The Component: A Personal Odyssey towards Another Normal(River Publishers Series in Social, Urban, Economic and Environmental Sustainability)

The Component: A Personal Odyssey towards Another Normal is the Oosterhuis' personal account of four decades of architectural and societal thinking, designing, building, and theorizing. It is an orchestrated yet non-linear series of subjects all leading toward the creation of a parallel world called "Another Normal." Another Normal is as of now a hypothetical parallel world. Nomadic international citizens are the inhabitants of Another Normal. Urged by the climate crisis, the food, energy, and water nexus, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Another Normal demonstrates the inevitable data-driven techno-social architecture of the physically built environment and the metaverse. Besides robotic production on demand of almost anything – when, where, and as needed – Oosterhuis' proposes a dozen strategies that run in parallel to establish Another Normal, among others: ubiquitous basic income, global birthright to own a generous piece of land, distributed production of healthy food, clean energy, and drinking water, ownership of private data and personal avatars in the Web 3.0, autonomous electronic transportation, ubiquitous shared responsibility for clean production and waste treatment techniques, ubiquitous home delivery, working from anywhere for any period of time, and decentralized real-time peer to peer banking. The organic real and the synthetic hyper-real co-evolve naturally in Another Normal, where a mix of strong and simple legislative, planning, and design rules create complexity, diversity, fairness, and equality.

Table of Contents:
1. Here and Now 2. What have we Done? 3. Another Normal 4. Ubiquitous Components 5. Components versus Elements 6. The Component 7. Where are we Now? 8. Proactive Components 9. Where do we Go? 10. The Chinese Patient

About the Author :
Professor Kas Oosterhuis is a visionary, practicing architect, founding director of the innovation studio ONL, and founding professor of the Hyperbody research group at TU Delft from 2000 to 2016. Environments at all scales – from furniture to buildings to cities – are considered complex adaptive systems, in terms of their complex geometry and their behavior in time. The main focus of the current practice is on parametric design, robotic building, and AI in all phases of the design to production and the design to operation process. Featured projects the A2 COCKPIT building in Utrecht, the BÁLNA mixed-use cultural center in Budapest, the LIWA tower in Abu Dhabi, and the individually customizable BODY CHAIR are living proof of Oosterhuis' lean design-to-production approach, in terms of precision, assembly, sustainability, costs, and design signature. Oosterhuis’ built projects are characterized by a strong component-based integration of structure, skin, and ornamentation, paving the way for the affordable iconic. In his previous book Towards a New Kind of Building, a Designer’s Guide to Nonstandard Architecture, Oosterhuis revealed the fundamentals of his personal design universe, which embraces the paradigm shift from standard to nonstandard architecture and from static to dynamic environments as the initial condition. In this book, The Component, Oosterhuis dives deeper into the role of the components that interact to form bespoke designs.