Bøger udgivet af Nhamerica Press LLC

Richard Joseph Neutra (1892-1970), Austrian architect based in the United States, sought throughout his works to correlate modern, rationalist and industrialized architecture to particular conditions of culture, climate, landscape and technology, as well as to local resources. Richard Neutra's first contact with South America took place between October and November 1945, through a diplomatic mission entrusted to him by the US Departmentof State. The relationships that were established there ranged from the personal to the professional and lasted until the mid-1960s. Either because of the political transformations that most Latin American countries underwent at that period of time, or because of Neutra's health condition and his long stays in Germany during the last few years of his life, the fact is that these relationships emerged, flourished, and eventually withered over a period of approximately twenty years. It is safe to say, however, that they went beyond what was stipulated - and even expected - by the US government.In the specific case of Brazil, Neutra landed there for the first time in November 1945 and visited iconic projects of modern architecture, such as the headquarters of the Brazilian Reinsurance Institute and the building of the Brazilian Press Association, designed by the Roberto brothers, and the Seaplane Station, by Atílio Correa Lima, in Rio de Janeiro; the Esther and Leonidas Moreira buildings, respectively by Álvaro Vital Brazil and Eduardo Kneese de Mello, in São Paulo; the Grande Hotel in Ouro Preto and Oscar Niemeyer's Pampulha works, in Minas Gerais. He took pictures and made several drawings - not only of Brazilian landscapes, but of all the countries he visited.Even more important is the fact that Richard Neutra identified with the Latin American people he met. In the preface to the Spanish edition of Survival Through Design, published in Mexico in 1957, Neutra states that he felt culturally "familiar with these people who thought in Castilian" comparing the history of Argentina and Peru with that of Vienna in the post-Renaissance period. In addition to pointing out this similarity around his motherland, the architect also recalled the Spanish origins of the city that had welcomed him in 1925. This was not condescending talk from an European, based in the United States, pandering to Latin American readers; rather, this was a genuine statement from someone who understood the meaning of being the other and who identified with it.

At the dawn of the new millennium, a group of Latin American young architects found themselves on a pilgrimage to one of the centers of design production of the old world. As pilgrims and migrants have done for thousands of years, they thought they were acquiring knowledge in exchange for their cultural currency. Instead, they encountered their own knowledge and used it to subvert the orders of center/periphery, North/South, knowledge/culture, generating new meanings and new concepts for the discipline and the practice of architecture. As you probably know, sudaca is a pejorative term used to label Latin American students in Europe. Supersudaca spins that insult around and celebrates their ways of doing Architecture. One of those ways is the Supersudaca tradition of not closing its processes; instead moving from one place to another, coming back in circles, and following unpredictable paths. Incomplete works celebrate the first two decades of this partnership and set the tone for more works to come in the future. It also resists the idea of a complete body of work, exposing the process as the frame. Edited by Fernando Lara from UPenn Weitzman School of Design, and published by Romano Guerra editora, Supersudaca - Incomplete Works is a fundamental book to understand the flow of architectural ideas from the Global South in the 21st century.

In 2000 my first book O lugar da crítica. Ensaios oportunos de arquitetura, was published. It gathered some texts written as a journalist and architectural critic, during the last decades of the 20th century. And it ended a cycle and opened another: then, after twenty years of professional activities, I decided to fully embrace the academic world. In this century, being a professor and a researcher became my main activity. After another twenty years, this new book presents a part of my activities, collecting some unpublished and out-of-print texts.

Este livro trata o projeto de arquitetura como um processo, ao mesmo tempo, personalisado/singular e anônimo/coletivo. É singular, por dar luz a objetos especiais, irrepetíveis, que respondem a necessidades de um habitante também único, irremovível em sua excepcionalidade e arraigado a um presente eterno e seguro. É também anônimo, ao envolver repertórios atemporais e conhecimentos disciplinares que, através de procedimentos tipológicos, conecta certezas do passado a imprevisibilidades do futuro.O projeto, especificamente da casa brasileira, do século 21 e burguesa, é o tema do livro. Voltada a "poucos" e com qualidades arquitetônicas de exceção no país, o que pode parecer uma ambiguidade, essa casa ainda é lugar de experimentações que se replicam em outros programas e escalas. Trata-se de uma oportunidade de investigar relações indissociáveis entre teoria e prática que, de modo especial, se refletem em processos de ensino e aprendizagem de projeto.

El concepto post-arquitectura se fundamenta en el proceso de crítica y autocrítica, y se usa como punto de partida para la invención de otros códigos discursivos; el prefijo post permite mover los límites epistemológicos de la disciplina.Comencé a escribir Post arquitectura a finales del año 2015, la idea original era revisar críticamente mis reflexiones sobre la 'otra' arquitectura; el material de revisión estaba constituido por tres tesis de posgrado y un par de ensayos; en aquellos documentos propuse algunos conceptos teóricos interesantes, todos centrados en la materialidad del artefacto; así que se podría pensar que el texto ya estaba escrito, y que era cuestión de darle forma; sin embargo, gracias a los avances tecnológicos, las ideas sobre el espacio de la escala humana comenzaron a cambiar y a difundirse a una velocidad vertiginosa, por lo que al leer el compendio, las ideas me parecieron obsoletas; además, aquella no era del todo mi voz.Desde mis inicios como investigadora, el interés principal han sido los otros espacios de América Latina (favelas, barrios populares, villas, entre otros); por lo tanto, mis propuestas teóricas se han desarrollado desde discursos sobre arquitectura vernácula urbana, hasta modelos de diseño colaborativobasados en redes espaciales de elementos; de la consideración del artefacto como geografía en curso, a otras dimensiones del fenómeno geo-urbano-arquitectónico. Luego, las redes espaciales se convirtieron en mapas topológicos a través de descripciones históricas; así, la memoria tomó el rol principal en la comprensión del fenómeno espacial.

This book by André Marques'' is an important reference (the only in English so far) on the work of Brazilian architect João Filgueiras Lima. João Filgueiras Lima''s work is an great example of bioclimatic architecture - an architecture in which aspects of sun control, resulting in a low energetic consumption or uses the benefits from sea breeze, ensuring healthy nurseries without air conditioning.