With 18 projects ranging from a chair to high-rise buildings, this book offers a cross section of the recent work of Powerhouse Company, which is based in Rotterdam, Munich, and Oslo.These projects are episodes in the success story of an architectural office that only completed its first building, a villa, in 2007. In three essays, Mimi Zeiger, Hans Ibelings, and Gay Gassmann share their insights on the work and the motivations of Powerhouse Company. Episodes traces how Powerhouse Company’s...

Co-edited by MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs and MVRDV partner Jan Knikker, this book presents twenty-five recently completed projects in Europe, North America, and Asia. Among them are several that show the potentials of reuse and transformation, such as 'High Profile', a lamp made from leftover metal profiles, or 'Seoullo 7017', the transformation of an elevated highway in Seoul into an urban park. Many of the projects also have a distinct public dimension, welcoming people in, around...

The East Railway Line in London is a fascinating subject of study. It is rich in history and forms a surreal and fragmented physical presence between the City and the East End. A literary analysis of the chaotically ordered composition of this part of the metropolis involves spaces, places, voids and objects within the realm of this place of experience and imagination, with its visible elements and its ethereal body of histories and myths. The process of naming spaces and elements becomes a n...

Waking up to the idea of a post-growth society, Rotterdam Ripresa presents a city that aims to amend instead of renew, accepting not just the pleasant past, but also the impudent present. To find the new in the old may well be the most sustainable thing of all. Can a city change while remaining the same?

Rotterdam Ripresa adopts an alternative method towards the production of new visions for the city. An urbanism of fragmentary intervention as a cadavre exquis where authorship is deluded rath...

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Spacematrix introduceert stedelijke dichtheid als instrument voor stadsontwikkeling en stadsontwerp. Berghauser Pont en Haupt ontrafelen op beelden gebaseerde termen als ‘urbaniteit’, ‘compacte stad’ en ‘parkstad’ door vraagtekens te plaatsen bij de betrouwbaarheid van zulke begrippen en door kritisch na te gaan of het mogelijk is om die te herdefiniëren met behulp van het begrip dichtheid. De belangstelling van de auteurs voor dichtheid is niet in de eerst...

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How to Build an Indian House focuses on one of Mumbai’s and India’s perennial and most daunting questions: mass housing. It documents, analyses and represents robust examples of different housing types in the city. Along with the documentary drawings and photographs, Sameep Padora developed a series of analytical models in order to understand spatial organization and infrastructure in residential building typologies.

This documentation is particularly perti...

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The fiercely social and vigorously innovative Mei realizes trend-setting buildings in the Netherlands and abroad. This Rotterdam-based architecture firm has built up an idiosyncratic oeuvre in which respect for the environment is central.

This first overview shows works of the past 25 years. From the 1995 modular Smarthouse to the wooden residential building Sawa that is currently being developed: they all display a fascination with intelligent building...