CONFLICT ATLAS

Geopolitics and Contingencies on the Malvinas-Falklands Archipelago

Jasmijn Visser

Berlin-based Dutch artist Jasmijn Visser’s Conflict Atlas looks at history through the perspective of the Falklands Islands/Islas Malvinas, linking global events to local proceedings on the archipelago. Through a lively combination of writings, drawings, photos, maps and archival materials, Visser explores trade routes, colonial enterprises, patterns of migration, questions of identity, strategies in warfare and the role of the climate in social issues. In this fully illustrated oversized softcover publication, she conveys the field of tensions in the Malvinas-Falklands Archipelago by the multiplication and stratification of geographical sites, historical times and subjective views. Designed by Amsterdam-based strategic design studio Metahaven, Conflict Atlas opens up a new way of writing history, in which the nature of the history itself becomes visible: a chaotic sea of circumstances that, through the endless variation of contexts, has become so overwhelming that it dwarfs the human scale.

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CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 5

Mark von Schlegell: Ickles, Etc.

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

In this novel, noted contemporary science fiction writer Mark von Schlegell imagines architecture in the year 2090 through the character Henries Ickles, Los Angeles’s most misunderstood info-architect. 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 20th century. In the fifth book from the Critical Practice series, von Schlegell puts the scifi back in notions of “speculative aesthetics.” A collection of interconnected comical stories set in New Los Angeles, Danish Expansion, Nieuw Nieuw Amsterdam and 1970s St. Louis, Ickles, Etc. explores the future of architectural practice in light of developments in climatology, quasicrystalography, hyper-contemporary art, time travel, and the EGONET. With artwork by Louise Lawler. Following New Distopia, this is von Shlegell’s second novel to be published by Sternberg.

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CRITICAL AND CLINICAL CARTOGRAPHIES

International Conference Proceedings

Andrej Radman & Stavros Kousoulas (Eds.)

What is the relation between the living organism of the human body and the machine technologies applied in the medical field? Mapping the shifting thresholds between organic and inorganic, the innate and the acquired, is the focus of this slender but rich publication from the trans-disciplinary Critical and Clinical Cartographies Conference at TU Delft. Organized around the themes of embodiment, technology, care and design, the conference participants rethink medical and design pedagogies in the context of the affective and the digital to explore relations between the body and machine technologies used in medical treatment and architectural design. Essays dissecting the influences of technology, cybernetic theories, digital and social media, ecological theories of architecture, capitalism and human behavior make for a fascinating discussion in the context of the fields of medicine and architecture. Contributors include architectural theorist Andrej Radman, architects Stavros Kousoulas, Robert Alexander Gorny, Dulmini Perera, Arthur Waisblat, media and cultural theorists Katharina D. Martin and Halbe Hessel Kuipers.

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MANIFESTO ARCHITECTURE: CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 3

Beatriz Colomina

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The third title in the celebrated Critical Spatial Practice series, Manifesto Architecture argues that the history of the avant-garde (in architecture and other disciplines) can’t be separated from the history of its engagement with media. It is not just that the avant-garde used media to publicize its work; the work did not exist before its publication. In her succinct text, architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University, traces the history of the modern architecture manifesto, from Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture to Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction. With a particular focus on Mies van der Rohe and the play between his written and built work, this essay propels the manifesto form into the future, suggesting that we are now in the age of the “soft manifesto.”

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CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 6

Eyal Weizman
The Roundabout Revolutions

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The sixth volume in the politically charged, idea-packed Critical Spatial Practice series, The Roundabout Revolutions stems from Israeli scholar and architect Eyal Weizman’s observation that the circle or roundabout has been the site of multiple revolutionary protests against authoritarianism, most recently in South Korea, Tunisia, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya and Syria. The book follows its development in 20th-century Europe and North America and its subsequent export to the colonial world as a means of policing “chaotic” non-Western cities. Weizman asks, how did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power become the locus of its undoing? Countering this counterrevolution, he proposes protestors must find its corollary in sustained work at round tables to be able to enact political change. Princeton global scholar, Goldsmiths College teacher and co-editor of Forensis (Sternberg, 2014), Wiezman focuses on how consciousness affects and is affected by our environment.

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CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 7

Felicity D. Scotty D. Scott
Disorientation: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs

Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The seventh publication from the ongoing CSP series focuses on postwar Japan through the eyes of Viennese émigré architect and social historian Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988), who famously described it as a “rearview mirror” of the American way of life. In this volume, illustrated by noted contemporary painter Martin Beck, architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the architect’s readings of the vernacular in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. Best known for curating Architecture without Architects, the famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial structures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Rudofsky drew on decades of speculation about modern architecture and urbanism, particularly their semantic, technological, institutional, commercial and geopolitical influences. In a contemporary world saturated with visual information, Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance.

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CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 8

Jill Magid: The Proposal

Nikolaus Hirsch, Carin Kuoni, Hesse McGraw & Markus Miessen (Eds.)

The eighth volume in the ongoing CSP series edited by Hirsch and Miessen, The Proposal focuses on American artist Jill Magid’s The Barragán Archives. Magid’s multiyear project examining the career of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988) questions the forms of power, public access and copyright used to construct artistic legacy. After his death, Barragán’s archive was split in two. His personal archive went to his home in Mexico, now a UNE SCO World Heritage Site, while his professional archive was purchased in 1995 by Vitra chairman Rolf Fehlbaum and housed at the corporation’s headquarters, where it became inaccessible to the public. As Magid attempts to bring together Barragán’s professional and personal archives and probes the architect’s official and private selves, she engages the intersections of the psychological and the judicial, national identity and repatriation, international property rights and copyright law, authorship and ownership, the human body and the body of work. Eight additional essays round out Magrid’s discussion. Contributions by Leonardo Díaz Borioli, Nikolaus Hirsch, David Kim, Cuauhtémoc Medina Gonzalez, Daniel McClean, Hesse McGraw, Elizabeth A. Povinelli and Ines Weizman.

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CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICE 9

Displacements: Architecture and Refugee

Andrew Herscher

Author and urban theorist Andrew Herscher’s Displacements: Architecture and Refugee, the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture— an art and technology of population placement—from the 20th century to the present. In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-state’s exclusion of refugees as people out of place. Posing the refugee as the preeminent collective political subject of our time, Displacements attempts to open up an architectural history of the refugee that reflects on the history of architecture and the history of the refugee alike. Herscher’s publications include Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict (Stanford University Press, 2010), The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2012) and, coedited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Spatial Violence (Routledge, 2016). Herscher is a professor at the Univ. of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

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CROSSBENCHING

Toward a Participation as Critical Spatial Practice

Markus Miessen

Following the publication of architect/theorist Markus Miessen’s hugely successful The Nightmare of Participation, on the politics of participatory practices in architecture, spatial practices and art, and the initiation of the popular pocket series Critical Spatial Practice, comes his timely new book engaging the ethics and politics of practice, Crossbenching. Following over a decade of theoretical research, the small softcover publication focuses on Miessen’s own architecture “platform,” Studio Miessen, in which he reapproaches the question of authorship in the context of a studio practice. Proposing a more discursive approach, he acknowledges the need for “an independent actor with a conscience” to navigate the conflicts, negotiation and maneuvers among the multiplicity of agents, both human (architects, clients, financiers and builders) and nonhuman (silicon, plastic, concrete and so on), that is architecture. Instead of using project-teams or working within the typical structure of an architecture office, however, Miessen assembled working groups incorporating “outsiders” on the theory that architecture and space-making is a collective set of interrelations crystalizing a form of civitas. Using the analogy of the crossbencher—the independent politician in the über-conservative British House of Lords—he proposes a reframing of architecture practice as one which operates on the basis of alternative and self-governing political parameters, hoping to open up a fresh debate on ways of acting politically. Preface by Austrian philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian, introduction by Swiss journalist and author Hannes Grassegger and Miessen, and postscript by Canadian artist, writer and designer Patricia Reed. Miessen is currently Distinguished Professor in Practice at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

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CYBERMOHALLA HUB

Nikolaus Hirsch and Shveta Sarda

When a slum in Delhi was torn down in the name of “urban renewal” – and nothing was planned to replace it – a group of architects, artists and urbanists from the Architectural Association in London stepped into the vacuum. Led by Frankfurtbased architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller, a high-powered group including Raqs Media Collective, Superflex and Hu Fang started designing a prototype for a hybrid community center, school, studio and gallery. This compelling book documents the prototype structure for the “mohalla” (Hindi for neighborhood) that has been shown in Vienna and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, among other venues. Many voices, from the community residents to international artists, were engaged to redefine and reinvigorate this urban space.

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