Bøger af Winy Maas

Data-driven research inputting green spaces into hyper-developed urban environmentsIn its newest book, the research group Why Factory produced a series of visualizations and data analyses of various "greened" cities, including Hong Kong, São Paulo, Dubai and more. The research provides an innovative method to calculate the environmental benefits and estimate the costs of greening our cities.

Most celebrated works of architecture of the early 21st century are what one would describe as spectacular; incredible cantilevers, rotating towers, gigantic cupolas and exuberant shapes are features without which a contemporary building would hardly register in the skyline or the media. Never before has architecture tried so hard to amaze. But are these icons true celebrations of human achievements? We Want World Wonders, the seventh volume in The Why Factory's Future Cities series, takes a critical stance toward the global production of the spectacular, investigating the future of amazement in architecture. What constitutes a "world wonder" today, when slums all over the world are growing and the chasm between the rich and poor has become ever larger? How can we provoke wonder and what can we wonder about, now that almost nothing is impossible in architecture? This project contemplates the wonders of the ancient and modern world, exploring, through the eyes of architecture students and practicing architects, speculative fields that might propel us toward the realization of new world wonders and a reconsideration of the classifications and categories that have historically accompanied such structures.

An exciting new manifesto from the Why Factory, Porocity: Opening Up Solidity makes a case for the intervention of the public realm into the private sphere of the city. The Why Factory raises a critique of the city as excessively closed off, and offers tools for the prying open and aerating of the city in such a way that is socially, environmentally and economically valuable to its citizens. How can we introduce pockets for encounters, for streams of circulation, for green areas, for tunnels of cooling? What structures can be imagined to allow for this openness? Creating grottos? Splitting towers? Twisting blocks? More than hypotheses, models and examples (as useful as these are), this book even proposes such tools as a computational means of calculating the degree of porosity of architecture, so that urban thinkers and urban doers can turn the critique upon their own cities.