Non Referential Architecture

Non-Referential Architecture is a manifesto on a new kind of architecture. Non-Referential Architecture presents a new framework for architecture in a world that is increasingly free of ideologies. We have left behind the values of multicultural postmodernity! Non-Referential Architecture offers unlimited possibilities for the liberated mind.

- This October issue of a+u is our second monograph dedicated to Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati. His architecture is cultural and not political. He builds and teaches in an independent way and he puts little emphasis on the application of methods - In this issue 15 projects are introduced, each accompanied by precise textured drawings and a text written by the architect, Valerio Olgiati - The issue explores Olgiati's buildings that are devoid of any origin, and therefore, 'non-referential' as described in this issue's essay ideated by Olgiati and written by Breitschmid This October issue of a+u is our second monograph dedicated to Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati. Back in our a+u 12:12 issue, Olgiati shared with us in an interview with Markus Breitschmidabout his theory on "making a building that is not arbitrary and is also not determined by an ideal". Consistent with his thinking, Olgiati's buildings are devoid of any origin, and therefore, "non-referential" as described in this issue's essay ideated by Olgiati and written by Breitschmid. To further build on this representation, a short essay by Go Hasegawa engages our senses to bring us closer to the presence of one of Olgiati's works - Villa Além (pp. 110-127). In this issue 15 projects are introduced, each accompanied by precise textured drawings and a text written by the architect. Text in English and Japanese.

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.

Most architectural standards references contain thousands of pages of details, overwhelmingly more than architects need to know to know on any given day. The updated and revised edition of Architecture Reference & Specification contains vital information that's essential to planning and executing architectural projects of all shapes and sizes, all in a format that is small enough to carry anywhere. It distills the data provided in standard architectural volumes and is an easy-to-use reference for the most indispensable--and most requested--types of architectural information.

Critique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.

More than 1,000 representations of the human figure in architectural drawings by architects ranging from Aalto to Zumthor, removed from their architectural context. Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and MOS present their rich findings on the human presence in architectural drawings not in any chronological or other linear order, but based on the convention of the encyclopedia, thus presenting (and perhaps deliberately condoning) surprise encounters made possible by the contingency created by alphabetical order.…. From the contemporary perspective of a pluralistic world, the form of the encyclopedia may be particularly apt to represent such a vast body of material as is presented here: defying any linear historical account or master narrative, it invites the reader to construct his or her own readings of the material by establishing relationships between individual drawings. —From the foreword by Martino Stierli Throughout history, across radically different movements in Western culture, the human figure appears and reappears, in multiple guises, to remind us, the observers, of architectural purpose and of our mutual position in the world.…This encyclopedia has enlarged or reduced all figures to the same approximate scale. Meredith, Sample, and MOS have gathered them here in an unprecedented, intoxicating way, like being at a fabulous party. —From the afterword by Raymund Ryan Architects draw buildings, and the buildings they draw are usually populated by representations of the human figure—drawn, copied, collaged, or inserted—most often to suggest scale. It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human form. This book collects more than 1,000 scale figures by 250 architects but presents them in a completely unexpected way: it removes them from their architectural context, displaying them on the page, buildingless, giving them lives of their own. They are presented not thematically or chronologically but encyclopedically, alphabetically by architect (Aalto to Zumthor). In serendipitous juxtapositions, the autonomous human figures appear and reappear, displaying endless variations of architecturally rendered human forms. Some architects' figures are casually scrawled; others are drawn carefully by hand or manipulated by Photoshop; some are collaged and pasted, others rendered in charcoal or watercolors. Leon Battista Alberti presents a trident-bearing god; the Ant Farm architecture group provides a naked John and Yoko; Archigram supplies its Air Hab Village with a photograph of a happy family. Without their architectural surroundings, the scale figures present themselves as architecture's refugees. They are the necessary but often overlooked reference points that give character to spaces imagined for but not yet occupied by humans. Here, they constitute a unique sourcebook and an architectural citizenry of their own.