Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism explores the potential of modern architecture renovation in the Global South as a catalyst for self-determination and community-building.

The volume presents case studies, conversations, and visual essays by international experts in architecture, governance, regenerative design, contemporary art, philosophy, and gaming. These contributions examine recent heritage renovation as a scaffold for local coauthorship of the built environment, and as a way of coming to terms with the region’s postcolonial nation-building projects of the mid-twentieth century. The starting point for the book’s contributions is the Oscar Niemeyer Guest House renovation project in Tripoli, Lebanon, by the Beirut-based East Architecture Studio—a recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The main focus here was to uncover the history of the site and to foreground the political climates of such postcolonial nation-building projects.

The publication addresses contemporary heritage challenges, questions renovation trends, and reveals gaps in historicization and archiving. It reflects on the need for new architectural operations due to a lack of infrastructure and emphasizes the materiality of renovation projects, encouraging discussions on craft, manufacturing, growth, aging, and hybridity.

Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism presents architecture as a process of mutual translation—listening to, interacting with, and supporting cultural practices. It offers a platform for critique and possibility, while considering preservation as an imaginative futurist practice.

Edited by Raafat Majzoub and Nicolas Fayad, with contributions by Amale Andraos, Elias and Yousef Anastas, George Arbid, Aaron Betsky, Sibel Bozdogan, Costica Bradatan, Aziza Chaouni, Marco Costantini, Civil Architecture, Farrokh Derakhshani, EAST Architecture Studio, Fadi El Abdallah, Farès el-Dahdah, Nicolas Fayad, Sarah Mineko Ichioka, Charles Kettaneh, Bernard Khoury, Raafat Majzoub, Noura Al Sayeh Holtrop, Sumayya Vally, Ana Tostões, Nader Tehrani, Jozef Wouters, and Akram Zaatari.

MARINA TABASSUM ARCHITECTURE: MY JOURNEY is the first book devoted to the Bangladeshi architect Marina Tabassum and her multifaceted architectural oeuvre.

Marina Tabassum’s exploratory approach makes her architectural practice one of the outstanding contemporary positions internationally. Her diverse oeuvre spans from governmental projects to housing and has brought her numerous honors and accolades in the international field of architecture.

This volume presents various public and private building projects that Marina Tabassum has worked on since 1995, first with the architectural office URBANA and since 2005 through Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA). The selection of her architecture in this book ranges from early projects in the city of Dhaka shortly after completing her studies at Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), such as the Museum of Independence and the celebrated Bait Ur Rouf Mosque, to recent mobile modular structures called Khudi Bari. Tabassum is establishing the latter for the people affected by displacement in various geographically and climatically challenged locations—both in the Ganges Delta and in the Rohingya refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar on the border to Myanmar, which is currently the largest refugee camp in the world.

The internationally renowned authors reflect on various perspectives and interpretations of Tabassum’s work. Besides the historical and political background, the contributions deal, among other things, with spotlighting particular architectural elements that pervade Tabassum’s work, such as place and memory, light and spirituality, brick and materiality, and people and community.

With contributions by Sean Anderson, Vera Simone Bader, Kareem Ibrahim, Hanif Kara, Andres Lepik, Nondita Correa Mehrotra, Tanzil Shafique, Cristina Steingräber, Marina Tabassum, Sarah M. Whiting, and Danny Wicaksono.

Saudi Modern: Jeddah in Transition, 1938–1964, edited by Abdulrahman and Turki Gazzaz of Bricklab, explores the urban and architectural transformation of the city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, since the discovery of oil—highlighting the city’s rapid modernization and societal change.

Over the last ninety years, Jeddah has transitioned from a modest walled city and pilgrimage hub into a sprawling modern metropolis. The complex urban morphology that characterizes it today can be credited to the port city’s role in the Saudi Arabian oil industry that arose after the discovery of natural oil reservoirs in 1938. The industry brought foreign companies and institutions, as well as workers and their families, from around the world. The city grew beyond its old walls. Moreover, interactions with modern technologies and development models launched a radical infrastructural and architectural reconfiguration of the urban fabric.

As a reaction to this dramatic shift, the language of the vernacular has become fetishized. Modernist developments post-1938 are today commonly considered inauthentic, and many of the buildings, streets, and neighborhoods that bear witness to the evolution of the city right after the discovery of oil have been demolished without formal archival documentation. In their place, new megaprojects have sprung up. Driven by global capital, Jeddah, along with other cities across the Persian Gulf, has entered yet a new phase of sweeping urban transformation.

Highlighting fifteen case studies, the book further combines scholarly essays with visual contributions, presenting unparalleled documentary research and historical contextualization of the city’s disappearing modernist heritage.

With contributions by Asaad Badawi, Lina Barnawi, Bricklab, Abdulrahman Gazzaz, Turki Gazzaz, Laurian Ghinițoiu, Stefan Maneval, Safouh Naamani, Todd Reisz, Anhar Salem, Saudi Ethnographic Diary, Sumayya Vally, and excerpts from historical research by Abdulla Yahia Bokhari and Sameer Al Layali.

Since the firm’s founding twenty-five years ago, AKT II have forged an international practice that unifies the cultures and disciplines of architecture and structural engineering. This book is an engine for critical reflection on the scope, potential, and limits of what they have come to define as design engineering.

Structured into five discursive domains—scale, variability, attitude, reverse engineering, and the craftsmanship of engineering—the book presents a robust selection of the firm’s endeavours, which together demonstrate a vast range of encounters and processes in design. Common among them is a desire to understand and reshape the boundaries of the discipline of structural engineering, along with its links to fields such as philosophy, computer science, and geography. Interlaced with the projects, texts by contributors from varying fields engage the theoretical discussions and social conditions that bind contemporary practice.

Matters of Engineering Design: AKT II balances structural concerns that require an equilibrium of internal and external forces, a clear understanding of boundary conditions, and knowledge of the properties of material with the overarching challenges that society faces today, including advances in technology, changing economic orders, and ecological responsibility.

With contributions by William Baker, David Basulto, Hanif Kara, Jayne Kelley, Priya Khanchandani, Adrian Lahoud, Lesley Lokko, Ibrahim Mahama, Stephen Parnell, Vicky Richardson, and Ellis Woodman.

The release of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture every three years is an enormously important moment for the architecture world. The projects recognized by this Award represent the vanguard of thinking and practice in architecture that goes beyond the regular scope of building, planning and preservation through its strong impact on the needs and aspirations of societies. This publication presents the twenty shortlisted projects, including the six recipients of the 2020–22 cycle of the Award.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s mandate is different from that of many other architecture prizes: it not only rewards architects but also identifies municipalities, builders, clients, artisans and engineers who have played essential roles in the realization of a project. This publication thus presents the projects from various viewpoints alongside detailed and up-to-date images and descriptions.

The acclaimed, interdisciplinary master jury and steering committee of this cycle of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture that determines the projects presented include David Chipperfield, Francis Kéré, Anna Lacaton, Marina Tabassum, and Sarah M. Whiting, to name but a few. Scholarly essays across various disciplines from members of the master jury and steering committee round out the publication. Contributions include a text on the optimism of humanity by Souleymane Bachir Diagne, director of the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, and a contextualization of Modern Architecture in the Muslim World by Sibel Bozdoğan of Boston University. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, director-general of the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, writes on the perspective of the dialogical, while Nasser Rabbat, the Aga Khan Professor at MIT, shares notes on architecture as a humanist empire. The texts also include a Salon des Refusés by Nader Teherani, founding principal of Boston-based architecture firm NADAAA.

The texts, which come from a wide range of geographies, are informative and descriptive, often striking an emotional note. Together with the project presentations, the publication thereby guides the reader through a contemplation of an architectural question of increasing urgency in our current times of crisis: how to build ethically for our shared global future.

With contributions by Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, Sibel Bozdoğan, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Farrokh Derakhshani, Nasser Rabbat, Nader Teherani, and Sarah M. Whiting.