2 New Books + 1 Online Magazine

Here's a couple of new books and a new online magazine that may be of interest.

Design Studio Pedagogy:
Horizons for the Future
Edited by Ashraf M. Salama & Nicholas Wilkinson
The Urban International Press, 2007

This groundbreaking book is a new comprehensive round of debate developed in response to the lack of research on design pedagogy. It provides thoughts, ideas, and experiments of design educators of different generations, different academic backgrounds, who are teaching and conducting research in different cultural contexts. It probes future universal visions within which the needs of future shapers of the built environment can be conceptualized and the design pedagogy that satisfies those needs can be debated.

Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?
Experiencing Aural Architecture
By Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter
MIT Press, 2007

We experience spaces not only by seeing but also by listening. We can navigate a room in the dark, and "hear" the emptiness of a house without furniture. Our experience of music in a concert hall depends on whether we sit in the front row or under the balcony. The unique acoustics of religious spaces acquire symbolic meaning. Social relationships are strongly influenced by the way that space changes sound. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter examine auditory spatial awareness: experiencing space by attentive listening. Every environment has an aural architecture.

Últimasmag
Recent work by Fernando Guerra

To provide a publication designed for the internet with the body and graphic concept of a magazine or a book is the complement to 3 years of images in ultimareportagens, with special dossiers, audio slide-shows and a small collection of FG + SG books of photography on contemporary Portuguese architecture. Últimasmag is yet another form we use to transmit architecture and hence our work. And to coincide with últimas’ third anniversary, this first number has a special flavour. Each bilingual edition will focus on an architectural work of special and topical relevance, analysed in a complete dossier including everything from sketches to critical texts, building blueprints and, of course, photographs. It will be regularly available and completely free for online reading or to download in order to collect or print. The choice is yours.