The publication casts new light on the relationship between modernism and the ground, calling into question received assumptions and liberating new possibilities for how a building relates to its site. The result of research PRODUCTORA initiated as winners of the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice at Illinois Institute of Technology, Being the Mountain examines the relationship between architecture and the ground it occupies, an interaction so obvious--a building must touch the ground--that it often remains underexplored. Richly illustrated contributions by Carlos Bedoya, Frank Escher, Wonne Ickx, Véronique Patteeuw, and Jesús Vassallo revisit significant moments in architectural history that cast new light on the techniques and legacies of modernism, especially in settings like Mexico and California, where architects such as Ricardo Legorreta and John Lautner incorporated dramatic natural topography in their agendas. Additional essays investigate the role of the ground in the thought of Kenneth Frampton in the 1980s and Luis Moreno Mansilla in the 1990s, as well as point to important parallels between premodern land practices, twentieth-century art, and today's architecture. Together, these episodes call into question our received assumptions and present new possibilities for the connection between a building and its site. A portfolio of related projects by PRODUCTORA concludes the book, further drawing out the idea of architecture as a form of constructed ground. PRODUCTORA is a Mexico City-based architectural studio founded in 2006 by Carlos Bedoya (1973, Mexico), Wonne Ickx (1974, Belgium), Victor Jaime (1978, Mexico), and Abel Perles (1972, Argentina). The studio's work is distinguished by an interest in precise geometries, the production of clearly legible projects with limited gestures, and the search for timeless buildings. PRODUCTORA has been recognized by the Architectural League of New York with the Young Architects Forum (2007) and Emerging Voices (2013) awards. In 2016, they received the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize for Emerging Practice from Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago for the Pavilion on the Zocalo. In 2018, PRODUCTORA was recognized with the Oscar Niemeyer Award for Latin American Architecture for the Teopanzolco Cultural Center, a project realized in collaboration with Isaac Broid. That same project also received the Simon Architecture Prize - Living Places in Barcelona, a recognition organized in collaboration with the Fundació Mies van der Rohe that celebrates collective places in which public and community life develops. The partners of PRODUCTORA have taught at local institutions such as the Universidad Iberoamericana, the Centro de Diseño, TEC de Monterrey, and the Universidad La Salle in Mexico City as well as international universities such as the University of California, Los Angeles, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. In 2011, PRODUCTORA founded, alongside curator and art critic Ruth Estévez, LIGA - Space for Architecture - Mexico City, a platform that promotes emerging Latin American architecture through exhibitions, conferences, and workshops. Published by the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture & Actar Publishers

Being the Mountain: Productora

Arts & Photography

Bedoya, Carlos

Ickx, Wonne

Jaime, Victor

Perles, Abel

Vassallo, Jesús

Architecture

Actar

During the past fifty years, documentary photography and architecture have become increasingly interdependent, blurring the disciplinary boundary between the two. Seamless looks at the work of a new generation of European photographers and architects working together to produce images of architecture made from fragments of reality. At the same time, it investigates how shared digital technologies influence the creation of architecture and its photographic representation through images. Based on a series of interviews, Seamless discusses the collaborations between Filip Dujardin and Jan De Vylder, Philipp Schaerer and Roger Boltshauser, and Bas Princen and OFFICE Kersten Geers David van Severen. Each of the three sections is illustrated with a series in images that form parallel narratives within the book. In the concluding essay, architect Jesús Vassallo pulls together the treads of the conversations to investigate questions about the impact of digital technology on the value assigned to images, how shared technological platforms enhance the influence photographers and architects have on each other, and why they have often chosen to focus on the dirty realism of the urban spaces.

Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Architecture at Rice)

Photography & Video

Park Books

Architecture and photography share the condition of being suspended between fine art and craft. Realism is considered a given, something that happens almost by default. From the moment it is taken, a photograph is understood to be a record of what was in front of the camera—just as a building, as soon as it is inhabited, becomes the fixed backdrop for everyday life. In Epics in the Everyday, Jesús Vassallo explores this condition, tracing a series of collaborations between architects and photographers from the postwar years up to the present. Consistently, the subject matter of these collaborations is the built environment, which presents architects and photographers—in different ways—with a mirror that challenges the idea of realism in their respective disciplines. Beyond casting a diagonal light on important developments within the two individual disciplines, the book chronicles an alternative history of both modern architecture and photography and builds a case for a specific type of realism found at their intersection.

Epics in the Everyday: Photography, Architecture, and the Problem of Realism

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