Carlos Arnaiz

This book will speak to a general audience interested in design and architecture by exploring how our contemporary built environment is responding to the disruptive revolutions of our age: the digital transformation and the climate crisis. The changes over the last two decades caused by a warming planet and rapid has introduced cataclysmic shifts in the ways buildings mediate our environment. Both phenomena have changed the meaning of space. The first has revealed that architectural space is not an empty void but a territory full of other active participants. The second has shown space to be more extensive and that what we can see with relations far beyond the perceptible physical realm. Architecture of the 21st century is embodying these disruptive forces I ways that can be mapped and discussed in relation to the history of the practice. Architects have come to realize that that our built environment is no longer controllable, reliable, or containable and is defined, instead, but its fragility and relativity to other fields. The book will sketch the outlines of a new paradigm for architectural thinking based on five concepts for how we experience our built environment today: Navigation, Scale, Order, Materiality, and Time.

With the onset of the Anthropocene Era, concern for the metabolism of various kinds of settlement has risen appreciably. Of particular concern in the study of architecture and urban design are metabolic contributions of flows of stocks that go into the construction and operation of settlements of one kind or another. This book is about a methodological approach that allows urban settlement patterns to be re-written, as it were, into water, energy and other material flows emanating from original sources in the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and so on, through various stages of transformation during settlement construction and operation and then on to end-of-life activities. In short, the methodology produces a so-called ‘cradle-to-grave’ account of the material aspects of urban settlement from which technological and design proposals can be crafted ameliorating and diminishing adverse impacts, as well as related outcomes such as embodied energy and carbon concentrations so deleterious to climate change and proliferation of other hyperobjects.

When Urbanization Comes To Ground is a collaborative research project between the Brooklyn-based architecture studio, CAZA, and think tank, SURBA, an urban research collective spearheaded by Carlos Arnaiz and Peter Rowe. Drawing upon case studies including projects in China, Colombia, and the Philippines, this book works across place, time, and culture to offer an allegorical journey into urbanization at large. When Urbanization Comes To Ground is a loosely congregated collection of essays that reflect an aggregation of encounters with urban circumstances - physical and immaterial, and structural and affective. From Robots, Utilidors, and a Brave New World to A Third Way Towards Metropolitanism and Tagging Thingness and Scale, this publication questions the role of architecture and its related disciplines in the wake of the master plan. It searches for a field guide to everyday urban life by offering palpable views into the network of relations that characterize this evolving social ecosystem. Through their collective global research projects CAZA and SURBA frame, abstract, poeticize, and render the city as a historical process, a future destination, a production cycle, and a layered landscape of overlapping phenomena. When Urbanization Comes To Ground does not attempt to cast the city in any one particular ideology, nor does it aim to essentialize or distill urban experience. Instead, this book oscillates from one rendering of urbanization to another, alternating scales and media in order to present the topic of the city and its encapsulated processes through the same phenomena that inform it.