Pressures and Distortions provides a close-up look at how residents of cities in the developing world are reshaping their environments in response to social, economic, and environmental changes. The cities chronicled range from China through Indonesia to Latin America. In each of the book's four sections, a team of researchers explores how an urban phenomenon of global importance is playing out in a specific city. The studies analyze the impacts of housing shortages on the residents of Shenzhen's vanishing urban villages and Shanghai's deteriorating lanes; the production of self-built housing and neighborhoods in Mexico City (as well as Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and Bogotá); the performance of disaster relief housing constructed in Banda Aceh after the disastrous earthquake and tsunami of 2004; and the reception of Bogota's award-winning new public buildings and spaces by urban residents. Throughout, the authors take a resident-centered view of urbanism and architecture. They interview city dwellers and painstakingly document their living environments as well as their self-built home improvements, using photography and measured drawings. They follow city dwellers with video cameras, recording their day-to-day interactions with urban spaces and with other inhabitants. They carefully chart the stages through which self-built communities are established and consolidated. In each case, the authors use critical examination of policy frameworks and statistical evidence to situate fine-grained observation within a larger context of urban production. Their findings avoid simplistic prescriptions while prompting constructive proposals for governments, NGOs, designers, and communities. Pressures and Distortions is a publication of the Research Program of Rafael Viñoly Architects, a global practice with headquarters in New York. The authors, based in Mexico, Colombia, China, Australia, France, and the US, were selected through a competitive process to receive grants that enabled them to pursue their independent research. The Research Program is proud to present their findings in this handsomely produce volume, containing more than 500 original full-color photographs, plans, and drawings, as well as a DVD with over 100 video and audio recordings.Authors include: Jay Bargmann (Foreword), Ned Kaufman (Editor), Hai Zhang, Marcel Baumler, Richard De Pirro, Ana Rota Garcia Lascuráin, Mayra Gamboa, Juan Carlos Zavala, David O'Brien, Ahmed Iftekhar, Nicolas Tixier, Ida Assefa, Camilo Cifuentes, Sandra Fiori, juL mcOisans, and Céline Rouchy.

Pressures and Distortions: City Dwellers as Builders and Critics: Four Views

Arts & Photography

Viñoly Architects, Rafael

Architecture

Applied Research & Design

This book documents the work of URBANbuild, a comprehensive two-year program at Tulane University School of Architecture initiated by its founding director Ila Berman to actively support the rehabilitation of the city of New Orleans in the aftermath of the storm of August 2005. URBANbuild local_global is quite literally a double-sided book that reconnects local research, analysis and design for New Orleans with a broader global framework that embraces knowledge and experience drawn from comparable world water cities.

URBANbuild: local/ global

Ila Berman

Mona El Khafif

Beyond the dense urbanism of Mumbai (Bombay) or the IT centers of Bangalore and Hyderabad lies the Ganges River basin--today home to over one-quarter of India's billion-plus population--a space historically defined by a mythological constellation of terrestrial sites imbued with celestial significance. Not only is it one of the most densely populated river basins in the world, but it also undergoes dramatic physical changes with the onslaught of the wet monsoon, where over one-meter of rainfall occurs in the span of three months. This book focuses on the intersection of these two observations. It is an atlas of built and unbuilt projects designed to transform the river into a giant water machine. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, this mythical watercourse has functioned as a laboratory to test and build a new civilization around the culture of water. Jointly authored by people and nature, the Ganges River is today a monstrous water machine in which the entire basin became a workshop of human-made experience, defined by a hydrological system best described as a supersurface: a surface engineered from the scale of the soil to the scale of the nation. Everything from diffuse urban projects and green revolutions to colossal public works programs and architectural transformations constitute the genesis of the Ganges Water Machine. Whether to thwart massive peasant uprisings or to redirect monsoonal rains to productive ends, never before has a river that inspired the realization of unbelievable architectural and infrastructural projects received as little scrutiny as the Ganges river basin. Reaching through the very heart of some of India s most densely populated cities, small towns, industrial zones, sacred sites, and mountainous forests, Ganges Water Machine by Anthony Acciavatti, composed of eight years of field and archival research, explores and theorizes the people and infrastructures that shaped this territory. Ganges Water Machine is an atlas of the enterprise to make the Ganges River basin into a highly engineered landscape: it reveals the narratives and explanations that allowed engineers and planners to realize fantasies previously only imaginable on paper or in myth.

Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India's Ancient River

Business & Money

Anthony Acciavatti

Economics

A Line in the Andes -- a one year investigation developed at the Harvard Graduate school of design -- examines the transformative role of the first underground metro line currently being implemented in the city of Quito (Ecuador). Through archival material, original drawings, and text, this publication frames the metro project within the city's historic and current urban form, visualizing the urban potential of this contemporary valley-city. In doing so, the material documented in this book sets the stage for well-informed design deliberations regarding an urban future Quito deserves. The book also includes a collection of essays by Rahul Mehotra, Quito Mayor Augusto Barrera, Edgar Jacome, Pablo Perez Ramos, Martin Cobas, Graciela Silvestri, and Ana Maria Duran Calisto. The writings expand on a series of themes related to Quito and frame the city within a broader geographic and disciplinary context.

A Line in the Andes

The Source Books in Architecture series documents the work of the Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professors at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture. While previous books have addressed a single project of the Baumer Professor, this one has a slightly different focus. Stan Allen was the Baumer Professor at the school in 2012–13, and this book documents projects that were discussed during Allen’s seminar as well as the theoretical position that Allen began to articulate with Field Conditions in 1996. Twenty years is a remarkable duration for a contemporary architectural position to hold the interest of its author and audience. Since the publication of Field Conditions, advances in digital technology have led to an exhaustive range of experimentation, refinement, and finally, factions in design style and strategy. Expressive form and gymnastic geometry are now available to even novice designers, and have worked their way into popular culture and onto the wish lists of public and private clients. While digital advances have expanded architecture’s lexicon, their seductive potential has sometimes trumped architecture’s performance beyond the iconographic. Fatigue and forgetfulness, in such cases, displace architecture’s broader cultural potential. It is noteworthy that Allen’s project has progressed in parallel with and taken advantage of digital developments. However, the digital project may have run its course as an independent trajectory. This book provides evidence that Allen’s project endures through new realizations and applications.

Stan Allen: Four Projects (Source Books in Architecture, 10)

Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms.

Redesigning Gridded Cities: 4 Volume Set

Busquets, Joan

Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms. Manhattan is the first case in the series, before Chicago, Barcelona and Hangzhou, and was conducted in the 2011-2012 academic year. The hypothesis of seeking to understand the city by examining the criteria of hierarchy and regularity of its urban infrastructures and transformations may help us to a different understanding of the decisions leading to the construction of the present-day city. Manhattan’s development is based on the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the second centenary of which was marked by a research project. The precision of layout, the judicious definition of avenues and streets, and the geometry of the city blocks are still interesting and thought-provoking. Many initiatives and projects have taken place on the island, gradually configuring the forma urbis of the central area of New York that can only be understood in terms of the forcefulness of the seminal grid project proposed at that time.

Manhattan: Rectangular Grid for Ordering an Island (Redesigning Gridded Cities)

Katsikis, Nikos

Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms. This publication about the city of Chicago is the product of a research project at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design to reinterpret the theme of the regular― gridded―city and to test its potential to assist in designing the contemporary city. There were two main aims for this research. The first pedagogical aim was to identify the morphological attributes of the gridded city and to understand the current value of this tool that has been built in the most varied cultures. The second, speculative, aim was to explore broadly urban design principles that can address issue particular to the 21st century city.

Chicago: Two Grids Between Lake and River (Redesigning Gridded Cities)

History

Crawford, Christina

Americas

Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms. The construction of modern Barcelona can be seen as a laboratory of urban projects and planning strategies. This process spanning more than 150 years features a series of innovative experiments that correspond to different scales and explain the complexity involved in constructing such a singular capital city.

Barcelona: Manifold Grids and the Cerda Plan (Redesigning Gridded Cities)

Perez-Ramos, Pablo

Redesigning Gridded Cities focuses with extreme detail on four paradigmatic gridded cities, Manhattan, Chicago, Barcelona, and Hangzhou by analyzing these cities and proposing their own interventions that implicate the grid in productive ways. They emphasize the value of open forms for city design, and specifically insist that the grid has the unique capacity to absorb and channel urban transformation flexibly and productively. In both historical and projective, this series of books explore the potential of the grid as a design tool to produce a multitude of urban processes and forms. Hangzhou is the fourth case in a series, coming after Manhattan, Chicago and Barcelona, and was conducted in the 2014-2015 academic year. It sets out to understand a city with a long history and a process of rapid recent transformation. The hypothesis of seeking to understand the city by examining the criteria of hierarchy and regularity of its urban infrastructures and transformations may help us to a different understanding of the decisions leading to the construction of the present-day city. The construction of modern Hangzhou can be seen as a laboratory of urban projects and planning strategies (the remodelling of the historic center, the extension of university and research sectors contrasting with the application of a functional grid of big streets and motorways), producing a more anonymous city, the repository of complexes of large blocks of economic activity, defining a generic city with no major defining values.

Hangzhou: Grids from Canal to Maxi-Block (Redesigning Gridded Cities)

Yang, Dingliang

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