Amale Andraos - Böcker

An engaging, playfully designed survey of the small- and large-scale projects that define WORKac as one of the most progressive and optimistic architecture firms in practice todayThis book surveys the projects that define WORKac (WORK Architecture Company) as one of the most progressive and playful architecture firms in practice today.WORKac: We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge traces fifteen years of collaboration between architects Amale Andraos and Dan Wood. Structured as a conversation between the two partners, the book alternates between explorations of seminal projects and discussions framing a series of issues that are key to their work. The book follows the firm’s career over the course of three Five-Year Plans (Say Yes to Everything, Make No Medium-Sized Plans, Stuff the Envelope), examining the relationships between work and life, and the limits and opportunities of collaborative creativity and practice.WORKac has achieved international acclaim, winning design competitions in Russia, Gabon, and China, and in 2015 the practice was named the 2015 AIANY State Firm of the Year. Showcasing projects for MoMA PS1, Edible Schoolyards NYC, Anthropologie, Diane von Furstenberg, Creative Time, and many more, the book is a tasting menu of everything the practice embraces: never assuming what architecture “is” but always imagining together what it can become. From residential interiors to futuristic masterplans of ecological cities, WORKac samples the wide spectrum of their critical, witty, and dialogued work.

Moving beyond reductive notions of identity, myths of authenticity, fetishized traditionalism, or the constructed opposition of tradition and modernity, The Arab City: Architectural 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.With contributions from Ashraf Abdalla, Senan Abdelqader, Nadia Abu ElA-Haj, Su'ad Amiry, Amale Andraos, Mohammed al-Asad, George Arbid, Mohamed Elshahed, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Rania Ghosn, Saba Innab, Adrian Lahoud, Lila Abu Lughod, Ziad Jamaleddine, Ahmed Kanna, Bernard Khoury, Laura Kurgan, Ali Mangera, Reinhold Martin, Timothy Mitchell, Magda Mostafa, Nasser Rabbat, Hashim Sarkis, Felicity Scott, Hala Warde, Mark Wasiuta, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, and Gwendolyn Wright.

“49 Cities has been a point of reference for me... and it has had a significant impact on my thinking. It presents the city as a properly architectural problem.”—Stan Allen, architectThroughout history architects and planners have dreamed of “better” and different cities—more controllable, more defensible, more efficient, more monumental, more organic, taller, denser, sparser or greener. With every plan, radical visions were proposed, ones that embodied not only the desires but also, and more often, the fears and anxieties of their time. Today, with the failure of the suburban experiment and the looming end-of-the world predictions—from global warming and waste to post-peak oil energy crises and uncontrolled world urbanization—architects and urbanists find themselves once more at a crossroad, fertile for visionary thinking.49 Cities is a call to re-engage cities as the site of radical thinking and experimentation, moving beyond “green building” toward an embrace of ideas, scale, vision and common sense combined with delirious imagination in the pursuit of empowering questioning and re-invention.In addition to enhanced, high-quality reproductions and illustrations, this cloth-bound third edition includes an interview between Amale Andraos, Dan Wood, Joseph Grima, and Archigram’s Michael Webb, an essay on The Death and Life of Urban Planning by Sam Jacob (founder of FAT Architecture) and new interviews with culture-defining architects Chip Lord (Ant Farm) and Yona Friedman.