From 2008 to 2010, Madrid based architects Luis M. Mansilla and Emilio Tuñón held the Jean Labatut Visiting Professorship at the Princeton School of Architecture. More than a collection of student work, From Rules to Constraints is a wide ranging reflection on teaching, design practice, history and the city. Focusing on three sites at three distinct scales, this book examines the constraints of the architectural project—social, political, historical, and environmental in order to create new rules for working. Examining both their teaching methods and Mansilla + Tuñón’s own design work, the book presents the design process as an ongoing conversation between the building and the environment, between freedom and limits, and between the decided and undecided.

Unsangdong Architects shared with us the latest photos of the nearly finished “Culture Forest”, the Culture & Art Center in SeongDong-gu, Republic of Korea. Read the architect’s description and view schematic renderings on our previous post or the first stage of the construction, here.

More photos after the break.

Grounds for Detroit – In this collaborative project, a distinct urban space – the mid-block of residential neighborhood – has been imported to Venice from Detroit. The installation is a recreation – and re-imagining – of a project undertaken in a abandoned single-family house in Detroit 2010.

In the original work, five architects collectively bought a property on Moran Street for $500 cash at a public auction. Each practice then contracted a distinct intervention within its formerly domestic spaces: a kitchen was transformed into a mobile threshold; a bedroom into a hermetic multi-sensory chamber; the dinning room a stepped interior topography; and the detached garage became a atmospheric observatory.

No one captured the midcentury modernism of the Mad Men era better than Balthazar Korab. As one of the period’s most prolific and celebrated architecture photographers, Korab captured images as graceful and elegant as his subjects. His iconic photographs for master architects immortalized their finest works, while leaving his own indelible impact on twentieth century visual culture. In this riveting illustrated biography, the first dedicated solely to his life and career, author John Comazzi traces Korab’s circuitous path to a career in photography. He paints a vivid picture of a young man forced to flee his native Hungary, who goes on to study architecture at the famed École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before emigrating to the United States and launching his career as Eero Saarinen’s on-staff photographer.

This issue of eVolo studies the most innovative examples of performance and exhibition architecture today. These are projects that revolutionize architecture on many levels, including sustainability, aesthetics, technology, and urban design. It is interesting to point out that these works are not concentrated in one specific region, but are located in every corner of the globe; from MVRDV’s Comic and Animation Museum in China, to the new Broad Museum in Los Angeles by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, or Kengo Kuma’s Victoria and Albert Museum in Dundee, Scotland.

Typology, volume 2 of the new series Christ & Gantenbein Review, presents more than 150 buildings located in Rome, New York, Hong Kong and Buenos Aires that have been analyzed by the chair of Emanuel Christ and Christoph Gantenbein at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. This selective and subjective inventory of metropolitan and essentially anonymous 20th century building production provides a basis for urban project creation.

Is resistance possible? Log 25, guest edited by French architect Francois Roche, urges us to Reclaim Resistance — to merge refusal and vitality into a schizophrenic logic able to navigate the antagonism between the bottom-up and top-down conditions of the globalized world. Architects and artists, theorists and philosophers, engineers and programmers drift between strategies of emergence, computation, and robotic fabrication, delineating new tactics and tools for renegotiating mechanisms of power and unsettling architectural conventions.

With its recent transformation, King’s Cross station has re-emerged as one of london’s most iconic buildings. Built in 1852, its elegance and simplicity stood in stark opposition to the neo-gothic extravagance of neighbouring St Pancras, and held its place as a prototype of modern architecture. The story of this station is a fascinating one. It’s a tale of changing fortunes and tides that follows the ascent and decline of Britain’s railways.

Designers around the world are carving out opportunities for new kinds of engagement, new kinds of collaboration, new kinds of design outcomes, and new kinds of practice; overturning the inherited assumptions of the design professions. Seventeen conversations with practitioners from the fields of architecture, policy, activism, design, education, research, history, community engagement and more, each representing an emergent role for designers to occupy. Whether the “civic entrepreneur,” the “double agent,” or the “strategic designer,” this book offers a diverse spectrum of approaches to design, each offering a potential future for architectural practice.

The sophisticated designs by Terunobu Fujimori (1946) are fascinating: archaic, eccentric, poetic, and ecological, almost all of them are made of simple, traditional materials such as earth, stone, wood, coal, bark, and mortar. His architecture appeals to primordial instincts, promising warmth and protection. His structures serve as role models for a generation of young international architects who value a mode of building that is ecological, historically aware, and sustainable.