De-/signing the Urban: Techno-genesis and the Urban Image

eds., Patrick Healy and Gerhard Bruyns, , DSD Publication Series, 010 Publishers, 2006

This  book represents the fruits of a year-long forum held at the Delft School of Design (DSD), a laboratory for research and experimentation in architecture, urbanism and technologies of construction at the TU Delft. The papers in this collection are by renowned visiting scholars, faculty members, and doctoral candidates who contributed to workshops, seminars and lectures given within a guiding framework entitled 'forms and relations'. They address issues which have come to increasingly shift our understanding of architecture and urbanism. Their authors offer insight on urban processes and the aesthetic challenge for contemporary design in relation to image, technology and life sciences.

In many of these contributions case studies link arms with debates on critique and praxis. Topics include the structure of the network city in terms of temporal manipulations; new frameworks for understanding the ecologies of urban communities as exemplified in a case study on Istanbul; the virtual emergence and resilience of contemporary urban place in the context of Beijing; the practice of the 'production of space' detailed with a study of Nowa Huta, Poland, a post-Communist city; a phenomenological account of habitat and the urban body presented in relation to Bogotá; and new approaches to the mapping and diagramming of cities developed from various perspectives. Several essays put into question principal arguments regarding the forms of material things and examine how the philosophies of forms have shaped aesthetic theory and scientific understanding within the disciplines of architecture and urbanism.

Contributions include papers by DSD faculty and researchers, as well as international scholars such as Karsten Harries, M. Christine Boyer and Viktor Kittlausz.

Crossover: Architecture, Urbanism & Technology

eds., Arie Graafland & Leslie Jaye Kavanaugh, DSD Publication Series, 010 Publishers, 2006

Crossover is the very first publication by the Delft School of Design (DSD), a laboratory for research and experimentation in architecture, urbanism and technologies of construction at the TU Delft. Its investigations cover a wide variety of subjects, from theoretical considerations and historical studies to urban and architectural practices and contemporary structural design. What they all have in common is the emerging condition of architectural and urban knowledge in both the academic context and professional practice. Since its inception in 2004, the DSD has developed a strategy or field of inquiry for mapping new means of approaching the complexity of the contemporary urban and architectural conditions. Traditional approaches are seen to be increasingly inadequate in the face of this complexity. This is in part due to the nature of the information age. Yet, on the other hand, new technologies offer us the challenge and the potential to represent our world in unprecedented ways.

Contributions include over 30 papers by TU Faculty of Architecture members and international writers and practitioners such as George Baird, M. Christine Boyer, Joan Busquets, Kees Christiaanse, Wouter Davidts, Chris Dercon, Hal Foster, Kari Jormakka, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Lars Lerup, Ákos Moravánsky, Anne Vernez Moudon, Michael Müller, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Nikos A. Salingaros, Kelly Shannon, Philip Ursprung and Frank R. Werner.

 

Click here to view this publication on Google Books.   

The Body in Architecture

ed., Deborah Hauptmann, DSD Publication Series, 010 Publishers, 2006

Issues surrounding the human body, with its intellectual and sensory capacities are recurring themes in architecture theory. Central to the project of humanism was the organizing of the body, its most spectacular achievement being the creation of a mathematics of seeing for the eye through perspective. Consequently, architectural discourse has dealt with a static concept of the body, an ideal 'whole', for which sensory and intellectual capacities do not correspond to present-day research in the sciences and aesthetic theories. Departing from these traditional notions, the theoretical disposition of the collection posits that in a contemporary reading on the very notion of 'body' it is necessary to understand that there are many bodies: individual, collective, mystical, corporate, institutional, animal, even the prosthetic body and the ethological body made up of movements of slowness and speed.
The Body in Architecture presents a collection of both theoretical essays and architecture, urban & film based projects. The projects presented in the collection advance new ways of envisaging the city ranging from analytic apparatuses of viewing to design experimentations. The section on film presents innovative interpretations of forms and relations which, in one example, mediates multiple and fluctuating perspectives of space and, in another case, works experimentally through the use of film-making procedures along with more traditional means of architectural representations to plot time-space relations through the mechanism of the 'camera eye'.

Contributions include over a dozen theoretical texts by DSD faculty and researchers and international scholars, practitioners and artists such as M. Christine Boyer, Karsten Harries, Anthony Vidler, Warren Neidich, Michael Muller, Scott Lash and an interview with Rem Koolhaas; and nine project contributions from among others, Stefano Boeri and the video artist Dryden Goodwin.

Spacefighter: The evolutionary city (game) - MVRDV/DSD - in collaboration with BERLAGE INSTITUTE, MIT and cThrough

eds., W Maas, A. Graafland, C Pinilla, A van Bilsen and B. Batstra, Actar Press, 2007

The Spacefighter is a cooperation of DSD together with Winy Maas. The project stems from the former project of The Thinktank; Problems & Perspectives and from MVRDV's Region Maker; Planning, politics and urban development.

We don‘t know exactly when technological innovations will happen. When did we imagine that we could fly? Whoever thought it was possible to directly communicate? For centuries the speed of communication was limited by the travelling speed of the messenger holding this message. And all of a sudden “instant” communication and trade were possible in the second half of the 19th century. When did we think the computer would appear, when the internet, when wireless connections, etcetera?

Yet there are models or suggestive scenarios for technological innovation: in moments of scarcity certain innovations can be imagined; in extrapolations of ‘demands’, new technologies can be suggested. Different societal models can lead to different approaches of technological changes: from ignoring, protecting to facilitating.

The Model and its Architecture

Patrick Healy, 010 Publishers, 2008

This study of The Model and its Architecture examines discussions in contemporary scientific practice  about model making, and the philosophical arguments of  Kuhn, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Nietzsche  and Plato on the model, paradigm, and simulacra.

The book examines the role of images and image-making in the foundation of knowledge and its practical implication which are then shown in contemporary architecture, with detailed analysis of some contemporary practices.

The book also encompasses a study of spatial sensibility in pre-modern Islamic architecture, and the role of creation, process and design in the Renaissance.

The 'mind-body-machine' triplex is examined in traditional architectural writing from Vitruvius to present day critical theory.  There is a salient demonstration of the detail and depth of the Plato/Deleuze confrontation which is of such significance for the model/simulacra debate.

The book is richly illustrated, and contains also a reference bibliography and suggestions for further study.

COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE - FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NOOPOLITICS

Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich , 010 Publishers, 2010

Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication & Information

Delft School of Design Series on Architecture and Urbanism

COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE addresses the question of how evolving modalities from biopolitics to noopolitics might be mapped upon the city under contemporary conditions of urbanization and globalization. This volume is motivated by theories such as ‘cognitive capitalism' and concepts such as ‘neural plasticity' - the former indicating the mutation of labor and capital vis-à-vis the apparatuses of production within the confines of neoliberal economies and the latter the idea of mutability, transformation and the inherent potential for change within the spheres of imagination and ideology. Noo-politics, most broadly understood as a power exerted over the life of the mind, reconfiguring perception, memory and attention, also implicates potential ways and means by which the neurobiological architecture is undergoing processes of evolution and reconfiguration. This volume shows how architecture and urban processes, procedures and products commingle to form complex systems, which, in the end, help produce novel forms of networks that empower the imagination and constitute the cultural landscape.

Cognitive Architecture rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, which, in contemporary culture, call for a new logic of representation. Moreover, it examines the manner in which information, with its non-hierarchical and distributed format, recursive looping and self-reflexivity, is contributing both to the sculpting of brain and production of mind. Architecture and urbanism inhabit the same spaces and temporalities that characterize these new modes of relations; their presence also possesses the potential to bend and contort the very systems in which they operate. This volume brings together renowned specialists in the areas of political and aesthetic philosophy, neuroscience, socio-cultural and architecture theory, visual and spatial theorists and practitioners, and architects; the contributions elucidate original ideas for thinking the city as a framework for possible gestations of noopolitics.

Contributors include, among others: 
Maurizio Lazzarato, John Rajchman, Sven-Olav Wallenstein, Keller Easterling, Elie During, Gabriel Rockhill, Boris Groys, Ina Blom, Lisa Blackman, Bruce Wexler, Yann Boutang, Charles Wolfe, John Protevi, among others; and architects: Philippe Raum, Andreas Angelidakis, Markus Meissen and Elizabeth Sikiaridi & Frans Vogelaar