At the dawn of the twenty-first century, digital technologies have enabled new techniques for the development of architecture. In Catalytic Formations, Ali Rahim suggests that these digital design techniques have the potential to affect the wider cultural landscape in profound ways. Digital technologies allow architecture to engage in a feedback loop with its context -- to absorb influences and produce concrete effects on its users. This book offers both a philosophy and specific techniques for how architects can catalyze cultural advancements. Also included are provocative examples from Rahim's work at Contemporary Architecture Practice and projects by Zaha Hadid, Greg Lynn, FORM, and other cutting edge architects.

Future Offices examines the evolving nature of the office as a spatial asset. Rapid changes in culture, technology, and society have upended longstanding notions of offices and the nature of work itself. While companies and capital around the globe have become increasingly consolidated, labour vis-à-vis technology has become increasingly decentralized. The office, traditionally a key spatial interlocutor between labour and capital is caught in an awkward position with typological considerations for architecture. What should the future office look like? What is the future role of the headquarters? What does the office’s changing role mean for urbanism? The works collected here provide frameworks for understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of contemporary work, manufacturing, and commerce, and they aspire to influence new ways of conceiving architecture at multiple scales. They speculate upon a future where offices acquire new facets as resources of space, knowledge, and production that participate in local and global economic and cultural contexts in new hybridised forms. At the heart of this is a recognition that the new ways in which companies integrate into in society should be reflected in architecture itself.

Future Airports re-examines the relationship between the growth of capital and the history of New York City real estate by speculating that airports play a role in the city's financial success. What is the typology of a successful airport for the 21st Century? What role does the airport play in the context of rapid globalisation and ever-expanding International logistics networks? Can the Airport become a regional economic catalyst while also creating an inspiring and novel experience for passengers? The Future Airport becomes an important infrastructural space intricately weaving New York City's desire to maintain its leadership in global financial markets with the imminent need of improved air infrastructure and the emergence of the logistics hub as an important and growing building typology.

Technological choices give us ways to bridge the gap between the technical and the cultural, immersing one within the other. The immersion creates a platform for innovation. The techniques that people generate through their use of technology exert pressure on technical refinement and enfold those refinements within culture. Technological choices define a world within which specific alternatives of uses emerge, and they define a subject who chooses among those alternatives. In the making of the world through technology, we simultaneously enact great cultural change. In order for architecture to remain relevant in the future and create a critique of the present it must operate within technology, developing technological practices and design methods that become intrinsic to technology as opposed to applying it to a previously conceived design. The scope and significance of this is potentially enormous. Asset Architecture 3 attempts to illustrate some of the concepts, directions, and practices that have taken on this challenge.