KCAP Zürich

This book looks into the adaptive and inclusive capacities that urban megaprojects can offer to shape the future of our cities. Featuring eight unique case studies like Marunouchi Tokyo, West Kowloon Hong Kong, Marina Bay Singapore, HafenCity Hamburg, La Défense Paris and King’s Cross London, the book provides a new and comprehensive reading of selected urban megaprojects in Asia and Europe, and a comparative view of key aspects regarding their role in contemporary urban developments.

Textbook spans thirty years of KCAP's urban designer and architect Kees Christiaanse's thinking about cities. The texts range from charting the personal influence of the bicycle on his thinking about future mobility to the examination of dominant concepts and projects in the contemporary built environment. Christiaanse's sketches, personal notebook pages, and watercolours complement this unique collection.

This book celebrates Patrick Abercrombiess famous Potato Plan and reveals its potential as an analytical tool for contemporary urban territories. This book gathers together 40 specifc Potato Plans from various metropolises all over the globe that were drawn and interpreted by local architects, urban designers and schools of architecture. An updated depiction of contemporary urban analysis, inspired by the great Patrick Abercrombie. Unique plans and essays of 40 cities across the globe by local architects, urban designers and schools of architecture.

The expansive areas around large airports, affected by noise, infrastructure, and transient forms of architecture, have until now not been researched as a phenomenon. But these noise landscapes are emerging worldwide, often surpassing the neighbouring city in size, and sometimes rivalling it in economic importance.

On the basis of eight European case studies (Amsterdam, Zurich, London-Heathrow, Frankfurt, Munich, Madrid and the two Paris airports) this book provides the first account of how these landscapes emerged as the result of technical determinations, what is taking place in them, and how they can be interpreted.

The book is the outcome of several years of research by the chair of Kees Christiaanse at the ETH Zurich.
(Book description by: Nai Boekverkopers/ Booksellers)

Former docksides, industrial estates and railway areas are the focus of ‘The City As Loft’. Recently, the debate about future developments in European cities has focused to a large extent on the transformation of urban areas. This is precisely the field in which KCAP/ASTOC has produced its most innovative work. Old docksides and railway areas are some of the few innercity locations that are still available for development. In many cities, these sites (known as ‘waiting lands’) may be able to save the concept of urban character and inject it with new meaning.