Evolo have published the second edition of their magazine called Skyscrapers of the Future. It’s available here.

Four noteworthy publications on digital architecture are now out:

• Digital Cities AD: Architectural Design Edited by Neil Leich, articles by Michael Batty, Benjamin Bratton, Alain Chiaradia, Manuel DeLanda, Vicente Guallart and Peter Trummer.
• Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation by Lars Spuybroek
• The Patterns of Architecture: Architectural Design Edited by Mark Garcia, articles by Hanif Kara, Patrik Schumacher and Alejandro Zaera–Polo.
• Digital Fabrications: Architectural and Material Techniques (Architecture Briefs) by Lisa Iwamoto

You can get them from Amazon by clicking on the links above or from our bookshop.

This just out: a new reader from AD, edited by Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Christopher Hight with essays by Stan Allen, Reyner Banham, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Robin Evans, Jeff Kipnis and Bernard Tschumi. You can buy it from here or from our bookshop.

Below via Amazon:

The Space Reader provides a highly pertinent and contemporary understanding of space for a new generation of students and architects. It espouses a definition of space that is heterogeneous (an object or system consisting of a diverse range of different items). An example of heterogeneous space, for instance, is Manhattan where complex and multiple social and technological conditions are overlaid. (This is to be contrasted with highly centralised and ordered Modernist cities.) With the onset of globalisation and the Web, heterogeneneous space, with its emphasis on differentiation, is more relevant to the contemporary condition, which encourages the mixing of space, than a much more static conception of Modernist space.

This book foregrounds spatial issues and the potential of heterogeneous space through a threefold strategy:

1) Its compilation of seminal essays on the discourse of heterogeneous space. These are to include previously published key texts by Reyner Banham, Andrew Benjamin, Robin Evans, Jeff Kipnis and Henri Lefebvre, as well as new texts by important contemporary commentators, such as Mark Cousins, Werner Durth and Anthony Vidler.

2) By commenting on these seminal texts and drawing links between them.

3) By distilling from the first two efforts a contemporary outlook on a discourse of heterogeneous space that is of future significance.

From the Back Cover
Edited by three leading figures in cutting–edge design, this reader brings space firmly back on to the agenda of contemporary architecture. Whereas space was one of the central tenets of 20th–century Modernism, in the last two decades the overriding preoccupation with digital technologies has shifted the focus to parametric geometries and complex surfaces. This emphasis on form and image has not been accompanied by similar advancements in the understandings of architectural space.

The Space Reader provides a highly pertinent and current understanding of space for a new generation of students and architects. It espouses an understanding of space that is heterogeneous, ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems leading to a multiplicity of atmospheres. As a generation of social geographers has argued, this type of complex space is characteristic of the metropolis, where multiple social and technological conditions are organically overlaid. The Space Reader attempts to lay the ground work for a similarly robust articulation of spatial complexity within architecture, and its relationship today’s built environment. With its emphasis on differentiation, heterogeneous space is pliant, flexible and highly relevant to the contemporary condition.

The Space Reader features:

• A comprehensive introduction by the editors foregrounding spatial issues and the potential of heterogeneous space
• Seminal essays by Stan Allen, Reyner Banham, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Robin Evans, Jeff Kipnis and Bernard Tschumi.
• New, revised and recent texts by architects and theorists, such as Albert Pope, Charles Rice, Peter Sloterdijk and Jakob von Uexküll.

Lift Architects have released the first edition of a Grasshopper Primer.

A few excerpts from the book are posted on:

www.aaees.net

The book is available through our own bookstore.

This book provides an in-depth study of the creative and manufacturing processes behind 50 contemporary domestic design objects. Chosen from all around the world, they span furniture, lighting, tableware, textiles and products. Featuring the work of both long-established and emerging designers, each product is selected for its significant use of new technology, unorthodox or complex production process, use of innovative materials (or traditional materials adapted in new and unexpected ways) and, in some cases, for the creative concept behind it.Beginning with a general introduction, each project is then presented through explanatory text as well as inspirational image, sketch, detail shots of production processes and the completed product. A glossary of production methods is also included. “Process” offers an interesting and useful insight into how products are designed for students and professional designers alike.

Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture @ Amazon UK

Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture @ Amazon US

below: via Robert Blinn @ Core77

Glossy product design books usually relegate details like ideation sketches, prototypes, parting lines, and injection molds to a supporting role, but Jennifer Hudson’s Process: 50 Product Designs from Concept to Manufacture puts them front and center. Highlighting projects from both up-and-coming designers and design luminaries, Process showcases the hours of effort that disappear behind the scenes and are rarely seen by the consumer. Fifty products are each given about a page of explanatory text and are supported by three or four pages of photographs of early prototyping work. Everything from sculptural vases to functional electronics is shown from its birth as an idea to its eventual manufacture. Process reveals all of the details of industrial design that graphic designers (or book editors) might find a bit dull and it shines because of it.

Products like Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Steelwood chair appeal on an aesthetic level, but seeing the extremely complex molds that press the lightweight metal seat into a functional shape makes the final product all the more impressive. Others, like Maarten Baas’s Sculpt Furniture or Ron Arad’s Bodyguards chairs are strikingly original, but the process photographs showing welders and workers assembling them by hand betray that “industrial” follows a distant second to “design.” A third category, like Joris Laarman’s Bone Chair may not be everyone’s aesthetic cup of tea, but by illustrating the science and mechanics required for their design Process allows the reader to see a simplicity and beauty that may not be obvious from the finished product alone.