Pamphlet Architecture 35: Going Live, From States to Systems

Preface
"If landscape is more than milieu or environment, and encompasses a deterritorialized world, then it is the contested territory, hidden actor, and secret agent of the twentieth century. Stemming from the early work of some of the most influential landscape urbanists--Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Benton MacKaye, Patrick Geddes--this mini manifesto explores underdeveloped patterns and unfinished processes of urbanization at the precise moment when environmentalism began to fail and ecology emerged between the 1970s and 80s. Informed by systems thinking from the modern atomic age, this slim silver pamphlet takes inspiration from Howard T. Odum's big green book A Tropical Rain Forest and brings alive the voices of a group of influential thinkers to exhume a body of ideas buried in the fallout of the explosion of digitalism, urbanism and deconstructivism during the early 1990s. Catalyzed by Chernobyl's nuclear reactor meltdown, a counter-modernity and neo-urbanism emerged from the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of South African Apartheid. What happened during this concentrated era and area of change--across design, from architecture to planning--is nothing short of revolutionary."

For thirty-seven years, Pamphlet Architecture's forward-thinking authors have challenged architecture's conventional wisdom with bold ideas enhanced by visually provocative design. With far-ranging topics including building and urban form, algorithms, machines, and music, each Pamphlet is unique to the individual or group that authors it. The competition for Pamphlet Architecture 35 offered an opportunity for architects, designers, theorists, urbanists, and landscape architects to produce a small manifesto for tomorrow. The competition winner, not announced at press time, reflects the rigor and excitement found throughout the competition's rich history.