Power and architecture are fundamental to the question of how contemporary society and archi- tecture work together. Since power lacks a comprehensive logic, coherence, and instrumentalization capability, the question refers both to the autonomous powers of the architectural forms and toa set of external powers represented through architecture. The presented series of projects based on current and extreme syntheses of comprehensive and complex world-views enables mappinga network of powers that align, intersect, in ect, and diverge from each other: collective power, ordaining power, economic power, technological power, ritual power, cultural power, media power, and domestic power. The issue of counter power is then discussed against this background.Through eight essays by contributors, along with images, drawings, and documents, the book renders visible a set of entities, informal conventions, stakeholders, and means involved in the creation of architecture; that is, the dynamics of the collective that ceaselessly tests the architectural composition of the common world.

Photographs, newspaper cuttings, postcards, drawings, and slides: on entering the studio of Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the Pritzker Prize 2011, one is confronted with a variety of images on the walls that engage in a dialogue. How do these photos, drawings, and illustrations impact his design practice? What is the relationship between the image and the completed building? Floating Images: Eduardo Souto de Moura's Wall Atlas uses this question as an opportunity to examine the architect's visual universe. He has added images from his extensive collection of drawings and project sketches and reorganized them in this atlas. Complex relationships are formed between the individual illustrations and projects. Essays by Pedro Bandeira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Diogo Seixas Lopes, and Philip Ursprung round off the publication and provide a contextualization in terms of the history of art and images.