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.