This book contains a compilation of the work of Perkins & Will Miami since it’s inception in 1996. Drawing from a legacy of nearly a century of the fabled Chicago architectural Firm, the story of the Miami Studio is one of a search for a regional and critical modernist language unique to its time and place. Starting as a five person office, the studio has grown to a team of 70 architects, interior designers, and landscape professionals who have come together with a single vision of meaning and purpose. The work ranges from one of the most visionary Corporate Headquarters in the country, to a Hospital in Ghana; from the most important new Public Park in Florida to the largest Women’s University in the Middle East; from an Innovation Center in Rio de Janeiro, to an Office Building in Wynwood.

This book presents a privileged insight into the design and construction of the award-winning Thomas P. Murphy Design Studio Building through a series of interviews with the main professionals responsible for its conception, design and construction: the lead architects Bernardo Fort-Brescia, Raymond Fort-Brescia and Thomas Westberg; the builders Thomas C. Murphy, Erin Murphy, Nick Duke and Jason Anderson; the curtain wall manufacturers Jose Daes and Carmen L. Guerrero, and the University of Miami Project Manager, Gary Tarbe. It also offers sumptuous, detailed photography to provide a thorough understanding of a building that is not just a brilliant work of architecture in its own right but that also provides an inspiring, tailor-made environment in which to educate the architects of the future.

Taking on the key issues in urban design, Shaping the City examines the critical ideas that have driven these themes and debates through a study of particular cities at important periods in their development. As well as retaining crucial discussions about cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Brasilia at particular moments in their history that exemplified the problems and themes at hand like the mega-city, the post-colonial city and New Urbanism, in this new edition the editors have introduced new case studies critical to any study of contemporary urbanism - China, Dubai, Tijuana and the wider issues of informal cities in the Global South. The book serves as both a textbook for classes in urban design, planning and theory and is also attractive to the increasing interest in urbanism by scholars in other fields. Shaping the City provides an essential overview of the range and variety of urbanisms and urban issues that are critical to an understanding of contemporary urbanism.

Taking on the key issues in urban design, Shaping the City examines the critical ideas that have driven these themes and debates through a study of particular cities at important periods in their development. As well as retaining crucial discussions about cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Brasilia at particular moments in their history that exemplified the problems and themes at hand like the mega-city, the post-colonial city and New Urbanism, in this new edition the editors have introduced new case studies critical to any study of contemporary urbanism China, Dubai, Tijuana and the wider issues of informal cities in the Global South.

The book serves as both a textbook for classes in urban design, planning and theory and is also attractive to the increasing interest in urbanism by scholars in other fields. Shaping the City provides an essential overview of the range and variety of urbanisms and urban issues that are critical to an understanding of contemporary urbanism.

For six months in 2010 Shanghai has been host to the biggest and most ambitious World Expo in history. Central to the event are the truly remarkable pavilions and halls that house exhibitions of the 189 countries and 57 international organisations taking part. The first to include photographs and architectural drawings of the completed buildings, this important new book showcases the Expos most ambitious buildings and reflects a dynamism and spirit of creativity that will surely influence architects and designers for years to come.

The migration of computing from dedicated appliances to physical environments, thanks to increasingly proliferating microchips and ever-expanding information networks directly implicates and empowers architecture as a transformative agent and medium. The fact that objects can now sense, think, act, and communicate with the help of embedded technology is opening up the potential for an architecture that is more closely aligned with the networked dynamics of living systems - a sentient architecture. The technological enhancement of physical matter charts a movement away from a mechanical paradigm towards a biological model. The shift manifests itself on several levels, from the micro scale in the form of new composite or "smart" materials capable of registering and responding to external stimuli, to larger network formations between people, objects, spaces, and landscapes. Radical artifice here serves to imitate nature, enmeshing built environments in a complex web of interactions whose emergent properties approximate the resiliency of natural ecologies. * It is precisely this fine attunement to life that has made these emerging technologies pertinent in dealing with a wide range of issues from the therapeutic benefits to the body, to the mediation of global and climatic energy systems. The projects featured in this book demonstrate in working prototypes architectural applications of synthetic sentience in the broad research area of ambient intelligence, focusing on: Immersive Spaces, Hybrid Living Systems, Responsive Cladding, Surface as Interface, Augmented Building Technologies, and Individuated Experience. Initial informal efforts have evolved with this team into a focused and funded university-based research. The projects establish a collaborative platform involving designers, scientists, and engineers and a new family of spatial problems where, architecture is re-charged.

"A brilliant account of the politics of shit. It will leave you speechless." Written in Paris after the heady days of student revolt in May 1968 and before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic, History of Shit is emblematic of a wild and adventurous strain of 1970s' theoretical writing that attempted to marry theory, politics, sexuality, pleasure, experimentation, and humor. Radically redefining dialectical thought and post-Marxist politics, it takes an important-and irreverent-position alongside the works of such postmodern thinkers as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard. Laporte's eccentric style and ironic sensibility combine in an inquiry that is provocative, humorous, and intellectually exhilarating. Debunking all humanist mythology about the grandeur of civilization, History of Shit suggests instead that the management of human waste is crucial to our identities as modern individuals-including the organization of the city, the rise of the nation-state, the development of capitalism, and the mandate for clean and proper language. Far from rising above the muck, Laporte argues, we are thoroughly mired in it, particularly when we appear our most clean and hygienic. Laporte's style of writing is itself an attack on our desire for "clean language." Littered with lengthy quotations and obscure allusions, and adamantly refusing to follow a linear argument, History of Shit breaks the rules and challenges the conventions of "proper" academic discourse.

The work of Chicago architect Ralph Johnson explores the use of restrained modernism to enrich and clarify complex programmatic buildings with intriguing assemblies that reveal their functions and hierarchical relationships. Mr. Johnson's goal is to form, through the social art of architecture, an urban environment of buildings that are good civic neighbours as well as distinguished citizens. The projects in this book, both built and unbuilt, represent his concern for humanistic values and emphasis on process rather than preconceived product, allowing the work to respond to diverse cultures and urban conditions. Mr. Johnson is a Principal and the Design Director at Perkins+Will. The book includes essays by Rodolphe el- Khoury, Daniel Friedman and Thomas Fisher.