A cross-disciplinary and critical inquiry into the forms and practices of assembly-making across histories and geographies, with contributions by artists, architects, activists, and scholars, explores the potential of assemblies to reimagine the way democracy is practiced.

What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?

Training for the Future is a training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to “pre-enact” alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

This publication extends Studio Experimentelles Design’s socially committed approach to design through conversations, lectures, research, debates, and project documentation. To critically examine design’s current practices, it asks questions of how designers work today, demanding a fundamental reorientation in the issues design addresses and the social actors it serves.

What ideas and memories do the oceans hold in their depth and reanimate in response to the trembling of earth’s ecosystems? How to escape the silos of research and inquiry that narrow and fragment the knowledge of the oceans? Asking new questions and using multiple registers of sensing can lead to a revitalization of the ways humans engage with the oceans at this precarious moment and create new pathways for reparative justice.

As the true urgency of the environmental crises we face becomes clear, architecture requires fundamental reinvention. The assumption that the building industry can only fulfill humanity’s needs with the irreversible exploitation of the environment, of people, and of the future needs to be reconsidered.

INTRA! INTRA! details an ambitious and provocative project that explores human and posthuman forms of agency within a context of spatial research. The project situates itself around developments in artificial intelligence and technical advances in the mapping and creation of nonhuman subjectivities in relation to the presence of human and nonhuman bodies.

The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.

In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it.

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition is a research project by architect and artist Michael Hieslmair and cultural historian Michael Zinganel that focuses on the transformation of the informal hubs, terminals, and nodes along Pan-European transport corridors in Eastern Europe and Vienna.

How do we design our cities when our most intimate experiences are incessantly tracked and our feelings become the base of new modes of production that prioritize the immaterial over the material?

In today’s increasingly digitalized and neoliberal societies, debates on universals and specifics have gained new momentum. This volume situates the contemporary return to universal claims and concepts in the fields of art, architecture, and urbanism, and highlights the interrelation of the specific and the universal in diverse historical situations from the nineteenth century to the present.

Para-Platforms investigates the social, spatial, and material reality of right-wing populism. Three case studies—presented in a symposium at the Gothenburg Design Festival in November 2017—form the core of this collection: journalist Hannes Grassegger on Trump and Brexit; architectural theorist Stephan Trüby on spaces of right-wing extremism in Germany; and Christina Varvia on Forensic Architecture’s investigation of the murder of Halit Yozgat. 

“Xeno” speaks to the turn away from “what is” toward “what could be”: the (as yet) unknown, the alien—having been employed in recent years through such speculative-political approaches as xenofeminism and xenopoetics.

This publication surveys the work of Italian critic, architect, and visual artist Gianni Pettena. Focusing on a rich ten-year period of production that began in the mid-sixties, it brings new attention to the artistic and intellectual practice of a figure known primarily as one of the main exponents of the Radical Architecture movement.

Organized by curator Pierre Bal-Blanc, the experimental architectural program “Project Phalanstère” consisted of a series of site-specific artworks in the Parisian suburbs.  This book extends the recollection and mental reconstruction of the artworks and reconstitutes the project’s political aims.

In 1987, Peter G. Rowe published his pioneering book Design Thinking. In it, he interrogated conceptual approaches to design in terms of both process and form. Thirty years later, in a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rowe offered a reappraisal of his earlier work, describing ways in which the capacities of the digital age have changed the way we perceive and understand creative problem-solving in architectural design.

With Sundry Modernism, Oraib Toukan presents an informal register of modernist Palestinian architecture—an assemblage of images and stories collected from 2013 to 2015 in the cities of Nablus, Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho.

Rethinking Density considers new perspectives related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory.

In this in-depth conversation with architectural theorist K. Michael Hays, Yoshi Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow-Wow reflect on representation, occupation, and the democracy of architecture. Explaining their belief in the behavioral capacities of humans, architecture, and nature, Tsukamoto and Kaijima reveal the generous spirit of their work, and the importance of pushing such capacities to their most yielding limits.

There are eight million stories of the origins of the digital in architecture, and this book brings together fourteen of them. The arguments address specific changes in ways of thinking about architecture, building, and cities, as well as the shifts in technology that resulted from these changes, marking both a capstone of Archaeology of the Digital and the start of an investigation into other beginnings of the digital in architecture.

This book examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

“It is impossible, but as you do not know it is impossible, it might be possible.”
—Lolita Jablonskiene, Director of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, commenting on previous attempts to organize a joint pavilion including all three Baltic States for the Venice Biennale

The second volume in the EP series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains.

Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward—geographically and materially—Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again.

“Miessen’s new book depicts in a challenging and projective manner the problem of politics in times of conceptual indeterminacy, where ‘participation’ of the civil society seems to become the salvation for the political mess we are in, especially in Europe.”

—Ulrike Guérot, political scientist, founder and director, European Democracy Lab, Berlin

This collection of unpublished or rare texts by Frederick Kiesler written between 1927 and 1957 focuses on Kiesler’s ideas on display, and juxtaposes works of contemporary artists with a number of original drawings by Kiesler.

In the seventh volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the Viennese émigré architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance in a contemporary world saturated with visual information.

An experiment with alternative forms of design, Public Design Support is also an intervention in urban life. This publication—which includes key project materials, scholarly essays, and significant historical texts—chronicles the aspirations, methods, and projects of the first four years of Public Design Support.

Benjamin H. Bratton’s kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture.

The Paris-based architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal opened their 2015 lecture at Harvard University with a manifesto: study and create an inventory of the existing situation; densify without compressing individual space; promote user mobility, access, choice; and most importantly, never demolish. Freedom of Use reflects on these core values to present a fluid narrative of Lacaton and Vassal’s oeuvre.

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts.  In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.

In 2011, the astounding personal effects of Entwistle’s grandfather, architect Clive Entwistle (1916–76), emerged from a Manhattan storeroom. This book welds together original text fragments and extensive visual material from the collection and Clive Entwistle’s years in Paris, London, Tangiers, and New York.

An extension of the collaboration between artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, and chef Antto Melasniemi. Including interviews, texts, images, and poems that illuminate the installation’s properties of self-sufficiency and as a new component of Tiravanija and Kamin Lertchaiprasert’s ongoing project “the land,” a self-sustaining artistic community near Chiang Mai, Thailand.

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

This publication examines the impact of Oskar Hansen within contemporary visual culture and the redefined role of the viewer since the 1960s. The book includes in-depth interviews with some of the most important protagonists of experimental art in Poland, who investigate the historical impact of the open form.

Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s. In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.”

Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth.

This book excavates the notion of forensis (Latin for “pertaining to the forum”) to designate the role of material forensics in articulating new notions of public truth. The condition of forensis is one in which aesthetic practices, new technologies, and architectural research methodologies bear upon the legal implications of political struggle, violent conflict, and climate change.

In the third book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Beatriz Colomina traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, with particular focus on Mies van der Rohe, and the play between the written and built work. This essay propels the manifesto form into the future, into an age where electronic media are the primary sites of debate, suggesting that new forms of manifesto are surely emerging along with new kinds of authorship, statement, exhibition, and debate.

Once described as “Italy gone Marxist,” Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. This guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country’s post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi.

Published on the occasion of her project at MUSAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in León (January–June 2013), this publication offers the first comprehensive survey on the work of Slovenian artist/architect Apolonija Šušteršič.

Based on the findings of an interdisciplinary research project, Transcultural Modernisms maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an architectural modernity manifested in various ways in housing projects in India, Israel, Morocco, and China.

An invitation to undertake an urgent architectural and political thought experiment: to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization; consequently, to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from that of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee.

The artist’s house is a prism through which to view not only the artistic practice of its inhabitant, but also to apprehend broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space. Based on a series of interviews and site visits with living artists about the role of their home in relation to their work, Kirsty Bell looks at the house as receptacle, vehicle, model, theater, or dream space.

Archaeology of the Digital delves into the genesis and establishment of digital tools for design conceptualization, visualization, and production at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Conceived as an object-based investigation of four pivotal projects that established distinct directions in architecture’s use of digital tools, the book highlights the dialogue between computer sciences, architecture and engineering that was at the core of these experiments.

While emphasizing the multiple correspondences between collectives and groups like Arte Povera, Archizoom, Superstudio, and figures such as Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini, this volume also highlights previously overlooked spaces, works, and performances.

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition.

Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts. The Cybermohalla project, which takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood), has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities.

Tecoh is a sprawling series of buildings designed by the artist Jorge Pardo deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far the artist’s most ambitious work to date. This book offers the only available glimpse of the project, as it was primarily conceived as a private residence.

Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists.

Encounters with art engage various conditions of interiority—whether through psychic spaces or specific physical environments, such as museums and private residences. Through diverse discursive modes—commissioned essays, conversations and talks, historical writings, and artistic projects—this anthology, the first CCS Readers volume, examines the poetics and politics of interior experience within the frame of contemporary art.

The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making.

This new artist book by Ruth Buchanan charts three narratives associated with the life of the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, which acts as an example of the tension between what is contained in libraries and how it is contained.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.

A Variation on Powers of Ten uses the opening picnic scene of Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten as score to guide ten discussions. The result of a research-based residency at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the publication includes four essays and ten interviews with researchers whose work relates to one of the magnitudes of ten of the 1968 IBM-commissioned film.

The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual.

Casco Issues is a magazine published by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory, which explores recurring issues that emerge from Casco’s program. The twelfth edition of Casco Issues, Generous Structures, is a playful enquiry into “playfulness” as a value in critical cultural practice. It positions alternative notions of playing against the grain of neoliberal ideologies of “lifelong learning” and “work as play.”

Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health examines changing political uses of the concept of care in neoliberal democracies and asks how artists, architects, and designers both contribute to and attempt to critique its social manifestations.

Bulletins of The Serving Library is the new biannual publication from Dexter Sinister, which continues where the final issue of their previous house journal DOT DOT DOT left off.

The artists Agnieszka Kurant and Aleksandra Wasilkowska are representing Poland at the 12th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice 2010, August 29 – November 21, 2010.

“Crimes against humanity,” especially genocide, have been excluded from amnesty since the Nuremburg Trials. On a cultural level, oblivion by decree becomes an obligation to remember. This reversal is well-intended, but it opens up critical questions: Can memory be permanently established? Is it possible to maintain it in a monument?

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support.

Europe, as a political space, is as conflictual as its constitution. It needs to be designed and negotiated. It is longing for an architecture of strategic encounters. Based on the curation of a space at the 2007 Lyon Biennial, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen has drawn together a group of people to lead conversations around alternative notions of participation, the clash of democratic heterogeneities, and what it means to live in Europe today.

Working at Copan collects interviews with workers and employees at Edifício Copan, a landmark modernist architecture in the center of São Paulo. Designed by Oscar Niemeyer and completed in 1966, it became the largest residential building in Latin America. As a historical building and symbol of “vertical utopia,” it embodies an era of radical political and economic changes within Brazilian society.

In several theoretical essays, dialogues on collaborative projects and reflections on his own work, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch explores the critical transformations of contemporary space and its effects on spatial practice.

This publication documents both the visionary and utopic framework underlying the creation of modern Turkey.

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally “unhomely” modern condition.