Bodies of Air: Air as Architecture Materiality

(Paperback)

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Description

Air might be the opposite of building, but it is not the opposite of architecture. Air is architectural with all its aesthetic, biological, ecological, economic, environmental, ethical, financial, philosophical, political, scientific, social, and technological meanings.

Air belongs to the family of multiple, heterogeneous, and massively distributed objects in time and space. Air is an hyperobject that brings with it the planetary scale with all its intense pluralism.

This book opens a series of narratives where air emerges at the intersection of all materialitya transient material across time and space scales. This book works on how to introduce these discussions in architecture practice. A conscious effort to address the body of air within architecture discourse will help these questions to be meaningful for architecture practice. The transscalar dimension of architecture challenges the conventional apparatus of architecture, opening questions about process, time, and entropy as opposed to form, space, and order.

With Contributions of

Aerocene.org

Agency_ Ersela Krippa and Stephen Mller

Marie Bardet

Rafael Beneytez-Duran

Silvia Benedito

Salmaan Craig

Olafur Eliasson

Javier Garca-German

Victoria McReynolds

Kiel Moe

Manuel de Landa

Philippe Rahm

Author Bio

Rafael B. Duran is principal of Z4A Houston and Z4Z4 Madrid _ Office of Architecture, Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Architecture at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston. His works on practice and theory of architecture spans the fields of material thinking. His PhD. dissertation, titled Atmosphere as Form in Architecture, explores the idea of air in the context of design practices from 1818 to present. Javier Garca-Germn is Professor of Architectural Design at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM) since 2007. He is module director both in the Master's Degree in Collective Housing (MCH, ETH Zrich-UPM) and in the Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings (MAEB, IAAC, Barcelona). He is also Guest Professor both in the Master of Arts in Interior Architecture (MAIA, HEAD GENVE, Geneva) and in the Master in Integrated Architectural Design (MIAD, LA SALLE, Barcelona).