with Caruso St John, Material Cultures, Penelope Curtis, and more
Critically acclaimed publisher MACK is delighted to announce the launch of a new architecture list this fall. This first season of books spans a sourcebook for sustainable design practices by research and design group Material Cultures; a survey of the relationship between post-war architecture and sculpture by Penelope Curtis; a newly translated essay on Japanese architecture by Manfredo Tafuri, edited and introduced by Mohsen Mostafavi; an investigation of a radical playground in 1960s Amsterdam by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg; and the first volume of the Collected Works of influential architectural practice Caruso St John.
Among the books forthcoming in 2023 are an intimate diary of the construction and inhabitation of Alison and Peter Smithson’s Upper Lawn; a disruptive graphic introduction to architecture from Pier Paolo Tamburelli; a study of the London mansion house by Karin Templin, the first in a series of books on London building types in collaboration with the Architecture Foundation; a meditation on the life of Koechlin House, a home designed “inside out” by Herzog & De Meuron; an investigation of the “border ecologies” of the built environment of the Gaza Strip; a book on tarpaulin as a multivalent material in provisional, preservative, and hyper-ambitious forms of architecture; and an examination of the effects of disease and health on urban planning.
MACK architecture books will bring together voices from diverse areas of practice and expertise to cover topics across urbanism, housing, infrastructure, history, and theory. Books on established and emerging practices will sit alongside surveys of understudied vernacular forms and challenging new approaches to the architectures of health, capital, and nationhood.
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MACK fall 2022 architecture books
Caruso St John, Collected Works: Volume 1 1990–2005
The first volume of this expansive and experimental career retrospective by renowned international practice Caruso St John proposes a vision of the built environment as composed not just of the new but of everything that has come before—a network of culture, memory, and emotion. This volume includes extensive unseen drawings and images as well as new and archival texts by Wim Wenders, Claes Caldenby, Vicky Richardson, and more, encompassing key projects such as The New Art Gallery Walsall, Kalmar town square, and Nottingham Contemporary.
Material Cultures, Material Reform
This critical sourcebook from emerging research and design group Material Cultures presents a set of short, incisive texts considering how we can reshape architecture for a post-carbon future. Examining the cultures and infrastructures that shape the architectural industry and the destructive ecologies it fosters, this book proposes alternative systems based on direct relationships with the materials from which our world is built.
Manfredo Tafuri, Modern Architecture in Japan
This 1964 essay by celebrated Italian architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri, translated into English for the very first time, offers a rare outsider’s view of the post-war Japanese architecture of figures such as Kenzo Tange, arguing for the ‘contradictory unity’ of Western modernism and Japanese tradition. This richly illustrated volume is introduced and edited by Mohsen Mostafavi, with extensive new essays on the history of Japanese architecture, Italian criticism, and the idiosyncrasies of Tafuri’s luminous text.
Penelope Curtis, The Pliable Plane: The Wall as Surface in Sculpture and Architecture, 1945–1975
In this study of the influence of sculpture on architecture in the post-war period, critic and curator Penelope Curtis identifies the wall as a key locus of invention. Taking in the discovery of the Lascaux Caves, the development of materials such as concrete and aluminium, and figures such as Henry Moore, Anni Albers, Frederick Kiesler, and Mary Martin, Curtis offers a lucid account of interdisciplinary collaboration and infiltration, and a new understanding of the wall as support, partition, and versatile surface.
Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Huts, Temples, Castles
These unseen images by celebrated architectural photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg document a radical playground in 1960s Amsterdam in which children constructed their own buildings from waste materials. Schulz-Dornburg captures an intuitive architectural intelligence at work and raises questions around the wider relations of play and imagination to architecture. An essay by historian Tom Wilkinson explores these themes and the architecture of play in the context of post-war Europe.
Visit the MACK website for details on all our titles.
