Knowledge Matters

“With a twist and curl, a stretch and a knot, UNStudio unfurls architecture that transforms the most simple blocks into slinky spaces that seduce us into another world. Starting with logic and structural analysis, this firm manages to find forms that pull us away into convolutions revealing new relations between inside and out, public and private, and building and city. Few firms today are as efficient and as joyful in finding new possibilities in the simple act of building.”
Aaron Betsky
 

“The pursuit of architecture as a research based form of knowledge production has been at the forefront of advanced practices since the 1960s. UNStudio’s 11 Tools have radically activated this once academic protocol by taking research into design at all scales and modes of production. This remarkable compendium makes it evident that everything from the organization of management teams to product placement to material invention is a matter of knowledge and that the more forms of knowledge architecture can mobilize, the more it matters.”
Sylvia Lavin
 

“I have yet to come across the equal to this investigation of the recent past and the potential future; and I have yet to find a firm as knowledgeable, and as aware of the appropriateness of differing scales and movements in urban design.”
Anthony Vidler in Architectural Record

Written by Ben van Berkel & Caroline Bos and published by Frame Publishers, Knowledge Matters is an exploration into a more agile form of practice - one that is scalable, relevant and opens conversations about the future of the discipline in the context of today’s knowledge sharing society. It does so by critically engaging the expanded set of demands now placed upon the profession – reframing these demands as the latent potentials of performative architecture in the 21st century. These potentials are explored, realised and speculated upon through the book’s 11 ‘Knowledge Tools’, with projects often appearing more than once and in various guises.

Predicated on the belief that architecture’s inherently contextual quality provides ideal grounding through which to organise increasingly vast and accessible forms of knowledge into distinct and engaged entities, Knowledge Matters recasts architecture as the conduit through which the passive reception of knowledge is reimagined as the active production of it.

Available online from:
The Frame Store
Amazon

In Chinese from:
京东

Price: €29
Publisher: Frame Publishers, Sept 2016
Language: English and Chinese
Written by: Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos
Graphic Design:  Proxi Design (Rein Steger)
Print details: 250 x 220 mm
 / 400 pages / full colour / soft cover

ISBN: 978-94-91727-98-6