a:p
Architektur:
Positionen

Softcover
17 x 20 cm
English/German or German

Where does today’s young generation of architects stand? Are there new fields of practice and research in architecture? The series architektur : positionen intends to ask these and other questions. It will focus on the crossovers between architecture and art, introducing relevant and exciting contemporary positions: it will present things constructed, planned and imagined, colors and materials, unconventional theories, and surprising approaches.

The series centers on selected architects and artists, whose diverse development of (urban) space means they are associated with successful innovative approaches in the international architectural scene. Following leads between material and information, between social requirements and advanced technology, they generate sustainable architectonic strategies for short- or long-term projects.

An office building whose façade changes at night into a gently pulsating play of colors; an apartment that lets us know when our loved one is coming home on the other side of the world; a house, which rather than shielding us from the outside world, allows us to put together our own soundtrack inside with sounds from “outside” . To what extent can the integration of new technologies allow us to create spaces that move us, and in which we feel in the best case significantly more “at home”? Can architecture thus provide appropriate answers to the new needs of a mobile, globally networked society? What does “home” mean in the twenty-first century? What is really meant by “interactive” or “intelligent” architectures? Sensing Space presents projects, experiments, and perspectives on architectures and spaces of the future from, among others, Dunne & Raby, G TECTS, Ruairi Glynn, J. Mayer H., Usman Haque, Toyo Ito, Cedric Price, realities:united, and Adam Somlai-Fischer.

 

Arakawa and Madeline Gins have set out to completely rethink architecture. They pose themselves no less a task than helping mankind to find immortality through architecture. Literally, they aim to reverse human destiny by reappraising architecture’s basis – the original symbiosis of man and the biosphere. The outcome is not an ecological manifesto, but a draft for a completely new understanding of the body, consciousness, perception and the environment. With absolute seriousness, but also playfully, they consider the “architectural body”, which has always been inseparably interwoven with building and the process of being built around. Can we make use of this intermingling to become immortal? Madeline Gins and Arakawa say “yes”—and they have been realising their concept for man’s future through their construction projects in the USA and Japan since 1990.

www.reversibledestiny.org

 

 

a:p Color Spaces

978-3-939633-53-2
22,00
Out of print

Does it look wide or long, does it look different inside compared to outside, or does it look better standing than lying down? How consciously do we experience color, light, and space? How do colors influence our perception, change the effect of something built and thereby shift the relations of space and our judgement? Friederike Tebbe examines the manifestations of color, its perception, and interpretation. She is concerned with color perception as a primary experience and examines it in a sensually-attuned way in her artistic projects. She integrates the insights gleaned in this way into her practical work in concrete architecture. The selection from both areas of her work provides a colorful collection of works that is full of surprising transformations and lively impressions.

 

 

Disembodiment describes a physical process in the context of urban conditions. It is a process that robs our bodies of all material existence and transforms our physical conditions by intensifying conditions that we have been unable to feel initially up to a point where we perceive a clearer division between the body and thought. Differing urban worlds and living environments produce a vast range of processes of disembodiment. They produce a sense of becoming alienated from one’s own body, from the perception of the body, and from human behaviour. The work of architect José Salinas aims to investigate this intimate association between the body and urban space. The city forms the environment, and provides the space and energy. It consists of uninvestigated forces and synergies, which interact by means of their wealth and complexity. The body’s covering is also like an ambience; a topological configuration providing space and energy. It is equally dependent on the complexity of the surroundings.

www.knobsdesign.com

Future façades will become three-dimensional displays. New developments in display technology, so called voxels allow revolutionary architectural expressions. Whereas spatial expressions till present were determinated by the physical attributes of the building material, voxel displays will shift these borders. An intangible material, light points, defines space and allows surface attributes, such as: Dynamic relief, multilayered surface, decay function, privileged perspective, movement and speed and design process. By the example of spectacular contemporary projects, the book presents recent developments of three-dimensional display technology, showing its significance for our understanding of space and architecture.

 

Large residential developments like the Japanese “Danchi” went through an enormous international boom, particularly in the decades that followed the Second World War; they provided modern, affordable living space for rapidly growing populations. The banlieues in Paris are remnants of that period as are the Märkisches Viertel area in Berlin, prefabricated large-scale socialist developments, and the Danchi; largely built in the nineteen-fifties to seventies. Yet, this type of public apartment building has long fallen into disrepute. Many are threatened by vacancy, decay and demolition—wrongly so says MIKAN, a Japanese-French team of architects.
They have come up with a sheer inexhaustible range of ideas of how to convert, re-function and re-use such mass developments. Their aim: to protect them from decay and vacancy and to discover their hidden qualities. Save the Danchi shows how surprisingly easily and accessibly this uncomplicated architecture can be adapted to contemporary needs and ecological standards.