Alejandro Zaera-Polo

Jeffrey Anderson

The Ecologies of the Envelope theorizes the building envelope as a literal embodiment of the social, political, technological, and economic contingencies which have become embedded within it over the last century, analyzing the historical lineages, heroes and villains that helped define the complex material ecologies we see within the envelope today. While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes) which are deployed on the building's surface. Rather than producing a stylistic analysis of the façade, we investigate the historical lineages of the performances, components, assembly types, and material entanglements that constitute the contemporary building envelope.

A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

Paola Antonelli

Eyal Weizman

David Benjamin

Kevin Slavin

Architecture and Research by The Living

Now We See Now

Hyungmin Pai

The cities of the world stand at a crossroads. Amidst radical social, economic, and technological transformations, will the city become a driving force of creativity, diversity, and sustainability, or will it be a mechanism of inequality, despair, and environmental decay? At this critical moment, where do the stakes lie and what are the agents of change? From the time of its birth, the city has been held together by the commons. The book includes essays by Alejandro Zaera, Hyungmin Pai, Maider Llaguno, Nerea Calvillo, Hyewon Lee, Lindsay Bremner, Alex Ivancic, Iñaki Abalos, Charles Waldheim, David Gissen, Carlo Ratti, Daniele Belleri, Antoine Pico, Saskia Saseen, Adam Greenfield, Jesse LeCavalier, Philip Rode, Duncan McLaren, Julian Agyeman, Gunter Pauli, Gramazio and Kohler, Mario Carpo, Dirk E. Hebel, Marta H. Wisniewska, Felix Heisel, Mitchell Joachim, and Christian Hubert. The first publication of the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, proposes a framework that sets basic commons ? an evolving network of agencies, resources and technologies ? as the critical issue in the move towards a sustainable and just urbanism. It shows an exploration not of distant utopias, but of the very near future, because the emerging commons is changing the way we connect, make, move, recycle, sense, and share, and the way we manage air, water, energy and the earth. Whether met with fear or hope, they will very soon change the way we live in the city.

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017

Imminent Commons: Urban Questions for the Near Future

Hyŏng-min Pae

Urban Questions for the Near Future : Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017

Imminent Commons

Albena Yaneva

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ’from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ’cosmopolitically correct design’.

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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