Justin McGuirk

What makes the city of the future? How do you heal a divided city? In Radical Cities, Justin McGuirk travels across Latin America in search of the activist architects, maverick politicians and alternative communities already answering these questions. From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from. Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.

Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture

Radical Cities

Glenn Adamson

Tim Marlow

Charlotte Perriand

Octavio Camargo

the Modern Life

Eszter Steierhoffer

The twentieth century offered up countless visions of domestic life, from the aspirational to the radical. Whether it was the dream of the fully mechanised home or the notion that technology might free us from home altogether, the domestic realm was a site of endless invention and speculation. But what happened to those visions? Are the smart homes of today the future that architects and designers once predicted, or has 'home' proved resistant to radical change? Home Futures: Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow -accompanying a major Design Museum exhibition of the same title-explores a number of different attitudes toward domestic life, tracing the social and technological developments that have driven change in the home. It proposes that we are already living in yesterday's tomorrow, just not in the way anyone predicted. This book begins with a lavishly illustrated catalogue portraying the 'home futures' of the twentieth century and beyond, from the work of Ettore Sottsass and Joe Colombo to Google's recent forays into the smart home. The catalogue is followed by a reader consisting of newly commissioned essays by writers such as Dan Hill and Justin McGuirk, which explore the changes in the domestic realm in relation to space, technology, society, economy and psychology.

Living in Yesterday's Tomorrow

Home Futures

Gonzalo Herrero

To accompany The Design Museum's opening exhibition, which explores the anxiety and optimism inherent in contemporary design Fear and Love, published to accompany the major exhibition that will open the Design Museum's highly anticipated new home in Kensington, London, examines the role of design in the twenty-first century. It proposes that, in a rapidly changing world, design is defined by both anxiety and optimism. Organized by five key themes - Network, Empathy, Body, Earth and Periphery - the book explores design's relationship to emotive issues. Eleven leading figures from across the spectrum of design provide a wide-ranging set of attitudes to design in our times: Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation, OMA, Madeline Gannon, Metahaven, Hussein Chalayan, Neri Oxman, Christien Meindertsma, Ma Ke, Kenya Hara, Arquitectura Expandida and Rural Urban Framework.

The Design Museum Opening Exhibition

Fear & Love: Reactions to a Complex World

Brendan McGetrick

This book examines California's enormous impact on contemporary design, from the counterculture of the 1960s to the tech culture of Silicon Valley. On a more expansive level, California: Designing Freedom explores the idea that California has pioneered tools of personal liberation - from LSD to surfboards and iPhones. This ambitious survey brings together political posters and portable devices, but also looks beyond hardware to explore how user interface designers in the San Francisco Bay Area are shaping some of our most common daily experiences. Californian products have influenced contemporary life across the globe to such an extent that in some ways we are all now Californians. Put simply, 'Designed in California' is the new 'Made in Italy'.

California Designing Freedom

Justin McGuirk

Books

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