Re-Framing the Politics of Design is a research, exhibition and book project exploring the role of designers in collaboratively giving shape to future changes addressing complex challenges such as climate change, mobility and migration. By looking at concrete, situated case studies, this book explores the current need for designers to re-frame their political agency, engaging with the deep relationality connecting us all, humans (and not only those who already have a voice in society and are...

The first in a series by the Sikkens Foundation, this pocket-sized publication of the Mondrian Lecture given by Charles Jencks reprints his talk in full, along with various images. Jencks discusses the possibility that architecture and well-being can have a direct correlation, exploring how architecture can influence society, business productivity, profits and hospitals. He elaborates with examples of architectural determinism from both ancient and modern history, with a special focus on his ...

More than 70 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. Cities in Africa, Latin America and Asia in particular are growing like never before. Photographer Yvonne Brandwijk and journalist Stephanie Bakker travelled to five of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Not to Mumbai or Shanghai, but to the up-and-coming cultural, creative and economic hubs of tomorrow: Kinshasa, Lima, Yangon, Medellín and Addis Ababa. 


In this book, they share five years of tra...

The province of Gelderland (The Netherlands) inherits many castles, country houses and estates. Together they form historic estate landscapes that partially determine the regional landscape character. Climate change and urbanisation have a significant effect on the management and protection of these heritage landscapes. An abundance and a shortage of water, spatial fragmentation and increasing pressure from recreation and tourism are only a few of the many challenges that need to be addressed...

The Architecture Observer offers an overview of different forms of modern architecture in Central America since the outset of the 20th century. Although modern architectures constituted only a small percentage of the total building production in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, they hold in these countries an evident symbolic significance. Such buildings functioned as models for the desired societal, economic, and cultural changes, or as aspirational placeh...

In cities around the world a new urban condition is spreading

rapidly: an ever-increasing push for ‘perfection’, efficiency

and control and the active eradication of any

aberration, friction or alternative. The smooth city with its

sanitized spaces and new technologies compresses urban

life into a seamless experience. While the demand for safe,

clean, and well-functioning urban environments is understandable,

the rise of the smooth city undermines the democratic

nature and emancipatory po...

The current focus on sustainable development opens up debates surrounding our relationship with the natural world, about what constitutes social progress and about the character of development, both in the Global North and the Global South. The promotion of sustainable futures is taking on a new urgency in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss. This concise and accessible text explores how the international community is responding to the challenge of sustainable development.

It ...

A major overview of the most innovative, ambitious and beautiful houses on the Indian subcontinent.