Alejandro Zaera-Polo's Books

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

By: Albena Yaneva,Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

By: Albena Yaneva,Alejandro Zaera-Polo

The scale of ecological crises made us realize that every kind of politics has always been cosmopolitics, politics of a cosmos. Cosmos embraces everything, including the multifarious natural and material entities that make humans act. The book examines cosmopolitics in its relation to design practice. Abandoning the modernist idea of nature as being external to the human experience - a nature that can be mastered by engineers and scientists from outside, the cosmpolitical thinking offers designers to embark in an active process of manipulating and reworking nature ’from within.’ To engage in cosmopolitics, this book argues, means to redesign, create, instigate, and compose every single feature of our common experience. In the light of this new understanding of nature, we set the questions: What is the role of design if nature is no longer salient enough to provide a background for human activities? How can we foster designers’ own force and make present what causes designers to think, feel, and act? How do designers make explicit the connection of humans to a variety of entities with different ontology: rivers, species, particles, materials and forces? How do they redefine political order by bringing together stars, prions and people? In effect, how should we understand design practice in its relation to the material and the living world? In this volume, anthropologists, science studies scholars, political scientists and sociologists rethink together the meaning of cosmopolitics for design. At the same time designers, architects and artists engage with the cosmopolitical question in trying to imagine the future of architectural and urban design. The book contains original empirical chapters and a number of revealing interviews with artists and designers whose practices set examples of ’cosmopolitically correct design’.

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Page Count

409

Publisher

Routledge

Published Date

ISBN 10

1134809018

ISBN 13

9781134809011

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo,Jeffrey Anderson

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The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo,Jeffrey Anderson

The Ecologies of the Envelope theorizes the building envelope as a literal embodiment of the social, political, technological, and economic contingencies which have become embedded within it over the last century, analyzing the historical lineages, heroes and villains that helped define the complex material ecologies we see within the envelope today. While the façade is one of the most thoroughly theorized elements of architecture, it is also one of the most questioned since the end of the 19th century. Within the discipline of architecture, the traditional understanding of the façade focuses primarily on semiotic and compositional operations (such as proportional laws and linguistic codes), which are deployed on the building's surface. In contrast to this, our material and environmental theory of the envelope proposes that the exponential development of building technologies since the mid-19th century, coupled with new techniques of management and regulation, have diminished the compositional and ornamental capacities of the envelope in favor of material, quantitative, and technical performances. Rather than producing a stylistic analysis of the façade, we investigate the historical lineages of the performances, components, assembly types, and material entanglements that constitute the contemporary building envelope.

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Page Count

498

Publisher

Actar D, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

163840948X

ISBN 13

9781638409489

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo,Jeffrey Anderson

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The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

A Material History and Theory of Architectural Surfaces

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo,Jeffrey Anderson

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Page Count

498

Publisher

Actar D, Inc.

Published Date

ISBN 10

163840948X

ISBN 13

9781638409489

The Sniper's Log

Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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The Sniper's Log

Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X

By: Alejandro Zaera-Polo

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Page Count

592

Publisher

Actarbirkhauser

Published Date

ISBN 10

8492861223

ISBN 13

9788492861224

The Articulate Surface

Ornament and Technology in Contemporary Architecture

By: Ben Pell

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The Articulate Surface

Ornament and Technology in Contemporary Architecture

By: Ben Pell

Ornament is currently acquiring a renewed status in architecture. As contemporary technologies of design and fabrication introduce unprecedented opportunities to intertwine the constructive logics and expressive articulations of buildings, ornament has re-emerged as a means to explore the interactions between function and decoration, volume and surface, structure and envelope. This book gives a systematic account of the technologies employed in the production of ornament and the strategies of its application today, examining a range of international built examples. Architects with particularly advanced approaches to the question of ornament contribute reports and reflections on their experiences: Sam Jacob of Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT), London; Andreas Hild of Hild und K Architekten, Munich; and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects (FOA), London.

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Page Count

200

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter

Published Date

ISBN 10

3034612168

ISBN 13

9783034612166

Book's by Alejandro Zaera-Polo

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

What Is Cosmopolitical Design? Design, Nature and the Built Environment

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

The Ecologies of the Building Envelope

The Sniper's Log

The Sniper's Log

The Articulate Surface

The Articulate Surface

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