A study of the complex relationship between technological development and the conceptual basis of architectural design, from World War II to early 1990s.
In Tower and Office, Spanish architects Inaki Abalos and Juan Herreros look at the role and impact of advanced building technologies in American architecture since World War II. The war, they claim, marked the end of the first cycle of modernism, challenging the belief that technological progress alone could produce a perpetually better future. At the same time, the war was the source of powerful new structural models and construction methods. The authors examine the ways these technologies have been inflected over the last half century by more subjective and integrated processes of spatial organization.
In the first part of the book, Abalos and Herreros focus on the work of Le Corbusier, revealing the degree of complexity achieved in his interpretation of the modern skyscraper. In the second part, they look at the intersection of technical and cultural determinants in the design of high-rise structures since World War II. Among the issues they consider are the evolution of the load-bearing frame, the impact of high-tech systems on tall buildings, and the transparent building skin. In the third part, they address developments in office design and planning, tracing an evolution from the repetitive and homogeneous office skyscraper to the present-day mixed-use structure. Overall they demonstrate how the objective technical analysis associated with modernist architectural theory has given way in recent building practice to a variety of flexible, pragmatic, and environmental approaches. These, they suggest, have opened the way to new urban and architectural forms.

Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice

Science & Math

Herreros, Juan

Ábalos, Iñaki

Technology

Mit Pr

Tower And Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice

Essays on Thermodynamics, Architecture and Beauty, is a book that unfolds arguments and designs around the concept of "thermodynamic beauty". This new aesthetic category opens up new and unexpected directions to the architect's work, connecting architecture and thermodynamics without giving up the tectonic tradition. The compendium will be developed through the concepts of Somatisms, Monsters Assemblage, Verticalism and Thermodynamic Materialism, summarizing design strategies, and opening new territories at the scales of building, public space and landscape.

Essays On Thermodynamics: Architecture and Beauty

Arts & Photography

Snetkiewicz, Renata

Architecture

Actar

What is the role of architecture if not to realize a shared vision of the “good life,” a vision that in the age of architectural modernism shaped—and was shaped by—a range of ideas about the home? With The Good Life, Iñaki Ábalos serves as our guide for a tour of seven iconic twentieth-century homes that represent various concepts for living. Some of the homes were actually built, while others were merely planned, painted, or created as part of a film set. We see Mies van der Rohe’s House with Three Patios, Martin Heidegger’s cabin in the Black Forest, Picasso’s Villa La Californie in Cannes, and the New York loft that Andy Warhol called The Factory. From the ultramodern geometric houses and gardens in Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, we travel to the famed hobby-kit house in Buster Keaton’s One Week and on to the sunny swimming pool and home in David Hockney’s painting A Bigger Splash. Ábalos guides readers through the key philosophical precepts that likely guided the creation of these homes, making insightful points about the relationship between ideas about a particular modern way of living and approaches to architecture and design. What he concludes is that modernism marks less a coherent triumph of positivism, as is often assumed, than a loose celebration of the radical pluralism of the twentieth century. A fascinating work by one of Spain’s most prominent architects, The Good Life presents a powerful picture of the concerns that guided the course of architectural modernism.

The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity

Park Books

Iñaki Ábalos presents the quintessence of his thinking about architecture and the future of the trade.\nIn his new book Absolute Beginners, acclaimed Spanish architect Iñaki Ábalos explores forms of innovation in architecture. Drawing on diverse materials elaborated during the twenty years since the publication of his best-known book, The Good Life, Ábalos examines questions centered on how and why architectural creation—at least the kind that arouses the greatest cultural interest—is strongly linked to philosophical thought, especially to the essay and the aphorism. He guides us to an understanding of why innovation—as happens in philosophy—is inextricably linked to reflection on the past and to the emergence of new ways of appropriating old problems.\nAbsolute Beginners is a single essay written with effort and passion, made for the pure pleasure of composing a new and complex work and understanding the source materials as necessary fragments while remaining open to adjustments, changes, and bridges between them. Ábalos organizes his materials like a piece of music into a cohesive composition, to the delight and insight of his readers.

Absolute Beginners

Este libro quiere por tanto relatar que hay otras formas completas de pensar y vivir la casa que implican técnicas proyectuales bien distintas y que sin duda dan por resultado espacios domésticos que se alejan, en mayor o menor medida, de los que aún hoy tienen prestigio entre muchos profesionales. No se trata de un manual de arquitectura doméstica, ni tiene la ambición de dar instrucciones sobre qué hacer. Carece de una finalidad práctica inmediata; su objetivo es alertar y contribuir a una mayor conciencia de los vínculos entre las formas de pensar, de ver el mundo, los modos de vida y las técnicas proyectuales; que éstas no son neutrales sino que limitan y contienen en sí mismas la capacidad de maniobra crítica de nuestro trabajo.

La buena vida: Visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad

Editorial Gustavo Gili, S.L.

This text is an essay on the relationship between ways of thinking, the rich seams of contemporary thought and the forms of the house, of planning and living in it. The descriptive method is based on seven guided visits to a group of real or imaginary houses that make up a sufficiently extended panorama for understanding what the 20th century has bequeathed to us in the way of a heritage. In order to choose the houses to visit it was necessary to narrow things down, simplify them, by highlighting a series of archetypes defined by their most pronounced features. The reader, then, won't find any of the masterworks built by modern architects -neither the Villa Savoye, nor Fallingwater, nor the Villa Tugendhat-but mostly imaginary houses, houses constructed by manipulating different references. In short, this book invites the reader on a fantasy tour, one whose aim is not just to celebrate the diversity of the 20th-century house but also to stimulate the pleasure of thinking, planning and living intensely, to promote the appearance of a house that does not yet exist.

Photography & Video

Product Description 
As a consequence of their teaching, editorial, research, public and design activities 
Iñaki Ábalos and 
Juan Herreros have created their own identity as architects committed to the contemporary world and antagonistic towards all professional mysticism. Their interests are basically centered on contemporary programs, the relationship between technics and nature, the rapport between the natural and the artificial, their collaboration with visual artists, and the techniques and mixed programs which they themselves have called "a new naturalism." Their oeuvre delves into regions which turn out, on occasion, to be marginal to the professional world of the architect (rubbish tips, artificial beaches, etc.) and has a kinship with American pragmatism and figures from the former School of Madrid such as Alejandro de la Sota. An investigation into building techniques based on the products available in catalogues along with a concern for the urban situation, without ever falling into contextualism, are two of the main features of such built works as the Usera Library, the Valdemingómez Recycling Plant and their studio for Luis Gordillo, all in Madrid, the Environmental Education Center in Arico (Tenerife) and their office building for the University of Extremadura. 
 Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. \nUna nueva naturalidad (7 Micromanifiestos) por Ábalos&Herreros 1. El jardín latente Sólo como un resto puritano de modernidad puede entenderse que aún hoy la palabra belleza esté proscrita de los debates profesionales. Basta con enunciar que la atracción por construir una nueva noción de belleza es casi lo único que da sentido a nuestra profesión (si quiere seguir entendiéndose como tal), para imaginar un programa de acción contundente, alejado de las trampas que meticulosamente nos tendemos. Si uno acepta esta proposición, la propia obra se transforma en notas de un particular cuaderno de viajes. Se construye con él un atlas mental, una geografía imaginaria capaz de iluminar cada lugar desde la propia proyección (invirtiendo el contextualismo tradicional) y dando forma, paso a paso, a un jardín latente. Esta visión remite quizás al filón pintoresco, superviviente subterráneamente hasta nosotros, encadenando nombres (Uvedale Price, Frederick L. Olmsted, Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, Roberto Burle Marx, Lina Bo Bardi, Robert Smithson, Archigram, Cedric Price y otros). La fusión de naturaleza y artificio, la disolución de límites disciplinares entre arquitectura, arte, jardín y pensamiento, la organización de la experiencia como secuencias narrativas, la primacía de lo visual y el movimiento, también en lo inmaterial e invisible, la construcción de un espacio público y una arquitectura reflejo de las nuevas sensibilidades... Estos ingredientes conducen a un nuevo jardín que se ve o no se ve, pero sin él no hay nueva arquitectura sino, a lo sumo, variaciones. Quien lo imagina no se alimenta sólo de enunciados abstractos y nombres propios; debe construir otra cartografía paralela que ilumine sus proyectos conquistando nuevas referencias formales, nuevos símbolos, palabras y técnicas que le permitan abandonar los antiguos, carentes ya del atractivo necesario. Y debe reconstruir el interlocutor, a quién habla, a qué mundo se dirige (ver puntos 2, 3, 4 y 5). El cuaderno de notas se configura así con esbozos (las obras y proyectos), notas a pie de página, ideas prestadas y originales, nombres, imágenes, conversaciones, múltiples materiales que se miran a sí mismos y que recomponen nuestra propia mirada. El trabajo del arquitecto se confunde con el del jardinero: desbrozar, preparar el terreno, escoger las especies y sembrarlas de forma organizada, cuidando después de que el paso del tiempo haga bien su trabajo. 2. Descampados/Áreas de impunidad La disolución de la oposición natural-artificial que observamos a todas las escalas, conlleva un programa de trabajo que no es otro que el de redescr

2G N.22 Ábalos & Herreros

Beigel, Florian

Christou, Philip

Atlas pintoresco (I): Vol, 1: el observatorio (Spanish Edition)

Editorial GG

This book is a classic of architectural reflection responds to the questions How do ideas affect the design of a house? How do the ways of inhabiting it transgress these ideas? These questions and more are responded to through seven life models of the twentieth century. This book is an invitation to celebrate the diversity of houses, to stimulate the pleasure of thinking, projecting, or living intensely.\n¿Qué relación existe entre las maneras de vivir, las formas de proyectar y el pensamiento contemporáneo? ¿Cómo afectan las ideas al diseño de una casa? ¿Cómo transgreden a estas ideas las formas de habitarla? Este libro, un clásico de la refl exión arquitectónica, responde a estas y otras preguntas a través de siete modelos de vida del siglo XX, desde las casas patio de Mies van der Rohe a la cabaña refugio de Martin Heidegger, de la máquina de habitar de Jacques Tati a la Factory de Andy Warhol. Veinte años después de su primera aparición, reeditamos con nuevo diseño y un nuevo prólogo del autor este ensayo de referencia en el que Iñaki Ábalos nos guía de casa en casa, con un estilo ameno y despojado de códigos y prejuicios profesionales, para construir un lúcido recorrido que niega la modernidad como experiencia triunfante del positivismo y recupera la pluralidad radical del siglo XX. Una invitación a celebrar la diversidad de las casas, estimular el placer de pensar, proyectar o habitar intensamente y, ante todo, impulsar una casa que aún no existe.

La buena vida: Visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad (Spanish Edition)

Editorial Gustavo Gili.

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Books by Ábalos, Iñaki

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Tower and Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice

Tower And Office: From Modernist Theory to Contemporary Practice

Essays On Thermodynamics: Architecture and Beauty

The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity

Absolute Beginners

La buena vida: Visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad

The Good Life: A Guided Visit to the Houses of Modernity

2G N.22 Ábalos & Herreros

Atlas pintoresco (I): Vol, 1: el observatorio (Spanish Edition)

La buena vida: Visita guiada a las casas de la modernidad (Spanish Edition)