The Petropolis Of Tomorrow

In recent years, Brazil has discovered vast quantities of petroleum deep within its territorial waters, inciting the construction of a series of cities along its coast and in the ocean. We could term these developments as Petropolises, or cities formed from resource extraction. The Petropolis of Tomorrow is a design and research project, originally undertaken at Rice University that examines the relationship between resource extraction and urban development in order to extract new templates for sustainable urbanism. Organized into three sections: Archipelago Urbanism, Harvesting Urbanism, and Logistical Urbanism, which consist of theoretical, technical, and photo articles as well as design proposals, The Petropolis of Tomorrow elucidates not only a vision for water-based urbanism of the floating frontier city, it also speculates on new methodologies for integrating infrastructure, landscape, urbanism and architecture within the larger spheres of economics, politics, and culture that implicate these disciplines. Contributions: Oriol Bohigas, Arnold Reijdorp and Casanova+Hernandez

New Investigations in Collective Form presents a group of design experiments by the design-research office THE OPEN WORKSHOP, that test how architecture can empower the diverse voices that make up the public realm and the environments in which they exist. Today, society continues to face urban challenges--from economic inequality to a progressively fragile natural environment--that, in order to be addressed, require us to come together in a moment when what we collectively value is increasingly difficult to locate. Organized into five themes for producing collectivity--Frameworks, Articulated Surfaces, the Living Archive, Re-Wiring States, and Commoning--the projects straddle the fine line between the individual and collective, informal, and formal, choice and control, impermanent and permanent.

Abandoned by her father and struggling under the shadow of her overbearing mother, Jewish-Siberian teen Sasha has a baby with a homeless alcoholic and becomes a mail-order bride as part of her quest to find her father in America.

This book argues that understanding global urbanism in the twenty-first century requires us to cast our gaze upon vast city-regions without an urban core.

Oil Spaces traces petroleum’s impact through a range of territories from across the world, showing how industrially drilled petroleum and its refined products have played a major role in transforming the built environment in ways that are often not visible or recognized. Over the past century and a half, industrially drilled petroleum has powered factories, built cities, and sustained nation-states. It has fueled ways of life and visions of progress, modernity, and disaster. In detailed international case studies, the contributors consider petroleum’s role in the built environment and the imagination. They study how petroleum and its infrastructure have served as a source of military conflict and political and economic power, inspiring efforts to create territories and reshape geographies and national boundaries. The authors trace ruptures and continuities between colonial and postcolonial frameworks, in locations as diverse as Sumatra, northeast China, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kuwait as well as heritage sites including former power stations in Italy and the port of Dunkirk, once a prime gateway through which petroleum entered Europe. By revealing petroleum’s role in organizing and imagining space globally, this book takes up a key task in imagining the possibilities of a post-oil future. It will be invaluable reading to scholars and students of architectural and urban history, planning, and geography of sustainable urban environments.

UNCHARTED / New Landscapes of Tourism has a two-fold objective: to explore new avenues of thought in design teaching, and to do so through research that deals with new architectural landscapes that are linked to tourism. Publishing the Undergraduate Final Projects from IE University's Undergraduate Architecture program responds to the desire to highlight the importance of design strategies in the process of reformulating the tourist offering within the framework of an open debate about new models for development. The infrastructural nature of architectural design imbues the architect's creative capacity with the healthy ambition of transforming the territory into new landscapes for touristic opportunities. These new landscapes have been categorized here as productive, urban, industrial, extreme and reversible. UNCHARTED includes additional contributions on architecture, tourism and teaching by José Miguel Iribas, Elia Zenghelis and Eleni Gigantes.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

Bracket [at Extremes] includes critical articles and unpublished design projects that investigate architecture, infrastructure and technology as they operate in conditions of imbalance, negotiate tipping points and test limit states. We are conditioned, as designers of the built environment, towards the organization of people, programs and movement. Indeed the history of modern urbanism, architecture and building science has been predicated on an anti-entropic notion of programmatic and social order. But are there scenarios in which a state of extremity or imbalance is productive? Bracket [at Extremes] seeks to understand what new spatial orders emerge in this liminal space. How might it be leveraged as an opportunity for invention? What are the limits of wilderness and control, of the natural and artificial, the real and the virtual? What new landscapes, networks, and urban models might emerge in the wake of destabilized economic, social and environmental conditions?