city regions remain invisible. They are scarcely charted; there are no concepts for representing them or any direct sensory understanding of them in everyday life. The book is based on the understanding that the visual depiction of mega-city regions is fundamental to identifying, acting, and developing within existing concentrations of urban populations. Through essays from various disciplines the book approaches the phenomenon and discusses the necessity to visualize mega-city regions.

The building site has been a popular metaphor for the patchwork plans of contemporary life. With authoritative information and reflection from a variety of perspectives, some quite surprising, the building site is presented as an extraordinary place in the city and as a microcosm that operates under heavy pressures of time and costs. The book includes essays on specific building sites such as the megaproject Sihlcity in Zurich or the La Défense building site in Paris, interviews with architects and construction managers, and impressive illustrations.

The Serpentine Gallery has commissioned Olafur Eliasson and architect Kjetil Thorsen to design its Pavilion in 2007. Based on the principle of a winding ramp, the Pavilion explores the idea of vertical circulation within a single space. “Our collaboration on the Serpentine Pavilion 2007 is defined by our mutual focus on the experience of space and on temporality as a constitutive element of spaces, private or public. We both work within a field of spatial experimentation that renders conceptual differences between art and architecture superfluous.” The publication comprises extensive visual material documenting the development and realisation of the pavilion; two essays by Doreen Massey, Professor of Geography at The Open University (UK), and Andreas Ruby, architecture critic; a conversation between Olafur Eliasson, Kjetil Thorsen, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julia Peyton-Jones (Co-directors, Serpentine Gallery).

This broad selection of Swiss architecture, graphic design, and design from 1950 to 2006 demonstrates that playful humor and clarity are by no means opposites, but a highly unusual duo of qualities that mingle and interpenetrate. The question addressed by this publication is: are these examples from three professions, various regions and languages, and a period of more than fifty years bound together by a common denominator? No parade of luxury items, but talents and ideas finding material expression and clients with the courage to embrace new “inventions,” are presented.

175 meters long, the museum bores like a triangular beam through the Har Hazikaron, or Mount of Remembrance. It juts out from the hillside at either end, allowing visitors to enter and look out. This spectacular architecture is the setting for a lavish and impressive exhibition commemorating the Holocaust. The structure is the culmination of Moshe Safdie’s work in Israel. The architect, a student of Louis Kahn who began his career with the sensational residential complex Habitat at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair, maintains offices in Boston, Toronto, and Jerusalem. The museum, its architecture, and its series of interior spaces with their carefully designed exhibition facilities are documented in an indepth photo essay and illustrated with texts and plans.

With contributions by Moshe Safdie, Joan Ockman, Avner Shalev, Elie Wiesel, Integral Lars Müller

Miniature and Panorama offers a look at projects since 2000 by the firm Vogt Landscape architects, Zurich/Munich, which is internationally active. With photographs, plans, and explanatory texts, this volume sets forth the intellectual foundation on which the projects of Vogt Landscape architects are based. In words and pictures, it describes and illuminates thirty projects, organized according to the exterior typologies of landscape, park, square, garden, cemetery, courtyard, promenade, and interior. Among them are the exterior spaces of the Allianz Arena in Munich, various projects on Novartis Campus in Basel, and the Masoala Rain Forest Hall at the Zurich Zoo.

With contributions by Olafur Eliasson, Peter Erni, Hamish Fulton, Roman Signer, Olaf Unverzart and Christian Vogt

Winner of “Best German Book Design 2006”. 

This book is the first comprehensive monograph of sauerbruch hutton: 60 projects, 8 texts, and a complete register of projects document the architects’ rise to one of the leading practices concerned with a sustainable environment in the post-industrial city. This allows one to trace the development of their architectural thinking through the vehicle of realised projects, their texts, and a considerable number of unrealised works. The book will reveal Sauerbruch and Hutton’s understanding of their profession as an ongoing process of research. The theme of sustainability surfaces throughout the book as an integral part of the architects’ language.

In 1963 at the University of Cambridge, Peter Eisenman – world famous for his Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (2005) – wrote a dissertation on the formal basis of modern architecture. In it, the architect confronts historicism with theory and the analysis of form, whose distinguishing features he regards as the foundation of architectural composition. Eisenman illustrates his observations with numerous, extremely precise hand drawings. This striking document fully deserves to be published here, for the first time, in a faithful reproduction of the original.

BRAKIN: Visualizing the Visible is a research project of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. A group of scholars studied the various manifestations of public space using the example of the booming capitals Brazzavile and Kinshasa. BRAKIN is documented through everyday phenomena such as “Architectural Manifestations of the Diamond Trade,” “The UN Presence,” “The River Congo,” “Street Children,” “Mobile Phone Advertising,” “Conflicts over Property Ownership,” and so on.

Sense of the City was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in the autumn 2005 in the renowned Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal. These everyday discoveries were collected over a long time and then categorized according to their relationship with each other. The wide range of cities from which the examples were taken is reflected in the use of different languages. Without claiming completeness, this collection represents a pictorial archive documenting two very different kinds of expeditions through large and small cities of the world.

The idea of providing a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust dates from 1989. Since then plans have been made, designs sketched and heated discussions conducted. The memorial was handed over to the public in May 2005. 2700 concrete blocks flow unassertively over the enormous field and invite visitors to immerse themselves in them. The monument cannot be interpreted in any one specific way, it is not suitable for acts of state and does not follow the rules of ceremonial, which is what makes it so spectacular. This publication was created in close co-operation with Petern Eisenmn and records the memorial with photographs by Hélène Binet and Lukas Wassmann. Essays by Hanno Rauterberg and Peter Eisenman make it possible to reflect about the building more deeply.

Peter Eisenman (1932), is a leading contemporary architect, and author of numerous publications on architectural theory.

With photographs by Héléne Binet and Lukas Wassmann
With texts by Peter Eisenman and Hanno Rauterberg

Herzog & de Meuron test the boundaries between architecture and art to a greater extent than other contemporary architects. Their interest in surface and material, opacity and transparency and the function and variability of images makes architecture speak—not just in quotations and typologies, but by continually redefining raw materials. Their buildings seem to exist simply to present those mysterious and beautiful moments when material is transformed into meaning.

With essays by Richard Armstrong, Carrie Asman, Gernot Böhme, Georges Didi-Huberman, Kurt W. Forster, Boris Groys, Reinhold Hohl, Petros Koumoutsakos, Robert Kudielka, Albert Lutz, Christian Moueix, Peggy Phelan, Thomas Ruff, Ulrike Rebecca Schneider, Meyer Stump, Adolf Max Vogt, Philip Ursprung, Jeff Wall, Alejandro Zaera-Polo and Rémy Zaugg

Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were both born in Basel in 1950, establishing their own firm together in 1978. In 2001 they won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Le Corbusier’s buildings have long been part of the inalienable canon of twentieth-century architecture. But Le Corbusier’s work as a book designer and author is scarcely known. He planned and realized over 40 books in his lifetime. Architect of Books shows that Le Corbusier accorded great importance to books as an essential part of his output. Catherine de Smet traces the process by which these books emerged and makes it possible to discover the great construction architect as a book artist. New images and in-depth analyses make Vers une Architecture du Livre an indispensable complement to Le Corbusier, Architect of Books.

In the official Swiss contribution to the International Architecture Biennale 2004 in Venice Christian Waldvogel proposes dismantling the Earth and using the resulting materials to build a new, hollow and much larger world: a Globus Cassus. He describes the transformation of the earth into a Globus Cassus in great detail and with precise specifications. Drawings and pictures illustrate his project. The proposed inversion of the Earth would give humankind the opportunity to create its own world. Waldvogel’s project eloquently demonstrates that every human being is free to reinvent the world and eliminate existing barriers to thought. Planet Earth is transformed into an inhabitable monument of majestic elegance.

The blurry interface of exurbia and suburbia represents strange and alien territory for architects, because the context is usually vague and the space haphazardly organized. Zaha Hadid’s work in Strasbourg capitalizes on the haphazardness of its suburban setting. To reconcile the car and the dense historic fabric of Strasbourg, Zaha Hadid responded to the site with elegant but deceptive simplicity. She folded a concrete canopy up from the ground to stretch diagonally across the bus and tram lanes toward the parking lot and Strasbourg beyond, as though pulled in that direction. The parking lots demonstrate Hadid’s assumption that buses and the trams are a permanently impermanent part of the station’s overall organization and composition Hadid treats the cars that park here almost as natural phenomena with their own diurnal rhythms. In 2003 Zaha Hadid von the Mies van der Rohe Preis for this project.

With texts by Andreas Ruby

A Time and Place shows the extensive body of work by the German artist Christian Moeller, who lives in Los Angeles. It includes work dating from 1991 to 2003, and describes his fascinating tightrope walk between analogue and digital worlds. This is the first time there has been a monograph consisting of both internet and book pages. Playing to the particular strengths of each medium, A Time and Place gives it readers a book that, strange as it may sound, can be read at a computer that is logged on the internet. The artist’s texts, drawings and photographs in the book are complemented by digitized internet film documentation sequences in image and sound.

With Freudenberg cantonal school James Schader has created an internationally acclaimed masterpiece of enormous postulate and one of the most important works of 20th century Swiss architecture. A detailed film (DVD) provides a clear account of the building's complex quality, and includes conversations with the architect and experts. The accompanying brochure contains the planning documents and links the media in a new way.

With a film by Marc Schwarz

Theo Hotz, born in 1928, is a leading contemporary Swiss architect. His spectacular glass buildings produced since the mid eighties in particular, the EMPA in St. Gallen (1996), for example, or Hall 1 at the Basel Fair (1999) have made an international impact. The ETH in Zurich conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 1999. Theo Hotz has helped to shape Swiss architecture for several decades and several major projects are keeping him at the centre of current discussion.

With essays by Philip Ursprung and Hubertus Adam

“New Living” (Das Neue Wohnen) was the title of an exceptional architectural propaganda film created in 1930 by German avant-garde artist and filmmaker Hans Richter. It show-cased exemplary modernist buildings and furniture – some of which were on view shortly afterwards in the prestigious exhibitions “The International Style” – and contrasted them with impractical, unhygienic living spaces. The visual diversity of “New Living”, and its use of an experimental montage technique, pioneered a radical new method of portraying architecture on celluloid.

This publication includes detailed sequences from the New Living film, as well as numerous documents that illustrate the new style of architectural modernism.

An illustrated diary by the architects Alison and Peter Smithson (representing the Independent Group – see also As found) driving from their London office through to their Wiltshire cottage, their “Solar Pavilion” from 1961. The contrast of their Citroën DS 19, streamlined and mechanically advanced, with the luscious and picturesque landscape links – thanks to the observing eye – both the urban and the countryside in the most sensitive manner. The book was conceived as “A Sensibility Primer.” Reprint of the original publication from 1983, edited by Christian Sumi, architect, Zürich.

British art and architecture of the 1950s are of extraordinary topicality today. This applies particularly to the Independent Group which included artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Magda Cordell, the photographer Nigel Henderson, critics Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway as well as architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St. John Wilson.

Discourse uses numerous text by Buckminster Fuller to give an insight into his architectural, technical and philosophical visions.

This volume brings together photographs of the Vitra Fire station and Landscape Formation one-both in Weil am Rhein/G; Addressing the Century, Hayward Gallery, London, 1998; Blueprint/Interbuild Pavilion, 1995.

With a text by Hubertus von Amelunxen

The GSW Headquarters Building is an assemblage of five distinct volumes. This variety of elements allows a response to the different typological an morphological conditions of the ensemble's location between the southern and northern parts of the so-called "Friedrichsstadt" in the centre of Berlin. Within the discussion about the reconstruction of the once-divided capital, this project articulatesa response to the city which accepts Berlin's historical conglomerate as a structural principle. History is seen as a dynamic process which leaves its traces. This intention to work with these traces – as with any other condition of the context – in a constructive and creative way is the underlying principle of this sceme. With its low-energy concept the building leads into the future, and with its idiosyncrati aesthetics it demands the return of a sensual architecture at the beginning of the 21st century.