Stufish


Book Description

This issue of AD looks at the work of STUFISH Entertainment Architects. Founded by the late Mark Fisher, the legendary British architect known for his rock music stage sets for bands including the Rolling Stones, U2 and Pink Floyd, the studio is a recognised leader in entertainment architecture. The STUFISH team of architects, designers, visualisers, production managers, technical specialists and producers creates ambitious and pioneering work, exploring new ways to inspire audiences and visitors, from musical experiences to theatrical shows, exhibitions and buildings. Its work has been synonymous with the key theatrical, musical and monumental events embodied in the collective memory of generations across the globe since the mid-1990s. Entertainment architecture is a highly innovative, creative endeavour, producing ever-more elaborate, architectural spectacles. This issue visits the many facets of STUFISH – its history and design process, audience memory and experience –exploring the story behind and evolution of this particular brand of popular culture and its spatial manifestations, and touching on what the future may hold for it. Contributors include: Leonard Auerbach, Victoria Broackes, Peter Cook, Adam Davis, Haidy Geismar, Robert Kronenburg, Theo Lorenz, Ash Nehru, Aubrey Powell, Neil Thomas, Willie Williams, Patrick Woodroffe and Maciej Woroniecki.




Production Urbanism


Book Description

The Industrial Revolution caused a paradigm shift from an agrarian economy to a manufacturing economy, giving birth to the industrial city. ‘City’ became synonymous with a concentration of factories causing unfiltered scenes between centres of production and urban dwellings. The corrupted image of the city ultimately led to the displacement and separation of production away from residential zones in the 20th century. However, new innovative manufacturing technologies are allowing a coexistence between factories and dwellings through hybrid typologies that blend production back into the urban fabric. This AD issue discusses the implications of the re-emergence of production as an architectural and urban agenda through hybrid models that engage a new socioeconomic shift. Given the contemporary circumstances of a global pandemic affecting global supply chains, it is necessary to deliver a vision for a new productive urbanism that allows autonomous circular economies to flourish. Our 21st-century cities have an obligation to explore a new industrial revolution of shared economies that optimise the use of the legacy systems, infrastructure and building stock. Yet it is ultimately up to architecture to take arms in delivering new typologies. Contributors: Frank Barkow, Michele Bonino and Maria Paola Repellino, Kristiaan Borret, Vicente Guallart, Tali Hatuka, Doojin Hwang, Yerin Kang and Chihoon Lee, Kengo Kuma, Wesley Leeman, Scott Lloyd and Alexis Kalagas, Winy Maas, DK Osseo-Asare, Marina Otero Verzier, Nina Rappaport, and Shohei Shigematsu. Featured architects: Barkow Leibinger, DJH Architects, Goldsmith, Kengo Kuma & Associates, MVRDV, OMA, and TEN.




This Must Be The Place


Book Description

This Must Be The Place is the first architectural history of popular music performance space, describing its beginnings, its different typologies, and its development into a distinctive genre of building design. It examines the design and form of popular music architecture and charts how it has been developed in ad-hoc ways by non-professionals such as building owners, promoters, and the musicians themselves as well as professionally by architects, designers, and construction specialists. With a primary focus on Europe and North America (and excursions to Australia, the Far East and South America), it explores audience experience and how venues have influenced the development of different musical scenes. From music halls and Vaudeville in the 1800s, via the seminal clubs and theatres of the 20th century, to the large-scale multi-million-dollar arena concerts of today, this book explores the impact that the use of private and public space for performance has on our cities' urban identity, and, to a lesser extent, how rural space is perceived and used. Like architecture, popular music is neither static nor standardized; it continuously develops and has multiple strands. This Must Be The Place describes the factors that have determined the development of music venue architecture, focusing on both famous and less well-known examples from the smallest bar room music space to the largest stadium-filling rock set.




Emerging Talents


Book Description

There is a newfound interest in architectural education. This AD is a survey of some of the best contemporary architecture student work in the world. The most forward-looking architecture schools worldwide are reinventing pedagogy in the hope of developing radical syllabi that are a rich mix of the virtual and the actual. Design education is changing and adapting to compensate for the new material changes to the discipline, and is being used to disentangle old, outmoded spatial practices and replace them with new paradigms of space and representation. This issue showcases the students and teachers who are pushing the envelope of architecture in extraordinary ways, offering their insights into its future materiality and spatial dexterity. It premieres a new young generation of architects who are likely to become names in the architectural profession and possibly important teachers themselves. Their work has been selected by their own influential teachers of architecture who describe the studio methodologies – and reasons for them – that prompted the work. Contributors: Daniel K Brown, Jane Burry, Nat Chard, Odile Decq, Evan Douglis, Riet Eeckhout, Mark Garcia, Nicolas Hannequin, Perry Kulper, Elena Manferdini, Mark Morris, Hani Rashid, and Michael Young. Featured institutions: A Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan; Architectural Association, London; Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; Carleton University, Ottawa; CONFLUENCE Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture, Paris; Cooper Union, New York; University of Greenwich, London; KU Leuven, Belgium; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York; Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles; Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne; Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand; and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna




Robert Lepage / Ex Machina


Book Description

Robert Lepage/Ex Machina: Revolutions in Theatrical Space provides an ideal introduction to one of our most innovative companies – and a much-needed and timely reappraisal of Lepage's oeuvre. International, interdisciplinary and intercultural to the core, Ex Machina have negotiated some of the most complex creative and cultural challenges of our time. This book maps the story of that journey by analysing the full spectrum of their richly varied work. Through a comprehensive historiography of productions since 1994, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina offers a detailed picture of the relationship between director and company, while connecting Ex Machina to culturally specific features of Québec, and its theatre. This book reveals for the first time how overlooked aspects of creativity and culture shaped the company's early work, while installing a dynamic interplay between director and company that would spark a unique and ongoing evolution of praxis. Central to this re-evaluation of practice is the book's identification of an architectural aesthetic at the heart of Ex Machina's work, an aesthetic which provides its artistic and political centres of gravity. Moreover, this architectural aesthetic powers the emergence of concrete narrative as a new and distinctive mode of theatrical storytelling – uniting story and space, body and technology, content and form – and demanding that we discover the politics of these performances in the energetic gestures of theatre design, and space itself. Drawing on extensive interviews with Lepage, Ex Machina personnel and collaborative partners, Robert Lepage/Ex Machina calls upon us to revise both our creative and critical perceptions of this vital and distinctive practice.




Narrative Environments and Experience Design


Book Description

This book argues narrative, people and place are inseparable and pursues the consequences of this insight through the design of narrative environments. This is a new and distinct area of practice that weaves together and extends narrative theory, spatial theory and design theory. Examples of narrative spaces, such as exhibitions, brand experiences, urban design and socially engaged participatory interventions in the public realm, are explored to show how space acts as a medium of communication through a synthesis of materials, structures and technologies, and how particular social behaviours are reproduced or critiqued through spatial narratives. This book will be of interest to scholars in design studies, urban studies, architecture, new materialism and design practitioners in the creative industries.




Worldmodelling


Book Description

In light of current developments in modelling, and with the aim of reinvigorating debates around the potentiality of the architectural model – its philosophies, technologies and futures – this issue of AD examines how the model has developed to become an immersive worldbuilding machine. Worldbuilding is the creation of imaginary worlds through forms of cultural production. Although this discourse began with an analysis of imaginary places constructed in works of literature, it has evolved to encompass worlds from fields such as cinema, games, design, landscape, urbanism and architecture. Worldbuilding differs from the notion of worldmaking, which deals with how speculative thinking can influence the construction of the phenomenal world. As architects postulate ever-increasingly complex world models from which to draw inspiration and inform their practice, questions of scale, representation and collaboration emerge. Discussed through a range of articles from acclaimed international contributors in the fields of both architecture and media studies, this issue explores how the architectural model is situated between concepts of worldbuilding and worldmaking – in the creative space of worldmodelling. Contributors: Kathy Battista, Thea Brejzek and Lawrence Wallen, Pascal Bronner and Thomas Hillier, Mark Cousins, James A Craig and Matt Ozga-Lawn, Kate Davies, Ryan Dillon, Christian Hubert, Chad Randl, Theodore Spyropoulos, and Mark JP Wolf. Featured architects: Phil Ayres, FleaFolly Architects, Minimaforms, and Stasus.




City of Glass


Book Description

When reclusive crime writer Daniel Quinn receives a mysterious call seeking a private detective in the middle of the night, he quickly and unwittingly becomes the protagonist in a thriller of his own. As the familiar territory of the noir detective genre gives way to something altogether more disturbing, Quinn becomes consumed by his mission, and begins to lose his grip on reality.




The Arena Concert


Book Description

The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment is the first sustained engagement with what might said to be - in its melding of concert and gathering, in its evolving relationship with digital and social media, in its delivery of event, experience, technology and star - the art form of the 21st century. This volume offers interviews with key designers, discussions of the practicalities of mounting arena concerts, mixing and performing live to a mass audience, recollections of the giants of late twentieth century music in performance, and critiques of latter-day pretenders to the throne. The authors track the evolution of the arena concert, consider design and architecture, celebrity and fashion, and turn to feminism, ethnographic research, and ideas of humour, liveness and authenticity, in order to explore and frame the arena concert. The arena concert becomes the “real time” centre of a global digital network, and the gig-goer pays not only for an immersion in (and, indeed, role in) its spectacular nature, but also for a close encounter with the performers, in this contained and exalted space. The spectacular nature of the arena concert raises challenges that have yet to be fully technologically overcome, and has given rise to a reinvention of what live music actually means. Love it or loathe it, the arena concert is a major presence in the cultural landscape of the 21st century. This volume finds out why.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music, Space and Place


Book Description

Popular music scholars have long been interested in the connection between place and music. This collection brings together a number of key scholars in order to introduce readers to concepts and theories used to explore the relationships between place and music. An interdisciplinary volume, drawing from sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, media, cultural, and communication studies, this book covers a wide-range of topics germane to the production and consumption of place in popular music. Through considerations of changes in technology and the mediascape that have shaped the experience of popular music (vinyl, iPods, social media), the role of social difference and how it shapes sociomusical encounters (queer spaces, gendered and racialised spaces), as well as the construction and representations of place (musical tourism, city branding, urban mythologies), this is an up-to-the-moment overview of central discussions about place and music. The contributors explore a range of contexts, moving from the studio to the stage, the city to the suburb, the bedroom to festival, from nightclub to museum, with each entry highlighting the diverse and complex ways in which music and place are mutually constitutive.