Edited by: Erika Rosenfeld
Copyediting: Aaron Bogart
Graphic design & typesetting: Omnivore Inc.
Cover design: Ruedi Baur
Project management: Claire Cichy and Hatje Cantz
Production: Stefanie Kruszyk and Hatje Cantz
Printing and binding: Graspo cz, a.s.
Published by: Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, Berlin www.hatjecantz.com
Printed in: Czech Republic
© 2021 Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin
Making books for U–TT has become an important part of architectural practice.
Book on the Urban-Think Tank (U-TT), who are an interdisciplinary design practice emerging from the turbulent political environment of Chávez-era Caracas, Venezuela. UTT team tell the story of how they have pursued projects in Latin America, Europe, and Africa for almost twenty years.
The book is all about Urban and architectural pilot projects from the global informal city. However, it is also about the people in the UTT office whose work is on the projects—the individuals whose livelihoods depend on architecture, and whose experience of the world may overlap only for this effort: staff, clients, public officials, mayors, plumbers, engineers, contractors, bricklayers and friends.
UTT books are projects in and of themselves. Inside the publication you find original -diverse work that has remained only on paper. These design proposals positioned the firm at the forefront of a social turn in architecture in the late 2000s, with concrete urban interventions encouraging social cohesion in the megacities of the Global South and Europe’s evolving metropoles.
U-TT has also produced numerous media projects that harness film, theater, exhibitions, and print to create new discursive spaces and question how our cities are shaped, and for whom. Most notable is its work on the squatted skyscraper for which the firm shared the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012.
This book looks forward as well as back, imagining new spaces for a hyper-urbanized world and gaining insight from informal settlements, spatial play, and artistic interventions in public space. The book is almost a novel with literary sensibility. It finds expression in the way books are part of our office output. Originally our publications began as a way to communicate with our students or also send information or reach out to a public located outside of the architecture circuits, but now book-making has become an important tool for the practice.
This book in detail also serves as a kind of archive and a bittersweet reminder of the creation of spaces that UTT designers know intimately well but may never see again in full because they remained archived in digital format or because the occupants moved in and transformed the buildings.
“For UTT this book is the life of individuals who spent two decades creating projects and design thinking.”
