Mchap

Introduced by an essay about the vague contradiction between intentionality and chance, necessity and accident, reason and futility, authorship and anonymity, the book presents a selection of images that inform Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s cross production between art, architecture and academia. Each page contains a single picture and a brief caption describing it. Beyond a comprehensive depiction of the individual works, the monograph underlines transversal notions of inventory, format, scale, regulation and value within the pictorial representation. In the fashion of a personal album, each drawing, painting, photograph, model or building, evokes the mental world behind the couple's production. This volume could be read both as a collection of ideas, one after another, or as the same one that persists over time.

The long-standing debate over the origins of violence has resurfaced over the last two decades. There has been a proliferation of studies on violence, from both cross-cultural and ethnographic and prehistoric perspectives, based on a reading of archaeological and bioarchaeological records in a variety of territories and chronologies. The vast body of osteoarchaeological and architectural evidence reflects the presence of interpersonal violence among the first farmer groups throughout Europe, and, even earlier, between hunter-gatherer societies of the Mesolithic. The studies in Beyond War present the necessity of rethinking the concept of “violence” in archaeology. This overcomes the old conception that limits violence to its most evident expressions in war and intra- or extra-group conflict, opening up the debate on violence, which allows the advancement of knowledge of the social life and organization of prehistoric societies. Determining archaeological indicators to identify violent practices and to analyse their origin and causes is fundamental here, and represents the only way to find out when and under what historical conditions prehistoric societies began to organize themselves by exercising structural violence.

Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. e architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day. Concept & text by Jacques Herzog and photographs of Farnsworth House by Pierre de Meuron.

MCHAP: The Americas brings together leading architects and academics in a dialogue exploring the current state of architecture throughout the Americas and analyzes themes raised by the seven finalist projects (designed by Herzog & de Meuron, Álvaro Siza, Steven Holl Architects, OMA/ LMN – Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus, Smiljan Radić, Cristián Undurraga, Rafael Iglesia) from the inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize recognizing the best built works in the Americas from 2000 through 2013. The book includes contributions from the inaugural MCHAP jury (IITAC Dean Wiel Arets, Kenneth Frampton, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Dominique Perrault, Sarah Whiting) as well as essays by Fabrizio Gallanti, Pedro Alonso, Luis Castañeda, Felipe Correa, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Horacio Torrent, Molly Wright Steenson, Mimi Zeiger. Co-published with IITAC Press.

The result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology, Being the Mountain examines the relationship between architecture and the ground it occupies, an interaction so obvious-a building must touch the ground-that it often remains underexplored. Richly illustrated contributions by Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, and Jesús Vassallo revisit significant moments in architectural history that cast new light on the techniques and legacies of modernism, especially in settings like Mexico and California, where architects such as Ricardo Legorreta and John Lautner incorporated dramatic natural topography in their agendas. Additional essays investigate the role of the ground in the thought of Kenneth Frampton in the 1980s and Luis Moreno Mansilla in the 1990s, as well as point to important parallels between premodern land practices, twentieth-century art, and today's architecture.