Imminent Commons: The Expanded City: Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017

Description

In light of the increasing disengagement between urban and rural areas, this book address the interdependency of cities with ecological and technological processes outside the purview of traditional urban planning. It compiles a huge amount of essays in regards to the most important topics that cities must address today, such as their connection with global data networks, ecological cycles of resources which supersede the traditional boundaries of urbanism. For this reason, it frames investigation of contemporary urbanism on nine imminent commons grouping the urban commons into resources and technologies lead us to the arcane classification of natural resources: air, water, fire, and earth, the four elements of ancient cosmologies; and five basic technological commons based on expanded human capacities: sensing, communicating, moving, making, and recycling.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an award-winning architect and a tenured professor at Princeton University. His career has consistently merged the practice of architecture with continued theoretical and academic engagement. He was trained at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (Hons), and holds a Master in Architecture from the Harvard GSD (with Distinction). He worked at OMA in Rotterdam (1991-93), prior to establishing FOA in 1993, and AZPML in 2011. He was the dean of Princeton School of Architecture (2012-14) and of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam (2000-5). He was the inaugural recipient of the Norman Foster professorship at Yale University School of Architecture (2010-11), and has lectured widely and internationally at institutions such as the AA School, Columbia GSAPP, UCLA, and Yokohama University. His texts can be found in many professional publications such as El Croquis, Quaderns, A+U, Arch+, Log, AD and Harvard Design Magazine, and many of them are collected in The Sniper's Log (2012).

"Most similar to Urban Questions for the Near Future is Book 2: The Expanded City, the one with the blue cover. Just a tad shorter, at 424 pages, this book keeps the nine-commons structure of the first book but applies it to "providing arguments of continuity between urban and extra-urban areas." Although the 2017 Seoul Biennale "focuses on issues and proposals, not on authors and works," there's plenty of overlap between the contributors in these two books; fitting, given how they came out of the Biennale's main "Nine Commons" thematic exhibition." --A Daily Dose of Architecture