Книги издательства Actar

One of the essential effects of the sustainability, not only in architecture, is the consideration to the objects' life span. From the moment when a building is required to be highly efficient, it used to be an unknown dimension for architecture;...

Over the last 10 years, Rome has initiated an extensive process of urban transformation involving important changes in both the city s centre and suburbs. The MenoèPiù competition proposes a system of new parks, squares, schools and bui...

This publication contains 14 projects and recent works by Salvador Pérez Arroyo, an experimental and heterodox architect whose designs alternate between light, heavy and utopian. His unstoppable creativity never ceases to amaze. His interes...

Sanaa’s housing projects, both finished (House A, S House, House in a Plum Grove, Small House and Moriyama House), and unfinished projects (Flower House, Garden & House, Seijo Apartments, Ichikawa Apartments, House in China and Eda Apartmen...

For their intervention, Sanaa decided to use acrylic to make transparent curtains. They imagined an installation design that left the existing space of Barcelona Pavilion undisturbed. The acrylic curtains are standing freely on the floor and shape...

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and the technology company HP have developed an international contest with the idea of “self-sufficient city". It is an invitation to reflect on how we will live in the near future in th...

Created for students and professionals to inspire changes in how new buildings are designed and constructed, the Self-Sufficient competition challenged participants to design a self-sufficient and ecologically oriented dwelling. In the early 20th cen...

Images of the Mediatheque have widely circulated in architectural media since 1995, when Toyo Ito's competition project revealed a new structural prototype (or archi-type) that expressed the will to incorporate the notions of mobility and fluidit...

In recent years, Carlos Ferrater’s architecture studio has regularly and continuously developed new avenues for formal expression. This collection of projects comprises a family of independent experiences, joined by a common logic of design app...

This exhibition is the first solo presentation and one of the most important to be held in Europe on the work of the Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (Capivari, São Paolo,1886-1973), a key figure in Brazilian painting and responsible for the...

A graphic guide to ornaments in the twentieth century. It unveils the function of ornament as the agent for specific affects, dismantling the idea that ornament is applied to buildings as a discrete or non-essential entity. Each case exploits specifi...

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networ...

In the Spring of 2008 and following the model from the previously realized cycle dedicated to John Cage, the Casa Encendida presents The Limits of Composition?, a cycle dedicated to what is known as North American Minimalism in which reunites some of...

Metapolis (multicity): Beyond the metropolis of the industrial era emerges the Metapolis of the digital era. The city is now a place of places, where numerous urban models coexist, each with its own qualities that make it different from the rest. In ...

As a complex entity, an interesting building always has an interesting epic, a story that is embedded in the organisation of matter. A specific building epic, that of the Yokohama International Port terminal, is described in this book, the first in t...