Sarah Bonnemaison

Ronit Eisenbach

Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers' experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of "real" architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture's material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people's everyday lives. The first survey of its kind, Installations by Architects features fifty of the most significant projects from the last twenty-five years by today's most exciting architects, including Anderson Anderson, Philip Beesley, Diller + Scofidio, John Hejduk, Dan Hoffman, and Kuth/Ranieri Architects. Projects are grouped in critical areas of discussion under the themes of tectonics, body, nature, memory, and public space. Each project is supplemented by interviews with the project architects and the discussions of critics and theorists situated within a larger intellectual context. There is no doubt that installations will continue to play a critical role in the practice of architecture. Installations by Architects aims to contribute to the role of installations in sharpening our understanding of the built environment.

Experiments in Building and Design

Installations by Architects

The close connection between living nature and architecture is one of the most persistent and enduring themes of architectural theory. In the West it has come to be called organicism. For the creator, organicism can be seen as strategies of both invention and interpretation that draw from nature. This original publication makes explicit design methods that are drawn from living nature, and draws links between buildings across centuries and countries. Each essay interprets a unique aspect of organicism and puts it in its proper theoretical context. As a whole, the catalogue reveals the enduring strength of organicism in architectural education, research, and practice. Published in collaboration with Dalhousie Architectural Press to accompany an exhibition held at OCAD University, Toronto, for the Living Architecture Systems Group symposium, Spring 2019.

Resurgence of Organicism

Sascha Hastings

Philip Beesley

The Living Architecture Systems Group is an interdisciplinary partnership of academics, artists, designers, and industry partners dedicated to researching and developing next-generation architectural environments. Projects produced by this group are now showing qualities that come strikingly close to life. These experimental works can move, respond, explore, learn, and adapt.Open boundaries and expanded dimensions run throughout the studies, exploring the scales of new adaptive and responsive architecture, from intimate personal spaces to regional infrastructures. Dimensions at the edges of human perception, subtle phenomena, immersive sonic environments, and precise measurements using innovative software controls are included. Deep involvement in computation and material craft is offered, reflecting the unparalleled new abilities of designers to precisely addressing material performance. This White Papers 2019 volume offers readers a sense of the variety and depth of research that is being conducted by Living Architecture Systems Group.

White Papers 2019

Christine Macy

Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award! The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity. Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.

Creating the American Landscape

Architecture and Nature

With contributions from provocative art and architectural historians, this book is a unique exposition of the temporary architecture erected for festivals and the role it has played in developing Western architectural and urban theory. Festival Architecture is arranged in historical periods – from Antiquity to the modern era – and divided between analyses of specific festivals, set in relation to contemporary architecture and urban design ideas and theories. Illustrated with a wealth of unusual and rarely-seen images from the European festival tradition, this is a fascinating outline of the history of festival architecture ideal for postgraduate architecture and urban design students.

Sarah Bonnemaison

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