Pamphlet Architecture 29

Ambiguous Spaces, the newest installment in the Pamphlet Architecture series and a return to Pamphlet's own progressive roots, features the architectural fictions "The Pregnant Island" and "Nuclear Breeding." These two projects develop alternative urban concepts that address the challenges presented by the specific situations and social dynamics described in controversial locations such as the Brazilian Tucurui Dam, the Three Gorges Dam in China, and former English nuclear test sites. Using narrative techniques, fictional programs, ambiguous spaces, and building devices, Ambiguous Spaces explores people, communities, and even entire cities oppressed by a lack of freedom.

Ambiguous Spaces, the newest installment in the Pamphlet Architecture series and a return to Pamphlet's own progressive roots, features the architectural fictions "The Pregnant Island" and "Nuclear Breeding." These two projects develop alternative urban concepts that address the challenges presented by the specific situations and social dynamicsdescribed in controversial locations such as the Brazilian Tucurui Dam, the Three Gorges Dam in China, and former English nuclear test sites. Using narrative techniques, fictional programs, ambiguous spaces, and building devices, AmbiguousSpaces explores people, communities, and even entire cities oppressed by a lack of freedom.

Conceived as a set of "Flexible Standards," this new addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series proposes a new way of thinking about roadways in cities. By reexamining the urban expressway as a political, physical, and mythic manifestation of American culture, this compelling pamphlet serves as a design manual for planners, a novel atlas for drivers, and a collection of proposals that reaffirm the role of architecture in urban planning. The thirteen projects take as their subject a site of contested transportation infrastructure -- the Sheridan Expressway. By proposing new typologies for this site, these studies seek to mediate the spaces in the city where local and regional meet. Referencing the introduction of the modern parkway into the Bronx, the grading of the Central Park transverse roads, and other works that have redefined the relationship between parks and roads, author Jonathan Solomon suggests a system by which large projects might again be built in American cities.

Pamphlet Architecture was begun in 1977 by William Stout and Steven Holl as an independent vehicle for dialogue among architects, and has become a popular venue for publishing the works and thoughts of a younger generation of architects. Small in scale, low in price, but large in impact, these books present and disseminate new and innovative theories. The modest format of the books in the Pamphlet Architecture Series belies the importance and magnitude of the ideas within.

This newest addition to the Pamphlet Architecture series, long admired for its willingness to propose architectural solutions to challenging problems addresses the issue of rising sea levels with an interrogation of the concept of floating cities, a field of inquiry gaining increasing relevance and urgency with the impending reality of climate change. The authors explore notions of buoyancy and the amphibious through a typology based on human response and adaptation, to one of the hosting pressing issues of our day.

The Pamphlet Architecture series was founded in 1978 by architects Steven Holl and William Stout as a venue for publishing the works, thoughts, and theory of a new generation of architects. Now in its third decade, this award-winning series continues to build upon its legacy by promoting individual points of view with all of their raw and rough-edged spontaneity. In 1998 we published a hardcover volume collecting the first ten issues of Pamphlet Architecture. We areproud to present the next nine issues in the companion volume Pamphlet Architecture 11-20. This graphically stunning and theoretically stimulating collection includes the early work of many of today's best-knownarchitects, as well as an introduction by Steven Holl.