Architecture for the digital age

UNStudio, led by Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, creates spaces that are surprisingly innovative. Their work doesn`t rehash Modernism but rather embraces the digital age via the invention of new, time-based techniques expanding the imagination, exploding the hierarchy of the design process, and encouraging the input of different disciplines. UNStudio`s architecture is the result of a design strategy that repeatedly and constantly advances in different ways via leitmotifs called "design models." The most important examples of this new kind of architecture are the New Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart and the Erasmus bridge in Rotterdam, which has become the town`s new landmark. Another manifest aim is to come up with fundamentally new ideas for complex infrastructure projects and to give these a contemporary structure that fosters future (including urban) development. This can bee seen, for example, at the central train station in Arnhem, at the Ponte Parodi pier in Genoa, and at the Canadian Centre for Architecture?s (CCA) prestigious "Competition for the Design of Cities." This book presents an overview of UN Studio`s work to date.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture Series features:

* approximately 120 images, including photographs, sketches, drawings, and floor plans
* introductory essays exploring the architect's life and work, touching on family and background as well as collaborations with other architects
* the most important works presented in chronological order, with descriptions of client and/or architect wishes as well as construction problems and resolutions
* an appendix including a list of complete or selected works, biography, bibliography and a map indicating the locations of the architect's most famous buildings



About the author:
Trained as an architect at Yale University, Aaron Betsky is currently director of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Previously, he was director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute. He is the author of a dozen books, writes regularly for both professional and general interest publications, and is a columnist for Deutsche Bauzeitung.