Marc Angelil – författare

Addis Ababa is one of the fastest transforming environments on the globe and a prototype of an emerging territory. What can architecture and urban design as disciplines contribute to such transformation? According to which criteria can processes of the kind encountered in Addis Ababa be evaluated? And, how can all of this be steered?

Aiming to identify sustainable strategies—rather than upholding an a priori vision of an ideal city—the publication acknowledges the heterogeneous conditions of urban territories. The book highlights questions of method and procedure that can be transferred to other ‘cities of change’. This revised edition covers recent developments, such as the increasing influence of China in African countries or the chances of high-density, low-rise developments.

A truly unique perspective on their own work: Swiss-American architectural studio agps, with offices in Zurich and Los Angeles, has delved deep into their archive and woven a visual thread of some 160 illustrations that guides readers through this new book. Literally Out of the Box, from archival box and model crates, models, model photos, small hand-drawn studies, visualisations, but also photographs of realised buildings have re-emerged, covering agps’ entire work of decades of practice.The images are organised according to 13 keywords: spatial configurations that characterise agps' core design concepts and summarise central elements of their ideas. At the same time, they are terms that define the formal presence of their designs. The result is a multifaceted and inspiring insight into the work of an international firm that proves just how important spatial constellations are for the formulation of good architecture. Essays by Sabine von Fischer as well as by Marc Angélil and Cary Siress, along with an index of all featured buildings and projects, round off this unique volume.Text in English and German.

Flux Redux is a book about design experiments undertaken at the Zurich and Los Angeles-based firm agps Architecture over the course of three decades. The story it tells addresses the evolution of a body of work relative to the evolution of environmental discourse, reflecting also on the shifting relations between technology and sustainability in architecture. The nine case studies from agps Architecture’s portfolio record changes in how architecture is thought about and how it is made.Around 500 illustrations in the book are supplemented with texts by Marc Angélil, one of the founders of agps, and Cary Siress, architect and professor at the Nanjing University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Further contributions are provided by Swiss structural engineer Ernst Hofmann and Margarete von Lupin, a Zurich-based scholar of design and media studies and lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts and University of Zurich. Additional texts by Rainer Hehl, architect and visiting professor at Technische Universität Berlin and Yokohama National University, and Alvaro Siza, one of the most distinguished architects of our time, round out this inspiring volume that also offers observations on architects’ never-ending task of trial and error to make each building a more sustainable agent of a larger environmental system.