Jahrbücher

This issue of LA+ explores the notion of vitality as a proxy for the health of all things, and explores how design can improve the vitality of people, cities, systems, and landscapes.

Pressing Matters is an exciting design and research compilation from PennDesign's Department of Architecture, featuring recent student work, news, important symposia and lectures. Society faces many challenges: global warming and environmental change, pollution and waste, transition to new energy and resource economies, the redistribution and reorganization of political and economic power worldwide; globalization of the construction and development industries, population growth, shrinkage and migration; urban intensification and attrition; privatization of public sector activities; and the transformation of cultural identities and social institutions. We seek to bring the expansion of expertise and creativity in architecture to bear on these challenges with a goal to be at the forefront of advanced research & design by creating an advanced research institute that focuses on new design methodologies and future manufacturing through the interlinked intelligence of digital design, scripting and robotics. Printed on recycled paper with non-toxic inks, Pressing Matters focuses on social awareness and responsibility, and endeavors to be a think-tank for critical exchange and advanced debate within and across disciplinary boundaries. We are a connective device linking invited experts for ongoing lectures and publications to a growing international audience and an increasing network of experts.

The state of things is very serious. The water is rising, the ice is melting, the forests are on fire, and the land is sinking. Every day is a new catastrophe, we're rushing toward a precipice, we're out of time, we're out of luck, we screwed the pooch, dropped the ball, botched the delivery, broke the system, went hurtling down the road of good intention...In design, we've been trained to respond with solutions. <BR><BR>Throughout history mischief-makers have plagued the over-powerful, puncturing the smug assumptions of Fat Cats, Big Cheeses, and High Muck-a-Mucks. From Coyote to Anansi to Shakespeare's fools, the trickster holds the trump card when the chips are down, the stakes are high, and the owner of the casino is the President of the United States. We posit the wicked pleasures of the trickster tale as an enticing alternative to dreary disaster-capitalist narratives, technocratic solutionism, and universalist fictions of Authority, Progress, Unity, and Truth. This issue of Lunch (13: Mischief) is a collection of articles, letters, manifestos, anti-manifestos, graphics, games and narratives that approach design more impishly than urgently, that uproot assumptions that solutions are the solution, that wiggle under the garden fence and leave the farmer with a fistful of fur - but no bunny.

Abstract is the yearly publication of work and research from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Produced through the Office of the Dean Amale Andraos, the archive of student work contains documentation of exceptional projects, selected by faculty at the conclusion of each semester. The 2017 edition includes the applied research of the school's laboratories and projects from design studios taught by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, Kersten Geers, Juan Herreros, Steven Holl, Andres Jaque, Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukumoto, and Laura Kurgan, Jing Liu, LOT-EK, Reinhold Martin, Umberto Napolitano, Kate Orff, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Rural Urban Framework, Hilary Sample, Bernard Tschumi, and Enrique Walker and many others. This encyclopedic volume is conceived as both an organizational model for the school and a testament to the global distribution of the work included within.

Architecture in the Netherlands is an invaluable survey of the most noteworthy and critical developments in Dutch architecture over the past year. Thirty projects are described in detail, along with an overview of the most prestigious awards, exhibitions and publications.

Different concepts of the machine are pursued in essays on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Alfred Jarry's pataphysical machines, and cosmological and political orders in sixteenth-century utopias. Cross-cultural tensions are examined in essays on the Christian appropriation of Aztec symbolism, and on Jesuit perspectives in an imperial Chinese garden in Beijing. Architectural origins and education are revisited in essays on fire and language in Vitruvius, on storytelling by Spanish theorist Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz, and on the role of history in the design of the Prato della Valle, a public square in Padua. Phenomenal experience is the focus of essays on light and stone in the Gothic church of Saint-Denis, and on bodily movement through the ancient Palace of Minos at Knossos in Crete. Tensions in architectural representation are investigated in essays on the influence of Villard de Honnecourt on drawings by William Burges in Victorian England, and on Stendhal's curious narrative drawings in his book Vie de Henry Brulard. Contemporary beliefs are scrutinized in an essay that uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the modern concept of sustainability.