Víctor Muñoz Sanz

Alkistis Thomidou

With a combination of essays, memoirs, guided imagery, and speculative story-telling, this book reenacts Roadside Picnic, a sci-fi story addressing the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence through the environmental effects and wreckage left behind by the visitors. The bewildering nature of worldly Roadside Picnics pushes human and non-human beings across the planet to a similar situation. In the face of that shared condition, the book Roadside Picnics highlights the ways in which architecture and the built environment participate in and condition both our encounters with the unthinkable—How do we face trouble?—as well as the futures that are possible in the unintended landscapes of the Anthropocene—How do we stay with the trouble?

Encounters with the uncanny

Roadside Picnics.

Dirk van den Heuvel

Janno Martens

Habitat became a hotly debated topic in architecture in the 1950s, when this ecological term was introduced in the avant-garde circles of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and Team 10. Next to rethinking the housing question the notion of habitat brought a profoundly new way to conceive architecture and urban planning. No longer could one consider cities and buildings as discrete, isolate objects but instead they were to be understood as part of a larger whole, an environment or habitat. In light of contemporary environmental awareness Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture offers a transhistorical perspective to reflect on design principles from the recent past, reinvigorate current debates while offering suggestions for future architectural research. The publication contains contributions by Frits Palmboom, Erik Rietveld, Hadas Steiner, Georg Vrachliotis, and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi, combined with generous visual documentations of the work of renowned architects Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson, Van den Broek & Bakema, and many more.

Víctor Muñoz Sanz

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