Alex Ely Livres

This volume explores the interconnected social, sustainable and spatial principles that underpin the design of more environmentally conscientious buildings and places, illustrated through models, drawings and images of selected key projects by the award-nominated London-based architecture practice Mæ. Each project outlines beneficial strategies for creating more sustainable designs, achieving social equity and working within our planet's limits to elevate the human spirit in the long-term. This book posits strategies to design buildings and places that enrich culture and society, offering insight from researchers and practitioners, as well as richly illustrated documentation of key architectural schemes that put these principles into practice. It is a call to arms for ways to create more environmentally regenerative architecture, applying its ideas to architectural practice worldwide.

"Places for Strangers" aims to illustrate a set of continually negotiated principles and attitudes which London based mae Architects have established in their architectural and urban design. Juxtaposing polemic texts published through the duration of the practice with a fresh revisitation of mae s project portfolio, "Places for Strangers" is a contemporary examination of the architects predicament rather than an exhaustive monograph. It is a candid insight into the possibility of aligning ideological principles with the prosaic realities of design practice where a building and place s occupant is unknown. The new book takes a form between manifesto and manual. It acts as a manifesto in so far as it advocates a position on urban design and architecture, and a manual in so far as it elucidates an approach to producing critically engaged design, which questions and challenges the rules that we work with. It comprises a number of texts by Alex Ely with contributions by former mae partner Michael Howe, written between the practice inception in 2001, and the present day. These texts, written for newspapers such as "The Guardian" or professional perioducals like "The Architects Journal, " are polemic in their nature, illustrating the sociopolitical, ethical and formal concerns navigated in architectural production today. "