Research-based design has been foundational for landscape architecture. Analytical layering in geographically-based mappings has become a universally applied, formulaic approach. For waste landscapes, this has generated similar redevelopment strategies for drastically differing waste landscape conditions. This site typology, however, requires more nuanced approaches. As a design-research framework, “landscape lifecycles” aims to tackle waste landscapes with integrative strategies and techniques that reactivate waste as a legible and dynamic contributor to local and regional contexts; a method for integrating multiple diverse programs rooted in economic, environmental, and social performance to form hybrid assemblages in the transformation of perceived material and spatial waste. This article highlights design-research and generative representational methods developed through projects and coursework that embrace speculation as a means of engaging with waste conditions at multiple scales — from the material to the region. These methods range from speculative geographic, process, and abstract mapping to scenario testing to time-based, projective design that document, explore, and test an argumentative hypothesis and the multi-scalar design implications of research on the imaginative potentials of waste transformation.

The population of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, has increased by 197% in the last twenty years, resulting in the creation of sprawling districts with no basic infrastructure that house over 60% of the city’s population. Current development plans are proving ineffective as they require huge investments toward land-owner compensation and infrastructure, and rely on developers for implementation. As an alternative, we have developed a strategic framework for sustainable and affordable district upgrading for these sites as an Incremental Development Manual. The manual offers a strategy for in situ development that accommodates incremental growth and collective improvements to residents’ shared plots. It operates on a small scale, working on the mutual benefits of four households working together as the basic unit for all further transformation. This paper will demonstrate how this strategy reflects the diversity of housing needs and incomes of ger district inhabitants, and discusses potential financial tools for housing and infrastructure provision, including the potential for cooperative development. 

This article explores the potential of organic material to conceptualize new means of future tectonic beyond the duality of construction technology and representation through a case study of indigenous craft making. Particularly, we propose the understanding of organic tectonic practice as the dynamic action among the human body, spaces, surface, materials, structural systems, and construction. This idea is demonstrated through the tectonic exploration of banana leaves wrapping practices. The practice has been culturally established as a common indigenous technique in Indonesia, and it has been transmitted across generations through the direct practical demonstration of “making.” The findings suggest that the essence of tectonic practice may be found not merely through its materiality but also within the dialogues that occurred during wrapping operation as an integrated set of action knowledge. The exploration of banana leaf wrapping typologies introduced the idea of tectonics as a whole process that considers the relationship between elements that are often separated. This study concludes that the knowledge of action is equally essential with material properties. Such knowledge must be maintained and promoted as a possibility of searching for good materials in contemporary design practices.

Inequity is the underlying cause of today’s major societal health dilemmas. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines social health as “the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.” The success of this sequence depends on the distribution of money, power, and resources. Food is central in everyone’s life: an extended commitment for an equitable access to healthy food is necessary--even more during times of isolation due to the COVID19 pandemic. Focus group studies with community residents are important in increasing public understanding and community engagement around food accessibility, prevention of “food deserts,” and associated health issues. Urban United Roots, an organization discussed in this paper, offers an overview on how Baltimore, Maryland is assisting access to healthy food both spatially (elimination of food desert) and socially (achievement of food equity). This Baltimore-group addresses healthy food options that impact every aspect of the quality of life through the Honey Badger Promenade project in Harlem Park.

More Water, Less Land, New Architecture Sea Level Rise and the Future of Coastal Urbanism

By Weston Wright With forewords by Kenneth Framptonand Ana Tostoes, and afterwords by Rasmus Waern and Karsten Harries

Baunach, Ger.: AADR - Spurbuch Verlag, 2022

17.3 x 2 x 24 cm
[6.8 x 0.8 x 9.4 inches in.] illustrated

176 pages

€38 / $36.42 paperback

ISBN: 978-3-88778-588-8

From Eco-Cities to Sustainable City-Regions: China’s Uncertain Quest for an Ecological Civilization

By Ernest J. Yanarella and Richard S. Levine 

Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020

Dimensions illustrations

288 pages

US$142 (hardcover)

US$45 (paperback)

US$36 (eBook) 

ISBN: 9781839102783

Race and Modern Architecture.

A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present

By Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds Pittsburgh PA, USA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020

7 x 10 in. [17,8 x 25,4 cm]

96 b&w illustrations

424 pages

 $45 paperback

July, 2020

ISBN: 978-082 296 6593

Building Character. The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style

By Charles L. Davis II

Pittsburg PA, USA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

7 x 10 in. [17,8 x 25,4 cm] 

89 b&w illustrations, 12 color plates

320 pages

$55 hardcover

December, 2019

ISBN: 978-0822945550

Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture

By Diane Y. F. Ghirardo

London: Yale University Press

254 mm x 203 mm

135 color + 5 b/w illustrations

280 pages

US$65 / £50.00 GBP (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0300234930

The Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) is a transborder region that lies in the floodplain of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo River. The region, which covers four Texas counties and the northern portion of the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is home to more than 900 colonias on the Texas side of the border. These informal, unincorporated settlements–which house more than 400,000 people–are characterized by substandard housing and a lack of civil infrastructure including sewers, paved roads, and potable water. Many of the colonias flood regularly. This proposal imagines a modular, transitional approach to designing housing and landscape in LRGV colonias. While typical modular housing projects are standardized, prefabricated, packed, shipped, and assembled onsite; the following proposal extends modular efficiencies to the entire site, incorporating landscape, flood control, and canal systems. The holistic, modular approach allows for the flexible growth and decline of the community over the course of one hundred years. Ultimately, the transitional, modular model challenges the adversarial environmental, social, and economic arrangements that exist in colonia developments, imagining a more sympathetic relationship between people, water, and land.

3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), marks the latest in a series of technological and societal revolutions that span from the printing press to the personal computer and beyond. A key asset of this technology is that it aligns the architect with the manufacturing process, integrating the design and fabrication. Additive manufacturing, particularly fused deposition modeling (FDM), can further weave construction typologies like Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile block system by controlling the deposition process to create lightweight stressed-skin blocks with the potential for multiple functions. The research and creation of an initial prototype Woven Block module using FDM printing will be discussed.

Today’s Los Angeles region first concentrated around its river, which now meanders through the city’s disparate social topography for over fifty miles as a largely concrete channel before it discharges into the Pacific Ocean. Since the city’s inception various actors, including engineers, planners, and Supreme Court justices, actively shaped the image of the LA River through flood control practices. This article traces these framings and their co-constitution with policy and legislation in shaping collective visions of the LA River: a source of sustenance, a force of water, a concrete landscape to be celebrated, a desolate wasteland, a dormant ecology, and critical infrastructure for a resilient LA climate future.

Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures          

By Franca Trubiano, Ramona Adlakha, and Ramune Bartuskaite (eds.)   

Novato CA, USA: Applied Research and Design / Oro Editions, 2019, 2018

241 mm x 165 mm

144 pages

US$ 29.95 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-943532-43-8