Second Hand
Reading
Mark
Reading - Food, Agriculture, Nature and Architecture

Sebastién Marot Taking the Country's Side, Polígrafa editions, 2019.Agriculture & Architecture: Taking the Country's Side developed by Sébastien Marot is looking into an environmental movement, which for more than four decades has consistently explored the hypothesis of a future of energy descent and its consequences for the redesign and maintenance of territories. Carolyn Steel Hungry City, how Food Shapes Our Lives, Chatto & Windus, 2008.When you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for thirty million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all. Food shapes cities, and through them, it moulds us – along with the countryside and oceans that feeds us. Every day we inhabit spaces made by food, unconsciously repeating actions that are as old as cities themselves. S. Nucifora, A. Urso L’architettura dei mercati coperti, Editpress, 2012.The market as a container, full architecture, capable of configuring covered spaces of considerable interest, both from a compositional and a formal point of view. From the Roman macella, placed in the heart of the forum, to contemporary malls, "other cities”, antithetical to the historic centres, the book sets out to trace a history of the evolution of these architectures, following a temporal path that, between the two extremes, crosses the loggia spaces of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the iron and cast-iron markets built at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and the rationalist architecture of the markets of the Fascist era.   Ernesto Schick Railway Flora, Florette/Humboldt, 2015.Schick devoted a decade of his life (1969-1978) to observing, classifying and illustrating the wild vegetation that infests the grounds of the international railway marshalling yard in Chiasso. First published in 1980, Railway Flora has maintained all its original charm. Its bond with the territory and with the history of one of the symbols of its economic development, the painstaking research of an all but common man and his scrutiny of the complex relationship between human beings and their environment offer a testimony which remains as intriguing as it ever was.


Mark
Public Space

Mark Pimott The Public Interior as Idea and Project, Jap Sam Books, 2016.Rather than attempting an encyclopaedic overview, the author proposed six potent interpretive themes­—the Garden, the Palace, the Ruin, the Shed, the Machine and the Network—through which many exemplary interiors could be considered, so that the public interior might become more available to the imaginations of those who design them. All together here, the chosen exemplars form a kind of canon of the public interior. Submitted to interpretations in the context of these themes, they offer another lens through which they might be seen; as manifestations of ideas inscribed within material culture. Stanford Anderson On Streets, MIT Press, 1978.On Streets offers a superbly illustrated study of the history and sociology of streets, their role in urban life, their design and structure, as well as an actual demonstration project. The semiology of the street is taken up by Thomas V. Czarnowski and Diana Agrest who focus on the street as the locus of communication and signification in the community. Social scientists G. Levitas, G.H. Winkel, and R. Gutman's contributions are especially intriguing investigations of the anthropology and sociology of streets, man/environment research, and the architectural profession's nostalgia for street life. S. Anderson's own study of neighborhoods in Paris and Cambridge forms the basis for a system of classification for public/private space, while K. Frampton writes about architectural efforts to build alongside streets or to create megastructures with streets inside them. Gordon Cullen Townscape, Architectural Press, 1961.This book pioneered the concept of urban landscape. Townscape is the art of giving visual coherence and organization to the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment. This book had a great influence on architects, planners and others interested in how cities should look. Labics The Architecture of Public Space, Park Books, 2023.This book is devoted to the country’s architecture of public space. Galleries, loggias, porticoes, steps, and courtyards, are the elements that characterize Italy’s historic towns and cities and that make the experience of its public space so intense. Through the illustration and categorization of thirty-two case studies, The Architecture of Public Space has the ambition to build a general theory on the design of public space; a theory that acts before and independently of language and that is based on the idea that the city is structured through the relationship between architecture and public space. Magnan Lampugnani Frammenti urbani, Bollati Boringhieri, 2021.


Mark
Observational Cartographies

Georges Kubler The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, Yale University Press, 2008Georges Kubler’s The Shape of Time is a delicate investigation about the history of man-made objects and things under the rubric of visual forms. Facing the requirement to devise better ways of considering the whole range of man-made things, Kubler traces a way to identify human desires and thoughts through the resilience, evolution and abandon of forms. This reading and this way of considering the objects and the built environment is immeasurably useful to us as presents ways to directly interrogate things themselves, awakening an attitude that has to help us to establish methods and principles in our own work. Ryszard Kapuscinski Travels with Herodotus, London: Penguin, 2008In this captivating travel report taking place over millennia and different continents, the reader accompanies both Kapuscinski and Herodotus in their exploration of the world. Thanks to their endless curiosity, they will encounter many new cultures and people, hearing and recording their stories for the sole purpose of preserving memory. Herodotus’ Histories, Kapuscinski’s faithful companion on his journey, was written in 440 BC and is considered to be the founding work of history in Western literature. Through his expeditions and reports, Kapuscinski celebrates story-telling, the transmission of oral knowledge as the very origin of history and, as did Herodotus thousands of years ago, insists on the importance of recording it in order not to lose memory of our past. Georges Perec An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Wakefield Press, 2010.One overcast weekend in October 1974, Georges Perec set out in quest of the infraordinary: the humdrum, the nonevent, the everyday—what happens, as he put it, when nothing happens. His choice of locale was Place Saint-Sulpice where, ensconced behind first one café window, then another, he spent three days recording everything to pass through his field of vision: the people walking by; the buses and driving-school cars caught in their routes; the pigeons moving suddenly en masse, as if in accordance to some mysterious command; the wedding (and then funeral) at the church in the center of the square; the signs, symbols, and slogans littering everything; and the darkness that eventually absorbs it all.


Mark
Barcelona

Manuel de Solà-Morales i Rubio Ten lessons on Barcelona: urbanistic episodes that have made the modern city, Barcelona: COA de Catalunya, 2008In his Ten lessons, Solà-Morales delivers a sharp and concise description of the ten key episodes – both successes and failures – which helped define the urban character of modern Barcelona. From the laying out of decisive new streets and squares, the extension project of the Eixample to the annexation of the small towns surrounding the walled center, the reader gets a precise, accessible and extremely well documented insight in the evolution of the city. This book represents an essential introduction to the urban study of Barcelona, including historical, territorial, social and architectural perspectives. Manuel de Solà-Morales i Rubio Cerdà / Ensanche, Barcelona: Actar, D.L., 2008Cerdà / Ensanche approaches the man and the famous plan that has defined the urban form and evolution of the city of Barcelona for the past 150 years. The book, based on a lecture, tries to understand the mindset behind a plan, its context and evolution. Furthermore, the lecture is relevant to us because it presents the plan as something alive, with its qualities and weaknesses, where urban planners and architects are still defining its final shape and utterly its character and meaning. J. Emili Hernández-Cros; Gabriel Mora; Xavier Pouplana Arquitectura de Barcelona, Barcelona: Col·legi Oficial d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, 1990 This thorough and detailed architectural guide of Barcelona with over 600 pages presents the most important and historically relevant buildings which marked the evolution of the city over the last centuries. Precisely documented with black and white pictures, drawings and plans but also descriptive texts for each building, this book offers a very complete general overview of Barcelona architecture.
Mark

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