Sélection « En vitrine » – Voici les huit recommandations de lecture des mois de JUIN/JUILLET
De la part de la Librairie du CCA :
« Quelques perspectives actuelles sur nos espaces passés, présents, alternatifs et futurs. Voici huit recommandations que vous trouverez dans notre librairie.
Amancio Williams. Claudio Williams, Amancio Williams Studio, 1990
A rare publication produced by the studio of Amancio Williams in 1990. This book offers a practically complete vision of his work, where you can find everything from objects, furniture, boats, interiors and monuments to more well-known projects. With texts in Spanish.
2G 79 : Studio Muoto. Walter König, 2020
This issue of 2G focuses on the work of Paris-based architectural firm Studio Muoto—meaning “form” in Finnish. Working in architecture, urbanism, design and scientific research, Studio Muoto creates multifunctional minimalist structures made with rough materials. With contributing essays by Fabrizio Gallanti and Gauthier Herrmann.
Grundkurs: What is architecture about? Pier Paolo Tamburelli, MACK 2023
In this collection of idiosyncratic lessons, architect and teacher Pier Paolo Tamburelli engages with the very foundations of architecture, proposing a series of new and open-ended perspectives on how we build the world. Developed for the ‘Grundkurs’, or ‘basic course’, at Vienna Technical University, Tamburelli’s lessons are presented through the annotated sketches that form the basis of his lectures – variously rough and precise, sarcastic and sincere, and always uniquely expressive. This volume is a rich visual sourcebook of architectural ideas that form an accessible and discursive introduction to the discipline – one which pauses on the road to grand theories to learn from the intuitive processes of notetaking, drawing, and association.
Tamburelli’s lessons are based around a series of dialectic couples, including Roof/Wall, Shelter/Memory, and Language/Action. The pairs are experimental and often provocative, offering a framework to be used to climb in the direction of architecture. Tamburelli trusts in the capacity of images to suspend the restraints of more rigorous theoretical approaches, embraces the flexible wisdom of the note, and relishes the intrigue of the cryptic messages we leave for ourselves. Reproduced here in their entirety, these eight lessons offer countless routes towards, through, and around architecture, providing newcomers and experts alike with an intimate and refreshing encounter with a millennia-old discipline.
John Hejduk: Building characters. Luca Cardani, Letteraventidue 2023
John Hejduk is known to critics as a theoretician, teacher, poet and draftsman of extraordinary architecture, but he was above all an architect and builder in the deepest way. His built architectures have been rarely investigated but they manifest that his work finds its purpose in the act of building. This book attempts to give a complete interpretation of his built work, which includes a number of buildings and architectural installations created between 1980 and 2000, through the analysis of archival documents, analytical drawings and an extensive photographic apparatus, showing the tangible value of Hejduk’s thought on architecture and the important role played by his works in the transformation of the city.
Visible invisible. Bap!2. Éditions Polygone, 2022
Face à l’urgence écologique, comment faire émerger de nouvelles formes architecturales à partir des matériaux et énergies disponibles localement ? Si un terroir peut être défini comme la rencontre d’un sol, d’un climat et de savoir-faire, l’architecture est de façon similaire la mise en forme, au travers d’une culture particulière, de matières et de climats intérieurs, des ressources visibles et invisibles. Cette publication retrace l’exposition Visible, Invisible qui s’est tenue dans le cadre de la seconde édition de la Biennale d’Architecture et de Paysage d’Île-de-France. Elle dévoile un projet graphique et une structure éditoriale révélant les accointances entre les textes et les projets présentés, puis les événements qui s’y sont déroulés (workshops, débats, tables rondes, etc.).
Modern architecture : A planetary warming history. Hans Ibelings, Architecture Observer, 2023
Modern architecture is inseparably linked with the Industrial Revolution. Industrially manufactured materials such as iron, steel, reinforced concrete, glass, asbestos, and later also plastics, have helped to make architecture modern. The Industrial Revolution also set planetary warming in motion. Thus, it is not far-fetched to claim that there are also correlations between modern architecture and planetary warming.
This book is a rough sketch of a proposed history of modern architecture since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It aims to break away from the established neural networks of the profession’s collective memory of how modern architecture’s history has unfolded, and offers the beginning of a rewiring: by introducing new actors, and highlighting ideas and projects that deal with climate and environment, while relegating some of the usual stars of modernism and postmodernism to the background.
L’Aventure du Whole Earth Catalogue. Caroline Maniaque. Les Productions de Effa, 2021
Cette publication raconte la naissance, le développement et la fin d’un magazine qui parut cinq fois entre le début et la fin des années 1970, se diffusa hors de tout cadre institutionnel et économique traditionnel, se vendit à un million d’exemplaires aux États-Unis et en Europe. Whole Earth Catalog informait très concrètement ses lecteurs de l’actualité des recherches de la contre-culture américaine pour vivre différemment : comment construire un dôme géodésique, fabriquer son compost ou concevoir une architecture solaire, ainsi que des dernières publications dans les domaines pratique ou scientifique. La transformation du mode de vie était abordée également sur un plan personnel, avec par exemple l’intérêt pour le yoga qui apparaît en filigrane. Le catalogue associait également démarche écologique, sensibilité hippie et intérêt pour la cybernétique. Paradoxalement, il annonçait ainsi la transformation de nos sociétés par les nouvelles technologies de l’information.
Radical sympathy. Brandon LaBelle, Errant Bodies Press, 2022
Questions of interdependency and care have gained broader urgency within today’s planetary environment. From the pressing need to work at post-carbon futures to the challenges surrounding our covid-19 realities, understandings of care-work and co-existence require ever-greater imagination and creative engagement. As cultural communities reorient their practices and educational institutions test out other methods in the context of the pandemic, a new sense for solidarity and critical hope are gaining traction. This includes ways of attending to the politics of care, the systems of neoliberal extraction and their toxic projects, and the uneven power relations through which solidarity must work.
Radical Sympathy gathers a diversity of voices and perspectives with the aim of capturing methods and expressions of care and communal effort, as well as theoretical reflections on sympathy as a position of caring-for. While sympathy may carry connotations of charity, as that which acts from a distance, the publication underscores sympathy as what also enables forms of action and imagination.