Elemental Architecture

Elemental Architecture presents a new and refreshing approach to sustainable architectural practice. Going beyond the standard performance-based and quantitative sustainable measures, it incorporates a broader framework of considerations, including the more poetic and noetic possibilities of environmental design. The book is structured around the ancient Greek and medieval alchemists’ system of the Five Temperaments: fire, earth, air, water, and ether. Phillip James Tabb examines how these elements produce both positive and negative environmental forces which have an impact on architectural design – from drinking water and fresh air to torrential floods and tornados. He shows how responding to or enhancing these forces can help us to create a more sustainable, healthy, and purposeful architecture. To illustrate this, each chapter draws on seminal contemporary works of architecture, from Peter Zumthor’s Bruder-Klaus Field Chapel to Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece at Fallingwater. These examples are accompanied by over a hundred high-quality illustrations. Expanding the discussion of sustainability to include phenomenological as well as qualitative considerations, Elemental Architecture is ideal for students and researchers with an interest in sustainable architecture and architectural theory.

A spectacular, visually rich monograph on one of the most visionary architecture firms of the twenty-first century led by 2016 Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena Elemental, based in Santiago, Chile, epitomizes a new generation of pioneering, socially engaged architects. The firm specializes in innovative, powerful, and humane public-interest projects, working on both large and small scales across Chile, the United States, Mexico, Switzerland, and China. Featuring stunning images by renowned architectural photographers together with sketches and drawings from Aravena's personal notebooks, this book beautifully, often irreverently, displays Elemental's unique working methods and philosophy. Each project - from iconic structures like the Anacleto Angelini UC Innovation Centre to seaside residences and pioneering reconstruction plans - is accompanied by Aravena's engaging texts, bringing to life his understanding of civil society and the built environment. From the publisher of Snarkitecture, Grafton Architects and Concrete.

Conditional design is the sequel to Operative Design. This book will further explore the operative in a more detailed, intentional, and perhaps functional manner. Spatially, the conditional is the result of the operative. It is not a blind result however. Both terms work together to satisfy a formal manipulation through a set of opportunities for elements such as connections and apertures.

The core idea for this book is the use of operative verbs as tools for designing space. These operative verbs abstract the idea of spatial formation to its most basic terms, allowing for an objective approach to create the foundation for subjective spatial design. Examples of these verbs are expand, inflate, nest, wist, lift, embed, merge and many more. Together they form a visual dictionary decoding the syntax of spatial verbs. The verbs are illustrated with three-dimensional diagrams and pictures of designs which show the verbs 'in action'. This approach was devised, tested, and applied to architectural studio instruction by Anthony Di Mari and Nora Yoo while teaching at Harvard University's Career Discovery Program in Architecture in 2010. As instructors and as recent graduates, they saw a need for this kind of catalogue from both sides - as a reference manual applicable to design students in all stages of their studies, as well as a teaching tool for instructors to help students understand the strong spatial potential of abstract operations.

PRECEDENTS IN ARCHITECTURE A TIMELY UPDATE OF THE ARCHITECTURAL CLASSIC ON DESIGN ANALYSIS Precedents in Architecture, Fourth Edition provides a vocabulary for architectural analysis that illuminates the works of leading architects and aids architects and designers in creating their own designs. Thirty-eight leading architects are represented in this updated edition through an analysis of more than 100 buildings that are assessed using a diagrammatic technique applicable to any building. This impressive collection includes fourteen new buildings and seven new, innovative architects distinguished by the strength, quality, and interest of their designs. It delivers valuable guidance in analyzing architectural history as an evolutionary process by exploring the commonality of design ideas reflected in a broad range of structures by internationally renowned architects. Both novices and seasoned professionals will find Precedents in Architecture, Fourth Edition to be a very useful tool for enriching their design vocabulary and for the ongoing assessment of buildings found in today’s evolving landscape.

An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content. Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century, for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise, for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to, SITELESS is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author, a young French architect practicing in Tokyo, admits he “didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture, but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline, as a sort of compulsive reaction.” What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site, program, and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms, and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published. The 1001 building forms in SITELESS include structural parasites, chain link towers, ball bearing floors, corrugated corners, exponential balconies, radial facades, crawling frames, forensic housing—and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. SITELESS presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages, Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a “scale test,” showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions.

60 stunning works of contemporary architecture, all of which have a special relationship with the natural landscape Elemental Living presents 60 works of architecture from across the 20th and 21st centuries that have a special relationship with the natural world. The book includes a visually breathtaking selection of architect-created houses that have been designed to create unparalleled views of a wide variety of natural landscapes; designed to be almost indistinguishable from the natural landscape; or designed using materials and forms found in the natural landscape. Each house demonstrates a deep concern with the creation of unique living spaces that connect their inhabitants with the forests, mountains, lakes, deserts, and oceans that have attracted humanity for millennia.