Landform Building

[Image: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects].

This evening, Saturday, September 17, down at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, Marc McQuade and Stan Allen will be celebrating the release of their recent book Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects.

[Image: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects].

The book is a sustained look at "the evolving relationship between architecture and landscape," with a specific focus on geomorphic megastructures—that is, buildings that look like mountains and other earth forms—vegetative ornament, including green roofs, and complex interpenetrations between architecture and the surface of the earth (semi-subterranean structures, structures penetrated by bedrock, and so forth).

You can see some shots of the book itself here—

[Images: From Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, designed by Thumb Projects; see more].

—and you'll learn much more about the publication at tonight's book launch. There, you'll hear from McQuade and Allen themselves, but also from Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Lucia Allais, Eric Sanderson, and Nina Katchadourian.

[Image: Landform Building launch at the BMW Guggenheim Lab].

I'm excited to be participating in this evening's event, as well, with a short, pecha kucha-style presentation, looking at everything from constructed hills in Rome to artificial glaciers, and from the particularly vertiginous paranoia of a manmade earth to Celtic myths of the Hollow Hills. The quasi-mystical appeal of ground-penetrating radar, muon detectors in the rain forest, and methane-ventilation technology used in landfill construction will all make brief appearances.

Things kick off at 6pm; here is a map. Hope to see some of you there!