Critical Essays on Architecture
Excerpt
Join us to discuss and preview Columbia in Manhattanville, a new book from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
Amale Andraos, Reinhold Martin, and Eric Washington, in conversation with Caitlin Blanchfield. 1pm on Nov 4, Ware Lounge, Avery Hall Columbia University
Home to the famed Cotton Club, Alexander Hamilton’s grange, the Manhattan Project, and a Studebaker factory, West Harlem has been an ever-transforming pocket of New York City. With the arrival of Columbia University’s Manhattanville expansion, it is now also a site of experimentation in the future of the twenty-first century university. Bringing together conversations with the architects and planners designing the Manhattanville campus, the educators who will inhabit its buildings, and essays from urban and architectural historians, this book both documents the making of Manhattanville and critically engages with the University’s own history of expansion.
The editors of five fresh publishing projects gathered at GSAPP on February 12, 2016, for a rousing conversation on the varying concerns, approaches, and stakes of contemporary architectural publications practice. Joining us were Anthony Acciavatti of Manifest; Shumi Bose and Jack Self of The Real Review; Alfie Koetter of Project; Jimenez Lai of the Treatise series; and Lily Wong of :.
A complete recording of the event is available here.
Projects currently underway include:
The Ordinary (ed. Enrique Walker), which traces the history of “books on cities” and their role in architectural practice through conversations with Denise Scott Brown on Learning from Las Vegas, Rem Koolhaas on Delirious New York, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto on Made in Tokyo
Environmental Communications: Contact High (eds. Mark Wasiuta and Marcos Sánchez), which documents and reflects on the work of this West Coast media collective, whose “environmental photography” aimed to alter architecture and transform the consciousness of architecture students through the institutional slide library
Blue Dunes (eds. Jesse Keenan and Claire Weisz), which chronicles an interdisciplinary team’s challenge to the existing conventions of resiliency design with their proposal for a series of barrier islands stretching from Long Island to New Jersey
The China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanisms (ed. Jeffrey Johnson), which explores the phenomenon of the megablock in China as it mutates in response to demands for hyper-density and gated communities
... and conference books based on the recent and upcoming conferences on Documentary Remains, Embodied Energy, and The African City
The Arab City: Architecture and Representation
Edited by Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi, with Caitlin Blanchfield
Moving beyond reductive notions of identity, myths of authenticity, fetishized traditionalism, or the constructed opposition of tradition and modernity, The Arab City: Architecture and Representation critically engages contemporary architectural and urban production in the Middle East.
Taking the "Arab City" and "Islamic Architecture" as sites of investigation rather than given categories, this book reframes the region's buildings, cities, and landscapes and broadens its architectural and urban canons. Arab cities are multifaceted places and sites of layered historical imaginaries; defined by regional and territorial economies, they bridge scales of production and political engagement. The essays collected here investigate cultural representation, the evolution of historical cities, contemporary architectural practices, emerging urban conditions, and responsive urban imaginaries in the Arab World.
From February 4-7, 2016, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City joined a stellar group of art and architecture publishers in Mexico City for the second annual Index Art Book Fair. Hosted at Museo Jumex, the fair brought together independent publishers from Mexico, South America, and Europe to share their work with new audiences and participate in an events program that included exhibitions, workshops, and panel discussions.
For a full list of participating publishers and programming, please see the Index website.
Excerpt
“I first became aware of Amaza Lee Meredith two or three years ago. I had no idea that there had been a black woman architect practicing in Virginia as early as the 1920s and ’30s. And to be a modernist within that context! I thought that was quite extraordinary...”
Mario Gooden speaks with Artforum about his recently-released Dark Space—which the magazine describes as “a subtle reading of a number of African American cultural institutions [and] a consideration of the politics they spatialize”—in an interview from December 2015.