Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
Lisa Robertson
English
Coach House Books; Third Edition
2011
Hardcover 1,6 x 11,3 x 16,7 cm, 237 pages
ISBN 978-1552452325
How to describe a book about architecture which isn’t really about architecture at all? In this slim volume poet and essayist Lisa Robertson writes beautifully, leading the reader along a trail through metropolitan life in (mostly) the city of Vancouver. Now in its third edition, this collection of Robertson’s written work for various magazines, artists’ catalogs and institutions takes the lives – the human “soft architecture” of the city – in combination with surfaces, histories and geographies. From the history of the European blackberry plant to an indexing of public fountains, Robertson waxes lyrical on the vulnerable human part of the urban condition, whether venal, baroque, subtle or beautiful. This book is a treat, a way to escape into the ether of the stuff of place. (jb)
occasional work and seven walks from the office for soft architecture
Solution Series
Series edited by Ingo Niermann
2008 - ongoing
Solution 247–261: Love. Edited by Ingo Niermann
Solution 239–246: Finland: The Welfare Game. By Martti Kalliala with Jenna Sutela and Tuomas Toivonen
Solution 214–238: The Book of Japans. By Momus
Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel. Edited by Joshua Simon
Solution 186–195: Dubai Democracy. By Ingo Niermann
Solution 168–185: America. By Tirdad Zolghadr
Solution 1–10: Umbauland. By Ingo Niermann
Solution 11–167: The Book of Scotlands. By Momus
Solution 9: The Great Pyramid. Edited by Ingo Niermann, Jens Thiel
It sounds almost absurdly audacious to propose a list of capital-S “Solutions” to the world’s problems, be they economic, political or otherwise. That’s why Ingo Niermann’s Solution series endeavors to do so with solutions that themselves verge on absurdity. Niermann, a novelist, edits the series, and writes many of the texts himself. The others are outsourced to the type of experts who aren’t usually consulted about solving geopolitical problems: writers, artists, and architects. Each of the nine books in the series homes in on a particular geographic region, and each chapter corresponds to a specific proposal for fixing its most pressing issues. Solutions 186-195 address Dubai; 196-213 propose a “United States of Palestine-Israel”; 1-10 suggest the advent of “Umbauland,” a new and improved Germany. The proposals vacillate between the highly unlikely (a pyramid cemetery in the desert) and the startlingly feasible (welfare overhaul treated as a competitive sport). It’s this uncanny valley they create between science fiction and pragmatism – between irony and earnestness – that makes them so provocative. The most recent book in the series shifts its focus to a less tangible country – perhaps the world’s most vast and uncharted territory: Love. (ew)
Never Modern
Irenée Scalbert and 6a Architects; 1st edition, 2013
English
Paperback
176 pages, 64 b/w illustrations
14 x 21 cm
ISBN 978-3-906027-24-1
This book is an introduction to the work of 6a architects, one of the most interesting of the newer crop of UK practices. As opposed to a typical monograph, it has the look and feel of a novella or collection of poetry. And indeed the beautifully-written text inside – an essay by the architecture critic and historian Irénée Scalbert based on his conversations with the practice’s two directors, Tom Emerson and Stephanie MacDonald – reads more like a short-story: the narrative of a practice.
6a are generally seen as heirs-apparent to ‘The Whisperers’: the loose grouping of architects around Tony Fretton, including Caruso St John and Sergison Bates – with the work of Alison and Peter Smithson as their lodestar – an influence on their practice that is explored, alongside that of artist Richard Wentworth and the films of Jacques Tati.
Bricolage is taken here to be a guiding tactic behind 6a’s practice rather than any pre-ordained totalizing conceptual or theoretical position. And withal this is set against a keen sense of the passage of time, of a building’s history and future life. Whilst beginning by stating that the name 6a does “not presume an attitude”, by getting under the skin of the practice, this book identifies a strong sensibility to their work, making it seem akin to a manifesto-in-the-making, if a very readable and poetic one. (rw)
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