The city beyond architecture. Sheng-Yuan Huang and the work of Fieldoffice. Ediz. illustrata

The world of today is changing. The center of development has moved to Asia, where more than half of the world urban population is already living. In the future, Asian settlements will simply outnumber the ones of the other continents. And, most interestingly, this urbanization has nothing to do with what happened in the Western world, where suburbanism has finally come to dominate the landscape and the life of most of the people. In Asia, activities are all mixed, and one can find agricultural production sitting side by side with the housing, temples, or high tech factories. It is a new kind of mixitè and, if properly managed, it looks the like of something more sustainable than a European periphery. In this context, there is another thing that just started to develop, a public space capable to structure such particular landscape and provide both social spaces and a sense of identity to the communities living these places. In a way, it is now developing what landscape urbanism has been theorizing for some time. But here, it is a concrete matter, especially in places the like of Taiwan, where some form of direct democracy is possible. In a way, it is the like of what happened at the onset of the Tessiner school in South Switzerland, or at the times of the Barcelona Olympics in Catalonia, those rare occurrences of city-making, when innovations of planning and design are put forward. But here, it is something that speaks about what the design culture of most of world future urbanization could become. Sheng-Yuan Huang and his colleagues of Fieldo ce are the avantgarde of this architectural movement, that is producing a new form of collective living in terms of design and culture. They are also those that today do test new planning and design systems, experiments from where to learn about what the city is and how we can transform the landscape. In the light of this, the book is a first attempt to frame the work of Fieldoffice in terms of city-making, but also to highlight those concrete aspects of the process that can o er reference to the urban planners and designers around the world.

Cod: 9788832080117