What ideas are currently energising your architectural work and explorations? Why did these ideas become impactful while others did not? What role did mentors and peers play in the development of these ideas? What were your breakthrough insights or aha moments? What is next for you, and for the discipline and discourse of architecture? For this book, Mark Foster Gage has selected 11 of the most noteworthy and fascinating conversations from his year-long project of documenting the ideas of the next generation of designers who are revolutionising the nature of architectural practice and theory today. This remarkable collection of casual, informative, and personal interviews engages 15 architects as they reveal what made them who they are, what propels their architectural work forward, and what they anticipate comes next. A noted practitioner, tenured Yale professor, CNN design contributor, and respected insider of the international architectural scene, Mark Foster Gage has spent his professional life with many of the most important figures in architectural discourse and practice. With this book he focuses on an emerging generation of practitioners — approaching his subjects with a characteristic mix of insight, wit, and humour in a book that is consistently entertaining and informative as the architects open up in unexpected ways about their beliefs, work, lives and thoughts about where architecture, and they, are headed next.

In the course of a ten-month invited competition Mark Foster Gage Architects, using tools ranging from artificial intelligence to 3D fractal software, re-invented the design languages of the ancient Nabatean civilisation located on the Arabian Peninsula to propose the first Saudi resort in the modern era that would be open for international tourists. Isolated in a vast desert, with little infrastructure and virtually no visitors, lie the ancient ruins of Mada’in Saleh, and the site for the project. With 500 pages and over 1,500 images this is a book that documents the design process of this project, complete with all of its ideas, misdirections, failures, restarts, breakthroughs, and everything in-between. Of interest to architects and non-architects alike, this book heralds a new generation of creative techniques and design technologies that promise to redefine how we think of the past, present and future of the built environment in the 21st century and beyond.  

In Designing Social Equality, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from aesthetic philosophy and weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, he sets out to design a more encompassing social theory for how humanity perceives its very reality, and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.

In Designing Social Equality, Mark Foster Gage proposes a dramatic realignment between aesthetic thought, politics, social equality, and the design of our physical world. By reconsidering historic concepts from aesthetic philosophy and weaving them with emerging intellectual positions from a variety of disciplines, he sets out to design a more encompassing social theory for how humanity perceives its very reality, and how it might begin to more justly define that reality through new ways of reconsidering the built environment.

This collection of writings on beauty includes selections from twenty key philosophers and theoreticians spanning two millennia: Plato * Aristotle * Vitruvius * Alberti * Kant * Burke * Fiedler * Nietzsche * Wilde * Bergson * Bell * Scott * Benjamin * Bataille * Sontag * Jameson * Scarry * Nehamas * Zangwill * Freedberg and Gallese With an introduction and critical headnotes explaining the importance of each text, Mark Foster Gage offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. In a world increasingly defined by sumptuous visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines and that are essential to the emerging worlds of design and architecture in the twenty-first century.

By showcasing the intersection between technology, aesthetics, and function, this book offers a multidisciplinary approach to cutting-edge performative technology. In a Yale studio led by Lynn and Gage, students designed a boatbuilding facility using intelligence gleaned from the competitive sailing industry. These projects--along with work and essays by Gage and Lynn, Frank Gehry, Lise Anne Couture, Chris Bangle, and others--demonstrate how shared materials, tools, and techniques strengthen the fields of automotive and aeronautic design, boatbuilding and architecture, ultimately exhibiting the high-tech cross-pollination of form and material across industries.