Bracket 2: Goes Soft
January 2013
By Lola Sheppard (Editor), Neeraj Bhatia (Editor)
From soft politics, soft power and soft spaces to fluid territories, software and soft programming, Bracket 2 unpacks the use and role of responsive, indeterminate, flexible, and immaterial systems in design. In an era of declared crises--economic, ecological and climatic, among others--the notion of soft systems has gained increasing traction as a counterpoint to permanent, static and hard systems. Acknowledging fluid and indeterminate situations with complex feedback loops that allow for reaction and adaption, the possibility of soft systems has reentered the domain of design. The examples displayed in "Bracket goes soft" are offered as nothing more than a short catalog of soft systems--some explicitly architectural, others geological, others entirely metaphorical. In all cases, these examples explore how the notion of going soft can be iterated across professions, disciplines, and fields of research. The book is divided into the themes "sensing/feedback"; "interfacing/ enveloping"; "subverting/hijacking"; "formatting/ distributing"; "contingency/ resilience"; "diffusing/generating". Bracket is a book series structured around an open call that highlights emerging critical issues at the juncture of architecture, environment, and digital culture. The editorial board and jury for Bracket 2 includes Benjamin Bratton, Julia Czerniak, Jeffrey Inaba, Geoff Manaugh, Philippe Rahm, Charles Renfro, as well as co-editors Neeraj Bhatia and Lola Sheppard. Bracket is a collaboration between InfraNet Lab and Archinect.
- Bracket 2: Goes Soft
- Cities: X Lines: Approaches to City and Open Territory Design
- City Sense and City Design: Writings and Projects of Kevin Lynch
- City Transformed: Urban Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century
- Collage City
- Combinatory Urbanism : A Realignment of Complex Behavior and Collective Form
- Critical Spatial Practice #6: The Roundabout Revolutions
- Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto For Manhattan
- Designing Cities
- Event Cities 02
- Event Cities 03
- Event Cities 04
- Fast-Forward Urbanism: Rethinking Architecture's Engagement with the City
- Garden Cities of Tomorrow
- Going Public: Public Architecture, Urbanism And Interventions
- Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Postcivil Society
- La rue est à nous... tous! ( The street belongs to all of us! )
- Made in Tokyo: Guide Book
- Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century
- Measuring The Non-measurable 02: Tokyo/bangkok/singapore
- Measuring The Non-measurable 03: Mn'm Workbook 1
- Measuring The Non-measurable 04: Mn'm Workbook 2
- Measuring The Non-measurable 05: Post-souvenir City
- Measuring The Non-measurable 06: Subjectivities In Investigation Of The Urban
- Measuring The Non-measurable 07: Mn'm Workbook 3
- Measuring The Non-measurable 08: In The Search Of Urban Quality
- Megastructure Reloaded: Visionary Architecture and Urban Planning of the 1960s Reflected by Contemporary Artists
- Monu #13 Most Valuable Urbanism
- Monu #14 Editing Urbanism
- Monu #15 Post-ideological Urbanism
- Monu #16 Non-urbanism
- Monu #17 Next Urbanism
- Monu #18 Communal Urbanism
- Monu #19 Greater Urbanism
- Monu #20 Geographical Urbanism
- Monu #21 Interior Urbanism
- Monu #22 Transnational Urbanism
- New City Spaces
- Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City
- Public Space
- Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory
- S,M,L,XL
- Self-Sufficient City
- Small Scale: Creative Solutions for Better City Living
- Sociopolis Project for a City of Future
- System City: Infrastructure and the Space of Flows
- The City In The City: Berlin: A Green Archipelago
- The City, Seen as a Garden of Ideas
- The Death And Life Of Great American Cities
- The Endless City: The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society
- The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles
- The Public Chance: New Urban Landscapes
- The Self-Sufficient City: Internet has changed our lives but it hasn't changed our cities, yet.
- The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century
- Urban Future Manifestos
- Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types And Territories
- Urban Solutions: Building Solutions, Green Solutions, Culture and Research
- Urbanity: Twenty Years Later: Projects for Central European Capitals
- Verb Connection
- Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader (The ACSA Architectural Education Series)
- Young-Old: Urban Utopias of an Aging Society
