Overview

Skyscraper collectives, tower agglomerations, high-rise housing, mixed-use developments, luxury condominiums, airport hubs, suburban office enclaves, industrial and technology parks, hotel complexes and resorts, conference and financial centers, entertainment venues, gated communities, theme parks, branded cities, new central districts, and satellite cities: extra-large architectural typologies dominate the contemporary built environment worldwide. Despite the ubiquity of these building forms, their development has been largely restricted by a reliance on outmoded traditions of urbanism and the strict separation of disciplinary domains within current architectural practice. The Generic Sublime investigates how the modern concept of the genericonce assumed to achieve universality by means of organizational homogeneity, formal neutrality, programmatic blankness, lack of identity, and insipidness of characterholds the potential to become its very opposite: the singular, the irreducible, and the extraordinary. Directing the work of students of the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Ciro Najle examines the organizational protocols of building collectives and develops architectural models for encompassing the unprecedented potential of the extra-extra-large. The book includes essays by Ciro Najle, Mohsen Mostafavi, Inaki Abalos, Charles Waldheim, George L. Legendre, David Salomon, Paul Andersen, Lluis Ortega, Leire Asensio Villoria, David Mah, Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Alberto Delorenzini, Marcia Krygier, Julin Varas, Erika Naginski, Hiromi Hosoya, Farshid Moussavi, and Anna Font.

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9781940291758

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The Generic Sublime investigates the potential for the singular and extraordinary hidden in generic large-scale typologies skyscrapers, airport hubs, industrial parks, gated communities, and high-rises. In this tome, various contributors consider the model of the once exploratory skyscraper taken to fantastical proportions to reimagine its possibilities for a quasi-utopian, post-urban development. --Metropolis Magazine

Author Information

Ciro Najle is an architect, researcher, theoretician, and educator. Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, Najle has been Visiting Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2008. He is the Director at GDB General Design Bureau, office of architecture, design, and urbanism. His theoretical and professional work has been widely published. He is co-author of Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (2004) and Suprarural (2015).

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