a+t architecture publishers

BEFORE IS BEFORE explains the design and construction of public space and landscape through a catalog of strategies and actions. It is not a set of universal recipes. They are case studies that show, in a quick and simple way, the 'modus operandi' of the authors.

Aurora Fernández Per and Javier Mozas, founders of a+t research group, consider that strategies are the foundations on which any project proposal is built. In them are the latencies that will allow the development and solve the contingencies of the project.
Choosing a set of strategies means defining the rules of the game, picking the working tools and designing actions, which are grouped into three categories: environmental, operational and aesthetic.

Environmental strategies are aimed at improving the natural environment in which a project is located.
They manage water resources, energy sources and the ecosystems present.
They regenerate degraded ecosystems.
They integrate the existing by recycling or reusing.
They raise environmental awareness.

Operational strategies deal with the functioning and use of space.
They activate the latencies of the place with respect to its environment.
They anticipate usability by managing materials and systems.
They anticipate responsiveness to risks or new experiences.
Facilitate user participation in design and management.

Aesthetic strategies provide the transcendent value of beauty.
They contain formal resources that generate global designs.
They uncover the beautification capabilities of place.
They create stories, atmospheres and alterations of perception.
They build the author's space of freedom.

Currently, electronic devices transport the self to virtual realities, blur public with private, even the innermost, and provide a foretaste of a different domestic spatiality. Facing this challenge, and taking a resistant stance, architecture turns its gaze to the recent past and is capable of constructing a privacy in which materiality still preserves its full evocative power.

The third volume of the GENEROSITY series is dedicated to delving into how this privacy is built in the collective housing environment. Stephen Bates signs an extensive article on new architectural options for living together, Javier Mozas summarizes in five points the benefits of a home in which it is possible to achieve domestic happiness and Aurora Fernández Per compares the strategies to improve privacy followed by 8 selected projects.

The second issue of the GENEROSITY series is devoted to strategies of domestic exterior space.

The different degrees of domestic exteriority were modulated over time through openings or closures, with one defining moment, when the envelope was released from its load bearing functions.

From a distance, the modernist façade has multi­ple readings and Le Corbusier’s thick diaphragmed ‘fourth wall’ is not the same as Mies’ fine curtain wall.

Contemporary domesticity plays with the creation of thresholds to extend the liveable domain outside the envelope.

The three-dimensionality facilitates the construction of liveable spaces within a thick façade.

Works by Caruso St John Architects, Atelier Kempe Thill, Vivas Arquitectos, Henley Halebrown, Schneider Studer Primas, Studio Woodroffe Papa, MIA2, ITCHstudio + Vincenzo Di Salvia, MVRDV, Flint and Duncan Lewis - Scape Architecture.

The Indeterminacy of the Floor Plan is the first issue of the GENEROSITY series, dedicated to the design of collective housing. After the Density series, which warned about the importance of living in a compact and balanced environment, the new series is committed to the generosity of design.

Throughout the entire series, generosity translates into design strategies, identified as:

• Strategies of Indeterminacy: focused on enhancing spatiality and flexibility.
• Strategies of Exteriority: aimed at improving the relationship with the environment.
• Strategies of Privacy: whose objective is to build a protected and own place.
• Strategies of Interactivity: capable of promoting interrelation and cohesion between neighbours.

Not only outskirts, edges, peripheries... but also the continuum, exurbia, the hinterland, periurban areas and the suburbs overlap geographically and semantically. These are the names given to all those indeterminate spaces feeding off the cross flows between city and countryside. To describe the indeterminate in one single word, to pin down the hodgepodge is an impossible venture.

The analysis of this diffuse and increasingly expanded portion of the environment originates a series of.
(more...)

In 1794, the English landowner Uvedale Price incorporated the concept of the picturesque into the vision of the landscape. His friend, architect John Nash, builds a few years later, just outside Bristol, Blaise Hamlet, a cluster of cottages that recreates rural picturesqueness. Meanwhile, Andrew Meikle invents the threshing machine in Scotland and in America the colonization of the West begins thanks to the Land Ordinance.

Migrations from the countryside to the city have been going on since the beginning of the first industrial revolution and  accelerating with the second. The binary city-countryside vision, as opposed sceneries, increases and grows between them an intermediate space that encompasses the worst and the best of the two worlds. In this issue, a detailed timeline accounts for the facts that have taken place in the three contexts during the last 250 years.

Besides, the Is this rural? Series continues to question the identities of the territories. This new volume includes both cultural and educational buildings situated in the midst of less explored nature, as well as farms in densified urban centres -a cultured countryside and a cultivated city.
(more...)

The title of this series, IS THIS RURAL?, questions the identity of the largest proportion of territory, that not occupied by cities, that which is out there, that which traditionally used to be known as the countryside.

Are there still differences between urban and rural, or are the boundaries increasingly blurred?

How is architectural design affected by the absence of unequivocal identities?

We have chosen 12 actions and situated them within their environment, taking.
(more...)

Currently, the basic premises of collective dwellings are also being reformulated and they are becoming more flexible and indifferent. Their situation within the urban environment is less important due to the fragmentation and dissolution of contemporary cities. The offer is enhanced by a multiplicity of opportunities. Examples and solutions have merged together and functional separations fade away in the mist of postmodernity. There is no clear separation between different areas. The dispers.
(more...)

"As Javier recalls in his Autumn 2004 diary we made the round trip from Tokyo to Sendai and back in a morning, just to see the Mediatheque by Toyo Ito. The high speed trains enable this but I could not tell you anything about Sendai.
(more...)