Introduced by an essay about the vague contradiction between intentionality and chance, necessity and accident, reason and futility, authorship and anonymity, the book presents a selection of images that inform Pezo von Ellrichshausen’s cross production between art, architecture and academia. Each page contains a single picture and a brief caption describing it. Beyond a comprehensive depiction of the individual works, the monograph underlines transversal notions of inventory, format, scale, regulation and value within the pictorial representation. In the fashion of a personal album, each drawing, painting, photograph, model or building, evokes the mental world behind the couple's production. This volume could be read both as a collection of ideas, one after another, or as the same one that persists over time.

The result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology, Being the Mountain examines the relationship between architecture and the ground it occupies, an interaction so obvious-a building must touch the ground-that it often remains underexplored. Richly illustrated contributions by Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, and Jesús Vassallo revisit significant moments in architectural history that cast new light on the techniques and legacies of modernism, especially in settings like Mexico and California, where architects such as Ricardo Legorreta and John Lautner incorporated dramatic natural topography in their agendas. Additional essays investigate the role of the ground in the thought of Kenneth Frampton in the 1980s and Luis Moreno Mansilla in the 1990s, as well as point to important parallels between premodern land practices, twentieth-century art, and today's architecture.

The long-standing debate over the origins of violence has resurfaced over the last two decades. There has been a proliferation of studies on violence, from both cross-cultural and ethnographic and prehistoric perspectives, based on a reading of archaeological and bioarchaeological records in a variety of territories and chronologies. The vast body of osteoarchaeological and architectural evidence reflects the presence of interpersonal violence among the first farmer groups throughout Europe, and, even earlier, between hunter-gatherer societies of the Mesolithic. The studies in Beyond War present the necessity of rethinking the concept of “violence” in archaeology. This overcomes the old conception that limits violence to its most evident expressions in war and intra- or extra-group conflict, opening up the debate on violence, which allows the advancement of knowledge of the social life and organization of prehistoric societies. Determining archaeological indicators to identify violent practices and to analyse their origin and causes is fundamental here, and represents the only way to find out when and under what historical conditions prehistoric societies began to organize themselves by exercising structural violence.

Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. e architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day. Concept & text by Jacques Herzog and photographs of Farnsworth House by Pierre de Meuron.

No one demands that people move to cities; people tend to do so, on their own. People choose to move to cities for opportunity. Such choices are often made unconsciously, as they are based on rules, traditions, and local communities–or a combination of all three. Un-Conscious-City explores and unravels Dutch architect Wiel Arets’ kaleidoscopic viewpoints on the ways the collective, unconscious decisions taken by the world’s citizens throughout time–a process that remains invisible to the naked eye–are now working to transform and shift the physical, sensory, and emotional experiences of human beings, as they navigate and live in today’s metropolises as well as the countryside. People tend to only belong to one religion, one society, or one club–which completely defines their existence. One day most human beings will live in a global­nomadic-urban-condition; this will soon be amplified to unknown heights. Un-Conscious-City raises questions, predicaments, and ideals regarding the future of our cities, while recognizing their limitations. Wiel Arets–renowned architect, writer, and thinker–identifies this condition as the Un-Conscious-City.

"This book documents a unique experience of a journey by Alvaro Siza Vieira, Vincent Mentzel and Kenneth Frampton to the early work of Siza in Porto. The book includes a conversation between Kenneth Frampton and Alvaro Siza and photos by Vincent Mentzel."--Site web de l'éditeur.

Dirk Denison reflects on the diverse influences that have shaped his practice over 30 years in a volume featuring 10 remarkable houses designed in a broad range of modernist vocabularies ? each finely tuned to its site and occupants. Taking the form of an in-depth conversation between architect and educator Dirk Denison and journalist Fred A. Bernstein, this volume chronicles Denison?s childhood in Detroit, travels and early encounters with the arts and architecture, and his education at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. For design professionals and students of architecture, 'Dirk Denison 10 Houses' draws attention to the manifold ways in which life experiences at all scales nurture and shape a career in the field, but the book is an engaging read for anyone interested in the gratifying process of building one?s own home.