April 06 2015

From WIRED.COM --- Looking at the 100 buildings in Kushner’s book, experimental does very much feel like the right word. There’s a tremendous variety. Some, like Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower, are feats of form—her 82-story Chicago skyscraper is elevated to the realm of massive sculpture by the addition of curving balconies that jut out from the rectangular base. Others, like Neri Oxman’s pavilion made from silkworm thread, give us a sense of how new materials and digital fabrication techniques could be used to build tomorrow’s structures. The book includes a border crossing that shatters our stereotypes of Soviet architecture, a pool that purifies dirty river water, and a wall in the Sahara Desert grown from bacteria that produces limestone. The point: The future of architecture isn’t about one trend. It’s about a hundred—if not a thousand—different things.