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WEREWOLF: THE ARCHITECTURE OF SHAPE-SHIFTING, MATERIALMORPHOSIS AND LUNACY IN THE WORK OF CODA



CAROLINE O'DONNELL AND JOSÉ IBARRA



As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture’s stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context. These ideas are studied through architectural precedents and framed by critical essays by Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Jimenez Lai, Spyros Papapetros, Kari Weil, as well as the editors. The shift from passive buildings to reactive structures is now imperative, as climate change and political turmoil exacerbate the unpredictability of environments. Werewolf expands on the architect’s agency to critically address political, social, and environmental unrest. Revealing the cunning and agile ways in which architecture can negotiate rather than resist change, this book departs from the fixed Vitruvian man and uses the figure of the werewolf to propose a model where changes of state, mutation, and decomposition are conceptually fundamental.


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THE ARCHITECTURE OF WASTE: DESIGN FOR A CIRCULAR ECONOMY



CAROLINE O'DONNELL AND DILLON PRANGER



Global material crises are imminent. In the very near future, recycling will no longer be a choice made by those concerned about the environment, but a necessity for all. This means a paradigm shift in domestic behavior, manufacturing, construction, and design is inevitable. The Architecture of Waste provides a hopeful outlook through examining current recycling practices, rethinking initial manufacturing techniques, and proposing design solutions for second lives of material-objects. The book touches on a variety of inescapable issues beyond our global waste crisis including cultural psyches, politics, economics, manufacturing, marketing, and material science. A series of crucial perspectives from experts cover these topics and frames the research by providing a past, present, and future look at how we got here and where we go next: the historical, the material, and the design. Twelve design proposals look beyond the simple application of recycled and waste materials in architecture―an admirable endeavor but one that does not engage the urgent reality of a circular economy―by aiming to transform familiar, yet flawed, material-objects into closed-loop resources. Complete with over 150 color images and written for both professionals and students, The Architecture of Waste is a necessary reference for rethinking the traditional role of the architect and challenging the discipline to address urgent material issues within the larger design process.


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NICHE TACTICS



CAROLINE O'DONNELL



Now available in Chinese!​


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NICHE TACTICS



CAROLINE O'DONNELL



Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment.

Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.​


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THIS IS NOT A WALL



CAROLINE O'DONNELL & STEVEN CHODORIWSKY



This is Not a Wall is an epic of one architectural entity’s lifespan, depicted through a unique collection of illustrated short stories. the entity in question is the temporary pavilion Party Wall, designed by CODA as the winning entry of the 2013 Young Architects Program organized by MoMA PS1.


Through acts of reportage, recollection, and remix, this is Not a Wall assembles 75 unique episodes from a total of 75 individual contributors. individual stories can be read as standalone accounts; collectively, the volume forms a larger documentary testament to one herculean effort. this is Not a Wall opposes the notion of architecture as made by one master and appreciated by one audience. through many voices, the collection sheds light upon the various makers, observers, and thinkers that bring any architectural work into being and meaning


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CORNELL JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE 10: SPIRITS



CAROLINE O'DONNELL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF



Despite our obsession with objects, dynamic and boundless non-things (pollution, climate change, radiation, data, algorithms) increasingly drive our worlds and shape our places within it. Timothy Morton, in The Ecological Thought, called these phenomena “the ultimate spiritual substances.” Even in things as nameable as the city and as architecture, the spiritual and physical coalesce. Colin Rowe understood architectural form as spiritual when he wrote of “a continuous dialectic between fact and implication.”

This issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture examines a range of spirits haunting architecture today, following a trajectory from augmented reality and data to memory and mood, from watermarks and ghost towns to inanimate objects and the uncanny, and from the dashed line and the X-ray to the appearance and disappearance of the e in whiskey. The common dimension of all these seemingly disparate realms, is the presence of the invisible, the missing, the unnameable, and the difficult to represent: a feeling, perhaps, that, like the curved line of a door swing in a plan, no matter how we try to deny it, is always present (yet absent). How, given the world’s contemporary spirits—environmental uncertainties, augmented reality experienced through the device, half-empty and migrating cities—must architecture acknowledge its own zeitgeist and genius loci today? How can we learn to talk differently about spirits as architecture vectorizes into the digital age? By acknowledging the worlds beyond the physical, this issue explores the countless angels, animations, atmospheres, data clouds, ghosts, indices, memories, moods, specters, and virtual realities that invisibly consume and produce our existence and our practice within it.​


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CORNELL JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE 9: MATHEMATICS



CAROLINE O'DONNELL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF



While mathematics in architecture has historically referenced notions of order, proportion, and ideal form, the discipline of mathematics itself has shifted to encompass uncertainty, incompleteness, relativity, and chaos towards a situation in which truth itself is elusive. This move stems in part from an engagement with real phenomena, in which natural systems were shown to behave non-linearly and unpredictably. In architecture, while computational developments enabling dynamic and variable modeling have been subsumed into our culture of design and production, a new kind of idealism has emerged.

Formally prolific and inherently multiplicitous, this book proposes algorithmic truth and statistical outcomes over predetermined objectives; it signifies a retreat away from reality and back towards abstraction and simulation in the smooth space of possibility. Meanwhile, the consequences of uncertainty have pervaded our culture to its core. Recovering from the initial high of fractal and random geometrical proficiency, architecture is just beginning to re-embrace the underlying issues embedded within this contemporary mathematics: uncertainty, unpredict-ability, chance, recursion, wildness, and informality.


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THE CORNELL JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE 8: RE



CAROLINE O'DONNELL, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF



This issue of the Cornell Journal of Architecture is about the now, the new, and the next in architecture, while simultaneously acknowledging that every possible future is intrinsically linked to the existent, to the present and its attendant past. At the heart of issue 8: RE is the understanding that the creative act itself is reiterative; that in rethinking, recombining, reshuffling, recycling, and reimagining aspects of the world around us, we produce work that both belongs to the current moment and establishes new future trajectories. The texts reflect the interconnected strands of technology, history, theory, and intuition that necessarily reinforce each other in architectural education and practice today: issues of reuse and recycling; of feedback loops and regression; of dialogue, criticism, and correspondence; and of the role that changing technologies have in restructuring the way we think, see, and remember.​


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CODA

Ithaca, NY, 14850
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