Offers a unique look into the mind and method of one of the most important architects working today. For nearly three decades, Eric Owen Moss Architects has been at work transforming the former industrial area of the Hayden Tract in Culver City, California into one of the most highly concentrated centers of architectural experimentation in the world. This book looks into the mind and method of one of the most important architects working today through a presentation of three schemes designed for a single site in the Hayden Tract since 1991

This book explains both the origin and evolution of Miralles' system of representation, from his time as a student at the Barcelona School of Architecture to the latest projects he designed with Benedetta Tagliabue, including the heroic period with Carme Pinós. With previously unpublished drawings from the architect, it demonstrates on a fundamental level how the evolution of representation runs parallel to that of architecture, thus illustrating its indissolubility and mutual interdependence. It is impossible to dissociate the evolution of the architecture of Enric Miralles from the development of his own system of representation. Beginning from a position inherited from his training at the Barcelona School of Architecture and his practice at the office of Viaplana-Piñón, where he acquired a liking for precision in drafting and a graphic style based exclusively on lines of the same thickness, Miralles soon developed a method defined by a customised use of orthographic projections, connected to a fragmented conception of the architectural plan and space itself.

"Formation is ideal and utopian thinking, whereas Transformation is the adaptation of the ideal to the real or existing conditions. Are the two mutually exclusive? Or do they exist in conversation, a constant back-and-forth, push-and-pull between the idealised and the pragmatic? This book examines the dialectical relation of Formation and Transformation in the creation of the city. Taking Rome as its central case study, it develops a contextual theory of urban development that incorporates Italian Renaissance, Baroque architecture, and classical history. Similarly, this book encourages the aspiring architectural student to consider the ramifications of practice and praxis. How can utopian thinking, and the actualised execution of that thinking, continue to operate in existing urban contexts? How can we relate the complexity of Roman urbanism to the role of Roman architecture in its urban context? This book manoeuvres through such difficult questions deftly, illuminating its points with a wide selection of colour images."--

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For long, spatial design has been seen as an action that could be performed by people and for people only. And today, even though some of the most meaningful projects of our times seem to challenge this concept, qualitative researches still struggle to emerge. This is why this book collects, reconstructs, and discusses archetypal models of posthuman architecture, from the cabin of Henry David Thoreau to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. To show how architectural, landscape, and industrial designers, be they professional practitioner or not, redefined their tools in order to meet the functional and symbolic needs of new and different kinds of subjects. All this in ten monographic architectural tales, thought to trace the evolution of an extended idea of coexistence between humans and other species and technologies.

Contains biographies of Senators, members of Congress, and the Judiciary. Also includes committee assignments, maps of Congressional districts, a directory of officials of executive agencies, addresses, telephone and fax numbers, web addresses, and other information.

Description: The Nanjing Charter is a statement of principles and practices for urbanism for "one person at a time" designed by "one architect at a time." This Charter is a riposte to the Athens Charter of 1933, which laid down the law for the modernist city. In a remarkable series of drawings for a four-part city in China, Moss tests the line between theory and practice with provocative results. Embracing this ambiguity, a number of "experts" in urban design, history, and theory provide commentary, arguing with Moss-and one another-about the meaning of this splendidly elusive work.

The Lawson-Westen House was designed for a couple who cook together and entertain frequently. The vertical funnel of space above the food preparation area that results, is a dominant form in the building's composition and one of the major ordering devices in the building's circulation system. It is also an extraordinarily complex geometric feat, relying on shifting grids and subtle subdivisions, revealing a geometrically-based order of Moss' own devising. Incomprehensible at a simple glance, the interior of the Lawson-Western House is exhilarating and mentally exhausting at the same time.

The definitive statement of Eric Owen Moss's design theory, Gnostic Architecture seeks to expand the discussion of contemporary architecture beyond debates over style or ideology. It does so, however, not by turning to conventional site analysis or fashionable intellectual trends for support but by emphasizing the architect's personal approach to the act of building. "Gnostic architecture," Moss says, "is not about faith in a movement, a methodology, a process, a technique, or technology. It is a strategy for keeping architecture in a perpetual state of motion." While Moss's gnostic approach keeps the practice of architecture on the move, it nevertheless focuses on fundamental questions that face all architects, questions that, as he says, separate architects from those who just happen to do architecture. Gnosticism allows the architect to ignore the contradictions and confusions encountered along the path that is the practice of architecture, so that he or she may rely on individual, internally derived design methods. The measure of an architect's integrity is thus dependent on his or her own internal compass and not on external factors. The book, with its unique, trapezoidal shape and suggestive visual character, gives uncanny material expression to Moss's gnosticism.

Based on documentation originating in the environmental sciences, history of science, philosophy and art, Architecture of Nature explores the materiality and the effects of the forces at play in the history of the earth through the architect's modes of seeing and techniques of representation. This book presents the research work developed for the past eight years in the Advanced Research graduate studio "Architecture of Nature/ Nature of Architecture," created and directed by Diana Agrest at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union. Architecture of Nature departs from the traditional approach to nature as a referent for architecture and reframes it as its object of study. The complex processes of generation and transformations of extreme natural phenomena such as glaciers, volcanoes, permafrost, and clouds are explored through unique drawings and models, confronting a scale of space and time that expands and transcends the established boundaries of the architectural discipline.