André Tavares

Fearless Forms, Fearful Concrete is the story of an architectural soap opera in early 20th-century Brazil. It is about new technologies, cultural debates, and the dawn of modernism in architecture, with at the time novel reinforced concrete as a reference point. The design for Brasília, the country’s new capital, marks a culmination of Brazilian anxieties around national identity: camouflaged under whitewashed surfaces of iconic buildings, engineers and architects created the narratives to support their projects. The protagonists are leading figures of Brazil’s architectural modernism, such as Lucio Costa, Joaquim Cardozo, and Oscar Niemeyer, and international artists and intellectuals including Tarsila do Amaral, Monteiro Lobato, Le Corbusier, and Blaise Cendrars. Their complex web of relationships illustrates boundaries of public discourse and the subtle connections between a wide range of topics, from technology to eugenics, from medicine to construction techniques, from prostitution to urban renewal. For decades, 20th-century architecture was uncritically portrayed and praised as an organised, well-intended contribution to order and progress. Today, negative impacts of construction and tensions concealed by public discourse are finally receiving due attention. André Tavares’s book contributes to a critical examination of celebrated modernist architects’ means and methods without ignoring their achievements and limitations.

In Bangladesh, flooding is becoming more frequent as a result of climate change, forcing countless people to find new homes. In response, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and her team have developed the Khudi Bari – Little House. In Bangladesh, flooding is becoming more frequent as a result of climate change, forcing countless people to find new homes. In response, Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and her team have developed the Khudi Bari – Little House: A low-cost structure that can be assembled, disassembled, transported, and reassembled in another location by the in-habitants themselves. A Khudi Bari has been erected on the Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein as an example of an architec-tural approach and a concrete response to problems exac-erbated by the climate crisis. This accompanying publication contains texts, photographs and illustrations of the building, which forms an important part of the ongoing architectural dialogue on the campus.

A highly original exploration of the history of architecture in relation to fish, shedding light on the connection between marine environments and terrestrial landscapes. Architecture Follows Fish is set in the North Atlantic, and its protagonist is fish. In this book author and architect Andr Tavares explores the notion of fishing architecture, a concept coined to describe architectural practices that are spawned by fisheries. To encompass the scope of fishing architecture, and to establish the connections between marine ecology and architectural practice, the book oscillates between different continents, centuries, and species. Fisheries are unique, and this book sheds light on that uniqueness through an articulated narrative and a wealth of iconography. Up until now there has been no history of architecture from the perspective of fish, although there are counterparts for meat, timber, oil, and many other industries. Tavares provides a counter-narrative to the traditional history of marine environments, which is typically focused on water ecosystems, and instead forms a bridge between what happens at sea and what happens on land. The hope is that, after reading this book, readers will better understand life in the sea in relation to urban growth and terrestrial landscapes.

A material history of the Vitruvian canon. Vitruvius's De Architectura, written in the first century BCE, has been revered as the first treatise on architectural theory. Since its resurrection during the Renaissance, the enigmatic text has been adjusted, refined, and redefined in subsequent iterations. This book bypasses exegeses of the text to focus on the material history of the printed editions disseminated throughout Europe. It surveys over a hundred editions of Vitruvius from 1486 to the present, tracing the power of the printed page in establishing the Roman author as an authority. Focusing on the impact of the physical objects that embody the Vitruvian canon, Vitruvius Without Text highlights how book history and architectural history cross paths while illuminating how a symbiotic relationship emerges between the printed and the built.