Enrique Walker

Since the beginning of the century, the field of architecture has fervently turned its attention to documenting the contemporary urban condition. Every city been has been examined as a repository of architectural concepts, scrutinized as an urban manifesto, and recorded as a series of found objects. The Ordinary articulates a potential genealogy for this practice and for the genre of books derived from it. Organized around conversations with the authors of three seminal texts that document the city-Denise Scott Brown's Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York (1978), and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto's Made in Tokyo (2001)-this volume traces the history of these "books on cities" by examining the material they recorded, the findings they established, the arguments they advanced, and the projects they promoted. These conversations also question the assumptions underlying this practice and whether in its ubiquity it still remains a space of opportunity.

Este ARQDOCS re ne dos entrevistas a Enrique Walker sobre los talleres que ha impartido en Columbia GSAPP durante los ltimos 15 a os. La primera trata sobre una serie de talleres realizados bajo constricciones autoimpuestas con el fin de expandir el campo de trabajo del arquitecto. Bajo Constricci n (2003-2006) fue una serie consecutiva de diez talleres de proyecto que examin el uso de restricciones autoimpuestas en el dise o arquitect nico. La arquitectura, por definici n sometida a un r gimen de fuerzas externas, en gran medida ha ignorado estas restricciones como herramienta cr tica, a diferencia de la literatura o el cine. Y la segunda El Diccionario de Ideas Recibidas (2006-2015), trata sobre el proyecto de una d cada, cuyo objetivo era examinar las ideas recibidas en la cultura arquitect nica contempor nea; es decir, aquellas estrategias de dise o que agotaron su intensidad original debido a su recurrencia y aquellas que sobrevivieron a los problemas de dise o que originalmente abordaron bel registro de los clich s en el mbito de la arquitectura contempor nea, para posteriormente utilizarlos como herramientas de proyecto. This ARQDOCS gathers two interviews with Enrique Walker about the studios he has taught at Columbia GSAPP during the last 15 years. The first, 'Under Constraint' (2003-2006), was a series of ten consecutive design studios that examined the use of self-imposed constraints in architectural design. Subjected by definition to a regime of external forces, architecture has by and large disregarded self-imposed constraints as a critical tool, unlike literature or film. Given the abundance of restrictions in architectural practice, and the assumption that design problems are granted, constraints have with few exceptions been either dismissed as obstacles to the imagination, or accepted as requirements to be met. Architectural practice often embraces voluntary constraints when involuntary constraints are weak, though still masking them as external forces, and, in so doing, hindering their potential as a tool. And the second 'The Dictionary of Received Ideas' (2006-2015) was a decade-long project, whose aim was to examine received ideas in contemporary architecture culture; that is, those design strategies that exhausted their original intensity due to recurrence, and those that outlived the design problems they originally addressed. This series of architecture studios and theory seminars proposed to detect and record received ideas prevalent in the field of architecture over the previous decade, both in the professional and academic realms, as a means to ultimately open up otherwise precluded possibilities for architectural design and architectural theory.