Experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice.

In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice. This book explores and documents these radical pedagogies and efforts to defy architecture’s status quo.

The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of “unlearning” under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for “every body,” including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture’s role in the new century.

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Is what is below the surface so fatal?

Becky posed this question in her piece, which speaks to a lot of what we’re trying to capture here in Drown, Good Drown.

In their own way, the writers expressed consciousness and subconsciousness immersed in empathy, stories with sentiment and hints of humor, sadness, and joy. These writings and drawings were made by us ArtCenter College of Design students in the summer of 2022.

Actually, Megan hates summer. As Megan says, “summer’s role is to forever choke and steal what life came after winter.”

She thinks June is okay.

Rachael gave us a downpour of thoughts, an imagistic stream of consciousness straight to our souls, and Sophia spoke in a tender melodic tone provoking a sense of coziness and the tension of intimacy.

While Ibrahim imagined life undersea as a telepathic realm of shadow twins.

Along with Constant’s honesty and vulnerability, we also got to share his quiet but bold humor reflected in his story.

We almost named the publication Esther Williams because of Natalia’s misfit mermaid tale, which inspired us to be who we really are.

My story of reminiscing leads to the end of the book leaving softhearted fragrances of nostalgia.

Me. Cringe.

Drown, Good Drown, I think, is most importantly a collaboration. We’re all so different. You’ll see. But our different perspectives are reflected in drawings and stories. We mish and mash our creative minds for a submersive experience for the reader more than any of us could accomplish on our own.

So we invite you to pour yourself a cool water on the rocks, snorkel through our creative minds, and drown in the world of our stories.

Trust me; it will be a good drown.

– The Editor

*
Type+Authorship is a multi-disciplinary class taught at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. We conjure, discuss, and immediately write our way into a book of collective thematic interest and function within an aggregate studio environment where we design and produce a publication.

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A tool for students and professional designers.

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2nd Edition

A speculative book reflecting on design and architecture centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Play) organised by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book aims to approach issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

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Harvard Design Magazine 45 – Into the Woods | Spring/summer 2018

To go “into the woods” is to enter both nightmare and wonderment, chaos and serenity. The woods are the threatening realm of wolves and witches, yet also a space of peace and introspection. They confound and illuminate, disorient and clarify, endanger and protect. The woods are where we “come to our senses,” and where we embrace our wilder selves. They are a space of complex life forms and ecological destruction; of growth and decay; of fantasy and ritual; of secrets and control; of hiding and? the hidden.

The woods are often framed as a nonurban place; an entity separate from, and opposed to, the city—even the world; an eternal refuge that can smoothly be entered and exited, gone into and back out of. But how much of our woods still remains to go into—and on what terms?

As designers, we encounter the woods as building site, as obstacle, and as resource—territory to be cleared, but also to be preserved, cultivated, tamed, or simulated. Wood itself—along with its products like lumber, wood pulp, silvichemicals, and charcoal—fuel the building industry and feed architecture. In a period of accelerated climate change, the planet’s woods are disappearing, burning up, threatening and threatened by human existence. How can we holistically address the woods and its ecosystems, and the life and life-giving power they contain?

This issue of Harvard Design Magazine treks into the woods to come to terms with its precarious status as habitat and resource, and to challenge assumptions about wood as material. We won’t be “out of the woods”—this looping conundrum—any time soon, even if the woods as we once knew it, and might still imagine it, has ceased to exist. At the intersection of wilderness, urbanization, and myth, “Into the Woods” embraces contradiction, challenges destruction, and revisits our roots, biological and architectural alike.

“Into the Woods” combines contributions by noted critics and theorists including Milica Topalovic, Lawrence Buell, T. J. Demos, Rosetta Elkin, Jack Halberstam, and Maria Tatar; practitioners Dogma, Alexander Brodsky, Dilip Da Cunha, Eelco Hooftman, and Paulo Tavares; as well as artists Tang Chang, Maria Thereza Alves, Janet Cardiff, and Bas Princen; anthropologists Anna Tsing and Eduardo Kohn; and philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

Harvard Design Magazine 45 is edited by Jennifer Sigler and Leah Whitman-Salkin, and published by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD).

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published.

This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx’s lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publication sheds light on Burle Marx’s distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as “the real art in living.”

  

Faraway, So Close
25th Biennial of Design, Ljubljana
Published by Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) & Motto Books

Faraway, So Close presents seven investigations through the concept of time – time as a key with which to identify new patterns that can connect design with the phenomenological world and the myriad consequences of such an interrelation.

Acting in various dispersed territories across Slovenia, Faraway, So Close seeks out “low-intensity” places in which to test the possibility of changing our notions of economic progress and which could work toward and in the name of such fundamental aspirations as stability, community and a better future. Design is, or at least can be, a vehicle for exploring basic new metaphors. It is a dialogic procedure. This break from the strictly disciplinary approach of design creates space for an expansive investigation of various interdisciplinary intersections and engagement with a markedly different production of knowledge.

By presenting the seven investigative episodes developed within BIO 25 and their interchange with both local archives and broader paradigms, the book works to explore ways of changing the goals of design culture; of turning away from the urgent need to solve problems and instead opening up new frontiers for observation and experimentation, to look at our inhabited and habitable world for what it is and what it is becoming, and not simply what we think it should, ideally, be.

Contributions by
Nabil Ahmed
Andrea Branzi
Tony Côme
Brendan Cormier
matali crasset
Domitilla Dardi
Odo Fioravanti
Didier Fiúza Faustino
Studio Formafantasma
Thomas Geisler
Rory Hyde
Alexandra Midal
mischer’traxler studio
Dimitrij Mlekuž
Point Supreme Architects
Emanuele Quinz
Renata Salecl
Anna-Sophie Springer
Studio Folder
James Westcott
Elia Zenghelis
and many others

Photographic Essays by
Delfino Sisto Legnani
and Marco Cappelletti

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Tools collection and pictures by

Harvard Design Magazine #43

The more stuff we accumulate, the more space we need to store it all. Vast portions of the landscape are claimed and governed by spaces of storage, their maintenance, and the goods that move through them—or remain buried within them indefinitely.
This issue of Harvard Design Magazine investigates and unpacks the contents, containers, and systems of storage that organize our world.
Storage is the aggregation and containment of the material and immaterial stuff of culture; but also the safeguarding—or hoarding—of energy and tools for some imagined future purpose. How does all this stuff mask or overcompensate for economic and ecological bankruptcy? Is storage about greed or need? Storage, perhaps, is everything we can live without but insist on living with.
“Shelf Life” explores what’s inside the box (shed, tank, urn, vault, crypt, crate, case, pot, bag, vat, morgue, safe, bin, archive, warehouse, cabinet, cellar, cemetery, depository, locker, freezer, landfill, library). Even as we attempt to reduce and recycle, the stuff that we dispose of also needs to be stored. Where do we put it? Our planet is now a saturated receptacle. This warehouse is full, and we’re all inside it.

Edited by Jennifer Sigler & Leah Whitman-Salkin.
Published by Harvard
Language: English
Pages: 199
Size: 30.5 x 22 cm
Weight: 810 g
Binding: Softcover
ISBN: 074470577119

€15.00

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TUNICA presents an art of Individuals. We stand for the reality of the present.
Absolute: The new egos and the melodrama of modernity is the Exploitation of vulgarity, the Improvement of life…
TUNICA is created for this timeless fundamental Artist that exists in everybody.
Unconditional: Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people.
TUNICA is a cape of good hope.
Trust: We need the unconsciousness of humanity. Their animalistic stupidity and dreams, futurism, magic and life!
Staying power! Brave Comrades!
Long live TUNICA!

Contributors:

James Orlando
Sita Abellan
Louisa Gagliardi
Takanori Okuwaki
Roberto Piqueras
Eme Rock
Yung Beef aka Fernandito Kit Kat
Eyedress
Prefuse 73
Ilja Karilampi
Terranova
Wickerham & Lomax
Alexa Karolinski
Gaspar Noe
Karen Aragon
Le Roy
Matthew Connors
Izaac Enciso
Robert Beatty

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