(IN)FORMAL L.A. The Space of Politics

Book published by eVolo (2014)

Often portrayed as a confluence of cars and movies, this book traces another course to uncover Los Angeles' primal sources of creation - land and opportunity. Within the endless sprawl there reside ... [more ▼]

Often portrayed as a confluence of cars and movies, this book traces another course to uncover Los Angeles' primal sources of creation - land and opportunity. Within the endless sprawl there reside flurries of uncodified spatial configurations that no high-definition map or satellite image can accurately capture nor present. (IN)formal LA explores a range of unique spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of politics in Los Angeles. While this book articulates growing skepticism in current design discourse and education, it also provides a spatial awareness that is culturally rooted, socially responsive and vitally connected to the city. Composed of essays, photos, projects and interviews, (IN)formal LA embraces the quirky, celebrates the wide and embellishes the close range to expose the complex social organizations within this contemporary urban network. (IN)formal LA serves as both a textbook for classes in art and architecture, urban design, planning and theory in addition to responding to the increasing interest in the study of Los Angeles by scholars in other fields. The book provides an extended overview of the range and variety of urban issues that are critical to understanding present-day Los Angeles. [less ▲]

KELLER EASTERLING Subtraction

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning ... [more ▼]

Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning utopias or war, they are also targets of urbicide. Repeatable spatial products quickly make new construction obsolete; the powerful bulldoze the disenfranchised; buildings can radiate negative real estate values and cause their surroundings to topple to the ground. Demolition has even become a spectacular entertainment. Keller Easterling’s volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets and exhausted special landscapes. However, in failure, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry. These ebbs and flows—the appearance and disappearance of building—can be designed. Architects—trained to make the building machine lurch forward—may know something about how to put it into reverse. [less ▲]

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be. 2nd Istanbul Design Biennial

Book published by Hatje Cantz (2014)

The type of work that designers are tackling has grown exponentially—from the design of our buildings, streets, education, food, and health care to the design of our communications, political, and ... [more ▼]

The type of work that designers are tackling has grown exponentially—from the design of our buildings, streets, education, food, and health care to the design of our communications, political, and economic systems and networks. Throughout history, manifestos have functioned as statements of purpose, stimulating an exchange of ideas. In a contemporary context, curators Zoë Ryan and Meredith Carruthers use the Biennial as a forum for posing questions and generating dialogue. How can we reconsider the manifesto, harnessing its power to frame pertinent ideas while exploring the new forms it might take? This richly illustrated volume presents more than fifty international projects by designers working across disciplines as well as essays by leading thinkers in design. The projects and thoughts are open to interpretation but have the potential to instigate new modes of thought and outcomes, encouraging us all to pause and think about the future. [less ▲]

MARK VON SCHLEGELL Ickles, Etc.

Book published by Sternberg Press (2014)

It’s the late twenty-first century. Technological, environmental, and social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape forever. But in what remains of the international ... [more ▼]

It’s the late twenty-first century. Technological, environmental, and social catastrophes have changed the meanings of culture, nature, and landscape forever. But in what remains of the international urban scene, architecture still refuses to admit it hasn’t been modern since the early twentieth century. Enter Ickles, Etc. Helming Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architecture practice is Henries Ickles, “the man without self-concept.” Time and again Ickles offers practical solutions to the most impenetrable theoretical entanglements of art, architecture, and science in the 2090s. In the fifth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, Mark von Schlegell’s fusion of theory and fiction puts the SF back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical sci-fi stories written for various exhibitions, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET. Occupying New Los Angeles, visiting the Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam, and 1970s St. Louis, the practice finds selves embroiled in very spicy mustards indeed, redefining info- architecture and jettisoning the burdensome “self-concept” of the Western tradition in the process. Just don’t expect a visit to the ruins of Disney Hall! [less ▲]

The Trees For The Wood The Wood For The Trees

Book published by HEAD - Genève (2014)

Publication with a series of photographs taken in the Korean DMZ «Facing the impossibility of capturing the visual in a geography that is not only highly controlled, but exposed and condemned to a ... [more ▼]

Publication with a series of photographs taken in the Korean DMZ «Facing the impossibility of capturing the visual in a geography that is not only highly controlled, but exposed and condemned to a superimposed vista, an altered and forcefully prescribed act-of-seeing, a tarnished layer of the subjective ability to visualize, the work of Denise Bertschi rediscovers the immediate. Observing her work of a landscape that does not quite make sense, one slowly realizes that military intervention in this landscape of exception is not always clearly decipherable for what it is. Moreover, the very moment of realization of the single object or artifact in fact complicates the seemingly simple and straightforward unpacking of such mono-programmed geography – to the extent that the border-zone cannot only be understood as a territory of exception, but a man-made construct of absurdity that choreographs and overboosts staged realities of the cliché.» (Markus Miessen) [less ▲]

Koszmar partycypacji

Book published by Fundacja Bęc Zmiana (2014)

Nie ma tutaj porad, jak przebudować miasto ani nawet – jak to bywa w publikacjach Rema Koolhaasa czy Roberta Venturiego – jak je lepiej zrozumieć. Nie jest to książka o tym, co robić, ale o tym, czego ... [more ▼]

Nie ma tutaj porad, jak przebudować miasto ani nawet – jak to bywa w publikacjach Rema Koolhaasa czy Roberta Venturiego – jak je lepiej zrozumieć. Nie jest to książka o tym, co robić, ale o tym, czego unikać. Nie stanowi ona katalogu dobrych praktyk, jest raczej przewodnikiem po polu minowym. Miessen zaprasza na swoisty seans terapeutyczny, abyśmy sobie uświadomili, jak sami się oszukujemy i pozbawiamy zdolności do działania na rzecz realnej, a nie fasadowej zmiany. To książka szczególna. Autor mówi wprost to, co wielu z nas podskórnie przeczuwa: jesteśmy wciągani do współudziału w wielkiej ściemie. Pokazuje, jak zupełnie niepostrzeżenie pewien ideał przerodził się we własną karykaturę. Dlatego książka ta powinna zostać w Polsce starannie przeczytana. Potem można, a nawet należy się z nią rozstać. Ale trzeba zrobić to z właściwych powodów. (Z przedmowy Kacpra Pobłockiego) Translated by : Michał Choptiany [less ▲]

Der Standard

in Der Standard (2013)

GDI Impulse Der Aussenseiter

in GDI Impulse Der Aussenseiter (2013)

Evident in Advance

Book published by Sternberg Press (2013)

“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?," Wittgenstein asked himself in "On Certainty." Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence ... [more ▼]

“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?," Wittgenstein asked himself in "On Certainty." Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence of this world: a world as he found it. Hysterically reproduced paper maquettes of choreographed architecture, imprisoned within a clumsy, photographic frame, are abstract shelters for imagined and unspoken texts. Words are characters in performance of a world as a text. As a proposition, Farkas’s exhibition and publication for the Estonian Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 is "an absent book" and yet "the book to come." The installation is a piece of spatial, rhythmical writing; a quintet of interiors woven of autonomous though intertwined, poetic fragments of quasi-domestic setting: a library, a garden, an absent cinema, a spatial book, an obsession chamber (a locus of deranged architect and non-writer). "A story? No. No stories, never again," Farkas repeats after Maurice Blanchot, while rehearsing his art of ultimate denial and rejection. [less ▲]

Institutions by Artists

Book published by Fillip Editions (2013)

Artist-run initiatives in North America provide a space for the presentation and legitimization of experimental work and for the assertion of socially progressive and politically radical ideas and ... [more ▼]

Artist-run initiatives in North America provide a space for the presentation and legitimization of experimental work and for the assertion of socially progressive and politically radical ideas and questions. In making such spaces available, artist-run initiatives have operated alternately as flash points for heated debates and controversies, as well as platforms for social understanding. Institutions by Artists: Volume One presents a collection of texts addressing the performance and promise of contemporary global artist-run centres and initiatives within the historical contexts that saw their emergence. The texts address centres in Amman (Jordan), Brisbane (Australia), Vancouver (Canada), Zurich (Switzerland), Tokyo (Japan), and Barcelona (Spain), among others. The book is published as part of Fillip’s ongoing Folio Series, which presents anthologies of new and previously published essays on international contemporary art. [less ▲]