The newly released Patkau Architects: Material Operations demonstrates how the firm utilizes traditional building material and unconventional construction methods to produce poetic forms with a unique identity. The book includes a preface from Nader:

“[Patkau’s] work has always maintained a deep commitment to the development of a ‘tectonic culture,’ using construction elements not only for the fabrication of buildings but indeed to transcend the ‘merely material’ and create artful and poetic assemblies that dematerialize the conventions with which common construction is oft associated.”

Buy the book HERE. Read Nader’s preface HERE.

“Engaging the grain of wood for the Skating Shelters is a way of understanding how its fibers may inform the possibility of spatial and formal pliancy. In contradistinction to classical modes of composition, where the figurative and compositional aspects of design are assumed, this suggests a bottom-up approach: discovering through tinkering. By extension, their requisite play with plywood acknowledges the dual directionality of plywood laminates, the overlay of which offers a structural composite that defies that very natural grain to work at a modular scale of industrial production. The 4′ x 8′ sheet here becomes a unit of production that helps not only to extend seamless surfaces but also to create the very joints that make its tectonic ethic an irreducible part of its inventive expression.”

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Sarah Goldhagen brilliantly prompts the allegory of “blindsight” to show how the recent findings of cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology can become the basis for a thoroughgoing paradigm shift in the understanding and construction of the built environment. In explaining the connection between human experience and the world as an embodied phenomenon, she reconfigures the foundations of thinking that have dominated the scholarly, design and building professions. But she does more: bringing the sciences deep into the humanities, she reconceptualizes our understanding of the built environment’s profound effects on individuals, communities, and societies.

Goldhagen’s sharp eye as a design thinker maps out this new terrain through an array of specific and illuminating architectural, landscape, and urban explorations, offering examples that span ages, styles, and sensibilities. In reading this book, architects and planners will continually be asking themselves to rethink their own design practices and methodologies. Even more importantly, the tenets of the book stand to have a sweeping impact on a much broader audience of policy makers and the general public by helping us to gauge how we build, construct policy, integrate disciplines, define design agency, and produce rich and ennobling environments in a rapidly changing world around us.

Lucidly written in beautiful prose, this book will stimulate and delight professionals, students, and non-professionals alike. A must-read for all of us, there is much to learn from it!

Buy it HERE.

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