Andreas Ruby

Yuma Shinohara

Urban swimming is more popular than ever. When it comes to swimming in rivers, Swiss cities are international trailblazers. Moreover, in places like London, New York, Paris, and Berlin, increasing numbers of people are seeking access to the rivers, harbours, and canals in the built environment. Rivers and their banks are gradually being seen as natural public resources, a place of leisure that is both convenient and firmly anchored in everyday life. Together with an exhibition at the Swiss Architecture Museum, this book documents this recent phenomenon, exploring how cities can reclaim their waters as a spatial resource and sustainably improve the quality of urban life.

Swim City

Ilka Ruby

The Materials Book

Angeli Sachs

Philip Ursprung

What is minimalism? Or, more specifically, what isn't? In this fascinating aesthetic voyage, three experts in the field of architecture and art history trace the development of minimalism as a style and offer perspectives on the directions the movement is taking as it morphs towards the future. In double-page spreads filled with color photographs of the most innovative minimalist projects, this book illustrates three principal movements: the traditional, as practiced by Herzog & de Meuron in early works, Adolf Krischanitz and Tadao Ando; the ambiguous, in which architects not commonly associated with minimalism, such as OMA or Zaha Hadid, use it for specific projects; and the subversive, which appropriates minimalist concepts across a variety of new fields as exemplified in the architecture of Shigeru Ban or Lacaton & Vassal.

Minimal Architecture

In cooperation with Ilka and Andreas Ruby, book architectural MVRDV assembled a redefined architecture monograph about its realized work, featuring testimonies, journalistic articles, unpublished images and accessible drawings. The architects of MVRDV are famous for their visionary research and thought provoking projects such as Pig City and Grand Paris. In 20 years of practice the office also realized a big portfolio of buildings and urban plans, including Villa VPRO, Balancing Barn and Mirador Madrid.book architectural.

MVRDV Buildings

François Roche

R & Sie... Architectes

Stéphanie Lavaux

Architectural projects which expose the hidden contradictions of our everyday reality in a lively yet challenging way. Franois Roche (born in 1961 in Paris) and his partner Stephanie Lavaux (born in 1966 on the Reunion Island) are radical advocates of an architecture which is to be perceived as a tool for increasing critical awareness, as a discipline which provokes thought and inspires the imagination. Their buildings and projects, which include the new art museum in Bangkok and the Glacier Museum in Switzerland, both of which would have been unthinkable without the latest IT methods of design, strive towards designs which are unique and unmistakeable in both function and appearance. Franois Roche is guest professor at the London Bartlett School and the Technical University of Vienna, and has made a name for himself internationally as a pioneer of a new architecture through his lecture activities and his participation in many exhibitions. This monograph is the first complete overview of his workand will be published to coincide with the exhibition "No Standard Architecture" which opens in November at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where R & Sie...architects are one of the 12 invited architectural firms.

R&Sie_ Arquitects

Spoiled Climate

Is infrastructure but the plumbing and wiring of the human environment, or is it the true lifeblood of the spaces we inhabit? Infrastructural systems facilitate the flow of anything from people and goods to resources and information. While engineered to perform specific tasks, such networks also determine the structure of buildings, cities, and metropolitan regions, if not of entire nations and the planet itself.0Taking this critical leverage in consideration, this book calls for expanding and renegotiating the roles of infrastructure not only as a technical, but also as a political, economic, social, and even aesthetic matter of concern for all, claimed not only as the means for achieving more resilient forms of development, but moreover as a right to a sustainable way of life.0Twenty-five essays?by architects, engineers, urban theorists and policy-makers?address infrastructure as ?thing?, ?networked system? and ?agency? respectively in three chapters, which are periodically interspersed by a visual atlas of examples, that playfully celebrate infrastructure through the lens of its spatial qualities.

Infrastructure Space

Olafur Eliasson

Doreen B. Massey

Serpentine Gallery

Kjetil Thorsen

Olafur Eliasson is based in Berlin where he has established Studio Olafur Eliasson, a laboratory for spatial research. His work explores the relationship between individuals and their surroundings, as experienced in his awe-inspiring large-scale installation The weather project (2003) at Tate Modern, London. Kjetil Thorsen is co-founder of Snoehetta, one of Scandinavia's leading architectural practices, with offices in Oslo and New York. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt 1995-2001, is the commission that brought Snoehetta to international acclaim.

Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007

This exploration of the use and significance of two-dimensional images in contemporary architecture looks at the works of major designers, including Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, MVRDV, and Sauerbruch & Hutton, among others. It shows how certain architectural principles such as color and ornament--which nearly disappeared in modern twentieth century architecture--are making a strong comeback. Drawing connections to the rise of globalization and current media trends, this examination uses an abundance of thematically arranged photographs to illustrate what is unmistakably a major contemporary development in architecture.

A Picture Book of Architecture

Images

PETER ZELLNER

Harald Kloft

Marcos Novak

Zellner Novak Rich Saggio

ANTONINO SAGGIO

At last architects have discovered the free form shape - multiple curved surfaces, which do not exist in Cartesian geometry. What has long been usual in product design is now being adopted in architecture, these shapes are being generated by special software, and then they are subsequently built. Some young and innovative architectural firms have seized the opportunity to expand the boundaries of architectural space, showing a willingness to experiment with the new technology, and these young architects, or blobmeister as Wes Jones rather negatively called them, are now moving on to built examples. In this book, 11 examples from Europe, the USA and Japan are presented, showing that far from being out of touch with reality, cyber-architects do transform their dreams into actual buildings, thus concluding the endless alternatives and possibilities implicit in every design. For it is only built architecture which shows true mastery. This volume extensively documents the complex design process, from the digital conception of the designs, the creation of models, to the final photographs of the building sites and the finished structures. Thematic essays give the reader an insight into the history of the digital scene, assessing its influence on architectural culture to date and evaluating its future potential. The accompanying CD-Rom shows dynamic animations.

Digital Real

Groundscapes explores the 'comeback' of the idea of the ground onto the scene of contemporary architecture. With the decline of heroic modernism in the late 1960s a new generation of architects eager to discover this forbidden land initiated a reterritorialisation of architecture which continues today. As a consequence, we can understand built space and ground space no longer as opposites but as equal elements of the architectural body. Ilka Ruby is an architect and Andreas Ruby is an architectural critic and theorist. Since founding their office textbild in 2001 they have been committed to a cultural engineering of the discourse on contemporary architecture, writing texts, designing books, curating exhibitions, consulting architects and organising architectural symposia for a wide array of cultural and corporate clients. Their publications include Images. A Picture Book of Architecture (Prestel, 2004), The Challenge of Suburbia (Wiley-Academy, 2004) and Hans Scharoun: Haus Moeller (Walther Koenig, 2004). They have been teaching architecture at a variety of universities in Europe. Currently they are visiting critics at Cornell University. For more information see www.textbild.com

Andreas Ruby

Books

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