Aa Files 78

AA Files is the Architectural Association's (AA) journal of record. Currently under the editorship of Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, AA Files looks to promote original and engaging writing on architecture. It does this by drawing both on the AA's own academic research, public programme, exhibitions and events, as well as by a rich and eclectic mix of architectural scholarship from all over the world. The forthcoming issue of AA Files examines a range of building typologies and histories from Pyongyang to Lusaka and beyond - its geographic remit is broader than any previous issue. It also features articles looking at some of the wider contexts informing architectural practice, including timelines of ecological rupture, ways of measuring the human body, and the emergence of privatised public space. Contributors include Thandi Loewenson, Calvin Chua, Christina Varvia, Elisa Iturbe, Manijeh Verghese and Madeleine Kessler among others.

This title features essays by Lilly Dubowitz on Stefan Sebok, the art historian Karin Gimmi on Max Frisch, the architectural historian Irene Sunwoo on AATV, the oral historian Linda Sandino on the oral archive, the design historian Eric Kindel on stencils and a conversation between John Morgan and Sally Potter about her father."

Mediated Messages presents a collection of original writing exploring the role played by the media in the development of postmodern architecture in the 1970s and 80s. The book's twelve chapters and case-studies examine a range of contemporary periodicals and exhibitions to explore their role in the postmodern. This focus on mediation as a key feature of architectural post-modernism, and the recognition that post-modernism grew out of developments in the media, opens up the possibility of an important new account of post-modernism distinct from existing narratives. Accompanied by a contextualizing introduction, the essays are arranged across four thematic sections (covering: images; international postmodernisms; high and low culture; and postmodern architects as theorists) and present a range of case-studies with a genuinely international scope. Altogether, this work makes a substantial contribution to the historical account of architectural postmodernism, and will be of great interest to researchers in postmodernism as well as those examining the role of the media in architectural history.

Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect’s role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later theories from the 1960s, which focused more on the architect’s theorization of his/her own design strategies, seem increasingly irrelevant. In an age of digital reproduction and commodification, these theoretical approaches need to be reassessed. Bringing together essays and interviews from leading scholars such as Kenneth Frampton, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Tschumi, Donald Kunze and Marco Biraghi, this volume investigates and critically addresses various dimensions of the present crisis of architecture. It poses questions such as: Is architecture a conservative cultural product servicing a given producer/consumer system? Should architecture’s affiliative ties with capitalism be subjected to a measure of criticism that can be expanded to the entirety of the cultural realm? Is architecture’s infusion into the cultural the reason for the visibility of architecture today? What room does the city leave for architecture beyond the present delirium of spectacle? Should the thematic of various New Left criticisms of capitalism be taken as the premise of architectural criticism? Or alternatively, putting the notion of criticality aside is it enough to confine criticism to the production of insightful and pleasurable texts?

AA Files 75 features essays by Freya Wigzell, Kristina Jaspers, Claire Zimmerman, Laila Seewang, Roberta Marcaccio, Rebecca Siefert, Shantel Blakely, Francesco Zuddas, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Victor Plahte Tschudi, Francisco González de Canales, Ross Anderson, Salomon Frausto, Theo Crosby, Marco Biraghi and Zoë Slutzky, together with a personal reminiscence by Nigel Coates and a conversation between Thomas Daniell and Shin Takamatsu.

The International Building Exhibition 1984/87 in Berlin constitutes one of the most remarkable examples to discuss "open architecture". Almost 10,000 dwellings were constructed or restored in the Kreuzberg districts adjacent to the Berlin Wall, inhabited about halfway by immigrants. The renowned author Esra Akcan, related in many ways to Turkey, Berlin and the USA, narrates the history and reverberations of this architectural-political event.

This book describes both the theory of atomic spectroscopy and all the major atomic spectrometric techniques (AAS, Flame-AES, Plasma AES, AFS, and ICP-MS), including basic concepts, instrumentation and applications. Spectrochemical Analysis by Atomic Absorption and Emission is very wide in scope and will be extremely useful to both undergraduates and lecturers undertaking modern analytical chemistry courses. It contains many figures and tables which illuminate the text, covers various sample preparation methods and gives suggestions for further reading.