Siteless

<b>An attempt to free architecture from site and program constraints and to counter the profusion of ever bigger architecture books with ever smaller content.</b><p>Some may call it the first manifesto of the twenty-first century for it lays down a new way to think about architecture. Others may think of it as the last architectural treatise for it provides a discursive container for ideas that would otherwise be lost. Whatever genre it belongs to <i>SITELESS</i> is a new kind of architecture book that seems to have come out of nowhere. Its author a young French architect practicing in Tokyo admits he didn't do this out of reverence toward architecture but rather out of a profound boredom with the discipline as a sort of compulsive reaction. What would happen if architects liberated their minds from the constraints of site program and budget? he asks. The result is a book that is saturated with forms and as free of words as any architecture book the MIT Press has ever published.</p><p>The 1001 building forms in <i>SITELESS</i> include structural parasites chain link towers ball bearing floors corrugated corners exponential balconies radial facades crawling frames forensic housing--and other architectural ideas that may require construction techniques not yet developed and a relation to gravity not yet achieved. <i>SITELESS</i> presents an open-ended compendium of visual ideas for the architectural imagination to draw from. The forms drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) but from a constant viewing angle are presented twelve to a page with no scale order or end to the series. After setting down 1001 forms in siteless conditions and embryonic stages Blanciak takes one of the forms and performs a scale test showing what happens when one of these fantastic ideas is subjected to the actual constraints of a site in central Tokyo. The book ends by illustrating the potential of these shapes to morph into actual building proportions. </p>