Stray Dog Café will release new book by Thom Mayne (founder of Morphosis architects) “Combinatory Urbanism: the complex behavior of collective form”. This book explores new directions and approaches to urban planning and design.
In the PREFACE,
Architecture and urban planning have changed dramatically in the past few decades, not only as separate disciplines and practices but even more so in their relationship to each other.
Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form
For the past forty years Thom Mayne and his firm, Morphosis, have been engaged with projects that exist in the hybrid space between architecture and urban planning. Against this backdrop, Thom Mayne’s new book “Combinatory Urbanism: the complex behavior of collective form” (Stray Dog Café, 2011) surveys 12 urban projects that range in scale from a 16-acre proposal for rebuilding the World Trade Center site after the 2001 terrorist attacks to a 52,000-acre redevelopment proposal for Post-Katrina New Orleans. This book and the proposals found within, posit an alternative to traditional end-state planning solutions, while attempting to illuminate and explicate Mayne’s own work and critical processes.
We do not see architecture and urban planning as mutually exclusive fields, nor do we understand them as occupying certain territories of scale. Traditionally planners work through a quantitative lens, rational and analytical, while architects have opted for the intuitive or qualitative approach. Our methodology seeks a new synthesis between visceral and rational ways of thinking and working.
Combinatory Urbanism is a departure from previous Morphosis publications. Both a manifesto on urbanism and a comprehensive presentation of Morphosis urban design projects, many of which have never before been published; this book fills a void in the world of architectural and urban design publications.
This book makes our design philosophy explicit, conflating manifesto and monograph. Here text and image work together to clarify, demystify, and explain in the simplest terms our often complex processes and the spaces that they create. . . Only now, with ten years of insight into our own creative process, can we begin to articulate a set of methodologies that for so long were simply implicit in our work.
Combinatory Urbanism includes a foreword by Stan Allen, American architect, theorist and Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University, who writes:
This book documents a series of urban projects completed over a ten-year period, exposing a continuous thread of design research beyond the scale of individual buildings. It suggests that, when scaled up, architecture – like any other complex assemblage – undergoes a change of state. It needs new rules and new techniques. Mayne approaches the problem of urbanism as an architect (rather than as a sociologist, urban designer, or planner), confident that the city is a problem of form and design but also fully aware that urbanism requires a different set of design tools—new concepts adequate to the complexity and indeterminacy of the city itself.
+ Publication Information
Title: Combinatory Urbanism: the complex behavior of collective form
Author: Thom Mayne
Publisher: Stray Dog Café
Price: $39.95
Trim Size: 9” x 7”
Format: Flexibound
Pages: 448
ISBN-10: 0983076308
ISBN-13: 978-0983076308
Publication Date: June 12, 2011
+ Book on amazon.com – Combinatory Urbanism: The Complex Behavior of Collective Form,
+ Recommended projects by Morphosis on +MOOD
41 Cooper Square | Morphosis Architects
Cahill Center for Astrophysics | Morphosis