BOOK:Urban Think Tank-The Architect and the City, Hatje Cantz

Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), an interdisciplinary design practice emerging from the turbulent political environment of Caracas, has pursued projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa for almost twenty years. The philosophy of U-TT is to deliver innovative yet practical solutions through the combined skills of architects, civil engineers, environmental planners, landscape architects, and communication specialists. Their diverse work positioned the firm at the forefront of a social turn in architecture in the late 1990s, with concrete urban interventions encouraging social cohesion in the megacities of the Global South and Europe’s evolving metropoles. U-TT has also produced numerous media projects that harness film, theater, exhibitions, and print to create new discursive spaces and question how our cities are shaped, and for whom. Most notable is its work on the squatted skyscraper for which the firm shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. The book “The Architect and the City: Ideology, Idealism, and Pragmatism”, by Hatje Cantz, looks forward as well as back, imagining new spaces for a hyper-urbanized world and gaining insight from informal settlements, spatial play, and artistic interventions in public space.-Dimitris Lempesis