Rare Special Editions available from ACC Art Books –  More Information

Water is far too valuable of a resource to be disposed as a waste. Working Water presents the work of Denver landscape architecture firm Wenk Associates, highlighting their projects that treat stormwater, and the infrastructure that controls it, as a resource that supports functioning natural systems and enhanced urban open space. Built projects illustrate how stormwater runoff can be directed to support an intimate private garden, to the large-scale redevelopment of derelict industrial lands in Milwaukee organised around a stormwater park and open space system. Planning projects range from a plan for a surface stormwater system developed incrementally for a redeveloping urban district in central Denver, to a multi-generational plan for restoration of the Los Angeles River that will require profound changes in stormwater management policies and practice for full implementation. The final chapter describes the challenges, strategies, and lessons learned over the firm’s 37-year history as part of implementing new approaches to infrastructure design that can withstand the test of time.

Collage is one of the most popular and pervasive of all art-forms, yet this is the first historical survey book ever published on the subject. Featuring over 200 works, ranging from the 1500s to the present day, it offers an entirely new approach. Hitherto, collage has been presented as a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked in particular to Pablo Picasso and Cubism in the years just before the First World War. In Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, we trace its origins back to books and prints of the 1500s, through to the boom in popularity of scrapbooks and do-it-yourself collage during the Victorian period, and then through Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. Collage became the technique of choice in the 1960s and 1970s for anti-establishment protest, and in the present day is used by millions of us through digital devices. The definition of collage employed here is a broad one, encompassing cut-and-pasted paper, photography, patchwork, film and digital technology and ranging from work by professionals to unknown makers, amateurs and children.

Contents:

Collage Over the Centuries, an introductory essay by Patrick Elliott; Collage Before Modernism by Freya Gowrley; On Edge: Exploring Collage Tactics and Terminology by Yuval Etgar; catalogue of exhibition works; a Chronology of Collage.

EUROPAN is an initiative that puts on competitions for young architects. Founded in 1989 and supported by 13 countries in the EU, it runs a competition every two years for innovative and experimental models in urban development. The 2017 and 2019 EUROPAN competitions focused on the topic Productive Cities. The 2019 edition involved more than 900 planning teams from all over Europe, who prepared proposals for 47 towns.

This book features the 12 winning submissions to the 2019 Productive Cities 2 competition for the Austrian cities Graz, Innsbruck, Villach, Weiz, and Vienna. They are presented in great detail through photos, drawings and visualisations, along with commenting texts. The projects focus on architectural and urban-planning interventions and processes. They offer innovative concepts for the use of public space as well as holistic solutions for sustainable construction and models for cross-functional use of space. The book is a rich source for trend-setting ideas about our future cities and the development of a new urban lifestyle.

When do painterly gestures become objects or spaces? When the colours and lines in a picture become the subject, do they then flirt with or repel one another? Fascinated by the gaudy banality of day-to-day life, Anna Nero (*1988) scratches on the surface of things with the help of quotes from advertising, fashion, and comics as well as samples of abstract and concrete painting. The question of the ‘thingness’ of a picture as a painterly image or real ceramic object, the question of its material characteristics, its use, its “essence” is central to her work and also the focus of her first monograph.

Text in English and German.

Shanghai-based Atelier Deshaus, founded in 2001 as one of the first private architectural firms in China, is one of the country’s most important and innovative design studios. The architects made their name worldwide in 2014 with the much-acclaimed West Bund site for Shanghai’s Long Museum, which has since been followed by a series of further museum and other art-related projects. Such cultural and community buildings of various scale are the main focus of Atelier Deshaus, who refuse the usual commercial construction tasks in China. Their formally strong buildings are developed from reading the site with special attention being paid to the preservation of Shanghai’s industrial heritage after decades of a tabula rasa policy in the city’s urban development.

At the core of this first monograph are Atelier Deshaus’s 20 most important designs from two decades. They are documented in rich detail through plans and images as well as concise explanatory texts by the architects. In an extensive conversation with Hubertus Adam, the firm’s principals Liu Yichun and Chen Yifeng offer insights into their way of thinking, their understanding of Chinese tradition, their relation to art, and the challenges of working as a non-governmental office in China. Additional essays place Atelier Deshaus in the context of contemporary international architecture and discuss their key projects with regard to constructive qualities and atmosphere.