LetteraVentidue Edizioni srl Poradie kníh

Cities are not made only of stone: they harbor ways of life, practices, movements, moods, atmospheres, feelings. Yet the ineffable nature of affects has long deprived human passions of a meaningful role when it comes to observing urban space and envisioning its future transformation. With this book, we explore the contemporary city and its transitional conditions from a different perspective: a quest to understand how the space of collective life and the feelings this engenders are connected, how they mutually give form to each other. In an interdisciplinary collection of essays, The Affective City means to open a discussion on the "soft" presences animating the world of urban objects: beyond the city built out of mere things, this book's focus is on the forces that make urban life emerge, thrive, flourish, but also wither, and sometimes die. A task crucial for the survival of cities as human habitats, in an urban world that - with every passing day - seems to draw closer a crisis

Structures erected on the Indian subcontinent to collect water express a search for spatiality that ventures beyond functional prerequisites to reveal a deep bond with water’s spiritual value and rituals and practices related to water. Built from the 6th to 20th centuries, stepwells and tanks exalt the importance of their environment and propagate the symbolic imagery of cultures thousands of years old. Unfortunately, many of the structures have since been abandoned. Yet they exemplify the crystallisation of new architectural models and embody a vast and unique patrimony. This book seeks to address a series of though largely abandoned, can water structures continue to ensure the identarian image of each environment and community? That is, can these subterranean constructions―originally designed to respond to functional needs, but also intended to exercise a political and symbolic role over the territory―still enhance the importance of their surroundings? Furthermore, is there harmony between specific configurations―baoli, kund, and tank―and a form, aimed at celebrating the ‘creative void’ at the origin of everything?

Designed by Louis I. Kahn in Ahmedabad between 1962 and 1974, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) is considered to be one of his mature works and one of the most monumental buildings he conceived. Initially involved only as a consultant, this project challenged him with new and unparalleled questions concerning the management of a "remote" construction site in a country where he was not familiar with tradition and methods such as India in the aftermath of its independence (1947). The reconstruction in detail of the multifaceted events of the design of the architectural complex, made it possible to highlight the significance that the IIM assumed within the broader cultural policy initiated by the Indian government and the different roles played by the protagonists involved. In particular, it retraced the working method developed by Kahn, underlining his obsessive attention to the construction details which define the overall shape of the buildings that were left with no cladding. The IIM's focus on the various phases has also become a matter of urgency in recent years, since only a few years after the completion of the construction site the walls have begun to show the first signs of degradation which remain unsolved still today. 269 illustrations