Rem Koolhaas As Scriptwriter

This book is the first survey of a new field in architecture theory: script writing. Rem Koolhaas as Scriptwriter explores the intersection of architecture, film, and text using the example of the working method of scriptwriter, Rem Koolhaas, and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). This book argues that Koolhaas formulates his approach to architecture on the basis of the “written sketch” or script, and questions its transformations into built environment in the oeuvre of OMA. Divided into two parts, the first part is a theoretical outline that explores the notion of scriptwriting in film. It provides in-depth insights into the definition and historical evolution of the script—as a blueprint, Hollywood script, avant-garde script, storyboard, the relation to auteur theory, and the difference between the script and scenario. It surveys the first original script for the Exodus, of the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture. The second part offers a unique perspective on the urban development of West Berlin, in which Koolhaas created a metropolitan script, or blueprint, that spans the period 1971–1989, from his first visit to Berlin to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architectural theory, urban history, and film studies.

The activities of Rem Koolhaas and his staff were widely discussed even before the foundation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975. Today, many contributions on the work of OMA can be found in the international architectural press, including Koolhaas’ own writings. The book contains about 150 selected texts—interviews, feature articles, essays, lead articles, reviews, letters, introductions, appraisals, and competition reports that have been compiled for the first time. This compilation not only provides a fresh and critical view of the oeuvre of one the most important contemporary architects, but also represents an account of the debate on architectural and urban design in recent decades.

Experimental Visualization in Architectural Design Media: How It Actually Works is a theoretical, practical, and interdisciplinary account of the tools used by architects and designers. The book focuses on the how these tools influence their ability to envision and craft the future experiential reality of buildings and environments. The book is structured around two parallel sets of questions. The first, concerns the effects of various media on the designer's understanding of their work in experiential terms. The media considered include the process of design-build, standard media such as scale model building, hand drawing, drafting, and extends into the now dominant digitally based design media of BIM, digital modeling, and emerging VR technologies, such as Enscape. The second line of questioning seeks patterns of use and other attributes designers deploy in practice to achieve an experiential and meaningful understanding of their work, with and through each medium. To answer these questions, the author provides a detailed assessment of the pros and cons (affordance and constraint) of each form of mediation, and a set of recommendations documenting how experienced designers enhance their visualization skills to support such experiential design. This work is interwoven with interdisciplinary consideration of technology, perception, media studies, history and bolstered by the direct experiences of design professionals. This book will be of interest to researchers working in the field of architecture and design, as well as practising architects, designers and students who are seeking guidance on how to effectively design and consider the experience of their future built environments.

A History of Artificially Intelligent Architecture: Case Studies from the USA, UK, Europe and Japan, 1949-1987 provides a comprehensive survey of architectural projects exhibiting intelligence since the Late First Century right up to the present day. Tracing the social, scientific and technological developments, this book analyses case studies from both conceived and executed architectural projects by Architects and Cyberneticians from the United States, United Kingdom, Europe and Japan from 1949-87. From the Late First Century through to the Seventeenth Century, the scientific endeavors of the Hero of Alexandria, Ramon Llull, Paracelsus, René Descartes, Jacques de Vaucanson, Pierre Jacquet-Droz, and Charles Babbage have been presented in which they attempted to review, analyse and conclude the notion of artificial intelligence. Coming to the Twenty-First Century and witnessing a period, particularly from 1949-87, where nothing had been constant, Architects and Cyberneticians whose architectural projects attempted to simulate intelligence include Cedric Price, Richard Saul Wurman, Nicholas Negroponte, Kenzo Tange, Arata Isozaki, Charles Eames, Ezra D. Ehrenkrantz, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano, and Gordon Pask respectively. This book asks: How have Polymaths, Architects and Cyberneticians simulated artificial intelligence in their scientific/architectural projects? Is it possible to define intelligence purely based on the history of architecture? Or, on a more extensive level, is it possible to view artificial intelligence originating from the history of architecture instead of computational paradigm? The transdisciplinarity of the book makes it of interest to researchers and students of technologically advanced architecture’s history, theory, and criticism, artificial intelligence, cybernetics, information and communications, urban and sustainable design, ergonomics, computer applications, and digital design and fabrication.

Liquid Architecture challenges the idea of architecture as a fixed, inert container and reconceptualises it as a body whose boundaries are rather blurred and ever-changing. This book moves away from form as the primary driver of spatial protocols and explores what the built environment might look like when viewed through the lenses of a ‘wet ontology’ that is attentive to fluidity, flows and territorial dynamism. A reconfiguration of architectural materials and authorship is thus considered, leading, in turn, to an exploration of the ethical dimensions of co-designing with natural systems (of various viscosities) through liquid paradigms. The book examines a set of principles for practice-led discoveries that incorporate hybrid, mixed media with the author’s intersubjective relationship with liquid matter. Drawing from qualitative-based analytical investigation models, the text allows comprehension of the liquid phenomena via material contextualisation of an ever-becoming research setting. Through a practical and theoretical engagement with the ontology of liquids, the reader is exposed to a range of design-led experiments and creative propositions, visualisation systems, construction, and testing of physical models that collectively translate into a series of novel insights for architectural agendas. This book will be of interest to architecture and design research students and academics because it advocates the need for a more symbiotic and resilient approach to natural systems, which could benefit from the integration of regenerating material flows into our buildings and urban settlements.

This book brings together essays by established and emerging scholars that discuss Pakistan, Turkey, and their diasporas in Europe. Together, the contributions show the scope of diverse artistic media, including architecture, painting, postcards, film, music, and literature, that has responded to the partitions of the twentieth century and the Muslim diasporas in Europe. Turkey and Pakistan have been subject to two of the largest compulsory population transfers of the twentieth century. They have also been the sites for large magnitudes of emigration during the second half of the twentieth century, creating influential diasporas in European cities such as London and Berlin. Discrimination has been both the cause and result of migration: while internal problems compelled citizens to emigrate from their countries, blatant discriminatory and ideological constructs shaped their experiences in their countries of arrival. Read together, the Partition emerges from the essays in Part I not as a pathology specific to the Balkans, Middle East, or South Asia, but as a central problematic of the new political realities of decolonization and nation formation. The essays in Part II demonstrate the layered histories and multiple migration paths that have shaped the experiences of Berliners and Londoners. This analysis furthers the study of modernism and migration across the borders of, not only the nation-state, but also class, race, and gender. As a result, this book will be of interest to a broad multidisciplinary academic audience including students and faculty, artists, architects and planners, as well as non-specialist general public interested in visual arts, architecture and urban literature.

This book examines the relationship between social practices and built space, focusing on current cooperative/participative and posthuman approaches to its production and management. From a social-cultural-and-ecological perspective, it explores the modes of engagement of all factors in the constitutional processes of inhabited space. Throughout this interdisciplinary collection, built space is reconsidered in the light of other schools of thought such as philosophy, anthropology, social sciences and political theories and practices. It covers new ground at conceptual, epistemic and methodological levels, focusing on inhabited space from within the framework of globalisation, biopolitics, cultural changes, environmental crisis and new technologies. Organised into three parts, Parts 1 and 2 focus on the role of architects in the emergence of a new ethos for habitation, as well as the modalities of the inclusion of differences in design, discussing the importance of participation and narrative at a theoretical and practical level in architecture. In the third part, the chapters delve into questions regarding the intersection of design, ecology and technoscience in a posthuman approach, which might support the inclusion of differences in design and the emergence of a new environmental ethos. Providing a stimulating landscape of arguments and challenges to new readings of architecture, society and the environment, this book will be of interest to researchers, students and professionals of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and philosophy.