Shot in 1994, Berlin is an extended photo essay recording the transformation of the urban landscape of the city of Berlin. Capturing a moment frozen in time, these photographs present a Berlin that no longer exists but continues to survive.

The desert is a huge paradox. Beneath its outward appearance of immensity and silence, are the sounds of various experiments, mysteries, and utopias. The setting of outrageous true histories, entertainment oases founded on consumerism and play, and the secret staging of military power, the desert is far from empty. Instead, it is full of activity: unexpected, uninhibited, and excessive. Not subject to barriers and seemingly free of the formal, ideological or cultural ties of global society, the desert cultivates alternate architectures, urbanisms, and built phenomena. Through photographs, essays, and history, this book emerges as an exploration of some of these phenomena and the protagonists that made them possible.

"What is fascinating is the inability to separate the real from the digital, because they already form part of the same nature." So we said in the last issue of Verb. Here we explore how this fusion takes place. Buildings and cities grow, are transformed, and dissolve. How can this evolution be generated, controlled, enhanced or imagined? Is our environment programmable? How does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new architectural organisms, new environments, new natures? How does technology animate space, and how do users and programs animate matter? The fifth volume of Actar's boogazine looks for a new definition of the organic.Projects by: Terraswarm, Aranda/Lasch, Shohei Matsukawa / 000studio, Kram/Weisshaar, Michael Meredith, mos, Foster + Partners, George L. Legendre, IJP Corporation, PTW Architects + Arup Australia + CSCEC, ON-A, Hitoshi Abe, Manuel Gausa Asociados, Vicente Guallart, Mick Pearce, Yusuke Obuchi, R&Sie(n), Cristina Diaz, AMID, INI, ONL...

The shift from ''modern'' to digital systems of design and production opens up a material work to a much more profound interaction between author and audience. This change represents a new stage in the development of the relationship that a work--or, in another sense, a message--establishes between the author--or sender--and the reader--or receiver. From the classical work, with its "a priori," essentialist model of appreciation, to the modernist object, with its subjective model of aesthetics, to the emerging cybernetic model, the interface between author and ''user'' has become closer, more direct, and more open. The first issue of the new "boogazine" Verb looks closely at these questions regarding the present relationship between information and authorship in cultural practice, asking: how does the increasing complicity between author and audience affect architectural practice? And how can architecture be conceived more fluidly in terms of information? Handsomely designed and richly illustrated, this combination of book and magazine is the first installment in what is sure to be a groundbreaking journey through architecture and design.