Le Grand Puzzle is the urban study, commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille to the Rotterdam based architectural studio MVRDV and The Why Factory led by Winy Maas.

The book is the result of intensive research – made from 2018 to the start of 2020 – by an international team of architects and urbanists, in collaboration with Manifesta 13 and representatives of both Marseille institutions and universities. Le Grand Puzzle proposes a methodology, an agenda and an analysis to portray today’s Marseille and can be perceived as a ‘manifesto’ for the city.

Our current cities are comprised of enclosed, distant and introverted architecture equally isolated from urban life and ecological context.

How might we open these spaces? How might we introduce pockets of space capable of triggering social encounters, multiplying circulation and facilitating the introduction of flora and fauna?

This book gathers the research conducted by The Why Factory into what we term ‘urban porosity’. Using both analogue and digital approaches, our researchers and students explored modes to open up our cities. What might be imagined to open our towers and city blocks? Stepped floors? Public stairways? Grottos in which city dwellers might meet? Could we manipulate building envelopes in order to increase façade area? Might we perforate built volumes and thus create pocket parks?

Each of our hypotheses led to a series of step-by-step interventions that materialized in the form of a vast collection of towers built by our students using LEGO blocks. When gathered together, the resulting army of LEGO towers shows how far we can—and cannot—go. How much can a tower bend before it collapses? At what point does a porous tower become financially impossible to build or maintain?

Issue Reclaim - Remediate Reuse Recycle interprets and compares actions extracted from the projects and classifies them into three Re- processes:

Remediate: acting on the territory
Reuse: acting on the building
Recycle: acting on the material

With this start to the Reclaim series, a+t interprets the works analysed and organizes its discourse on the basis of Re- actions, using these actions to create a body of knowledge applicable to any project.

Reclaim has the environmental sense to reclaim the territory, the objects, the infrastructures and the materials yet it also is a call to reclaim dignity and citizen rights. It is a wake-up call to morally reclaim society using the Re-processes as atonement.

The number 37 of a+t magazine, entitled STRATEGY SPACE. Landscape Urbanism Strategies, is the second issue of the STRATEGY series. 12 works of urban landscaping, all built, are analyzed regarding the strategies identified in each one.

The Strategy series initiates a new way of approaching the project, in which the method is as visible as the result.

In this issue in the STRATEGY series, a+t extends its field of research to the system of tactics. While the first two issues in the series involved approaching the project through the strategies identified in it, STRATEGY AND TACTICS IN PUBLIC SPACE aims to define the strategy in relation to the tactics.

Javier Mozas looks at the context from which it emerges and develops the system of tactics applied to public space offering his view of the actors involved, the modus operandi and the realms in which it takes place.

Based on this view, a+t has chosen 8 tactical actions which it considers to be action types: re-using what is useless, low-cost self-building, farming the city, playing to change reality, negotiating at all levels, acting generously, using direct action and aspiring to utopia.

So, issue number 38 of a+t magazine brings to a close the field of research on project strategies by analysing 8 works on public space which add to the 34 works already published in the Strategy series. Likewise, it kicks off the analysis of the system of tactics with the works of 8 collectives.

In 2010, a+t magazine inaugurated the STRATEGY series with this double issue. Already sold-out in print version, it was the beginning of a research in the field of public space using project strategies.

It contains 22 landscape architecture built works to which a grid of scalar areas and disciplinary origins that allows comparative vision is applied.

This double issue from the Hybrids Series, titled HYBRIDS III. Residential Mixed-Use Buildings, is centred on residential use as a support for actions involving hybrids.

Whereas issues I and II devote their pages, respectively, to high rise and horizontal hybrids, Hybrids III supports the inclusion of housing in mixed developments, that guarantees continuous functional intensity and tends to be the driving force of financing civic buildings.

Nevertheless, the function of living is the most difficult to insert into hybrid programmes, due to recent growing requests of users in terms of privacy and safety. The balance between privacy and community requires a consensus of shared interests, rules that allow diversity without endangering individuality.

HYBRIDS I is the first issue of the new a+t series related to hybrid buildings. It is a visual analysis of the programs of these complex buildings and its insertion in the territory.

The analysis that a+t does on vertical hybrid buildings is based on the identification and comparison of three concepts on a selection of 12 prototype projects: programme, section and land use.
The relationship between height and use clearly expresses the urban vocation of the project, its openness to the city, its capacity to share the privilege of height and its social permeability. The section of a hybrid is also, according to Rem Koolhaas, a piece of urban fabric that rises up. In this sense, we wished to confront the urban weft with the section, to compare the intensity of uses with the density of the fabric.

The programme is broken down into a bar of uses and a field of vertical representation. On this field the uses of each building are distributed until 100% of the built surface is completed.

Based on the chosen projects, the possibility to integrate very different uses in one building has been observed. The tendency of planners to avoid mixing uses in favour of segregation is contested by this collection of projects where variety and intensity of uses, both public and private, in a unique development.

The analysis of the section shows the location of uses in the section and allows the comparison of tendencies regarding the placement of public and private spheres.

Insertion into the context is analysed from different scales:
- territorial scale, with population density data and a map with a scale of 1:500,000, to establish the area of economic and social influence.
- urban scale, with the mark inserted in the orthophoto with a scale of 1:5000, to confirm the adaptation or imposition to the weft, connection to the surrounding fabric, land use and edificability.

The analysis of hybrid buildings, started in the first issue of the Hybrids series with high-rise uses, now continues with the development of horizontal projects.

Massive land occupation, imposition on the weft, topographical modification of surroundings and the introduction of mobility in programmes are the most common conditions.

Nevertheless, unlike vertical hybrids, horizontal hybrids are more able to disguise themselves in the landscape, even separating into quasi-independent elements. They are buildings that renounce iconic character in favour of invasive character.

The term civilities relates to the conventions that regulate community life; it is as well the addition of civic + facilities. The a+t series begins under this name and attempt to present a new focus on life in common and buildings that keep up society’s pulse. This topic embraces therefore all kinds of constructions and programs implying shared relations, converging activities and experiences to be exchanged.

Civic facilities are more than just utilitarian areas like libraries, gymnasiums, health centres, nurseries, youth clubs, sports fields… They behave as focal points for cultural life, service nodes, gathering venues and driving forces of activity, extending their influence far beyond the walls that host them.They are places where human encounters are produced and a flow of activity rises, regenerating the surrounding area, both in the compact city and in the disperse suburbs.

The volume forms part of the Civilities series.

This second issue of Civilities is a selection of architectures that are closely related to their location. Some form part of urban regeneration projects while others represent public realm in the middle of a private territory or behave as simple centres of life in a deserted landscape. In other cases, the architecture is added to existing places, to memories and uses that become a stratus of new constructions.

In some projects, the dialogue between old and new is whispered intimately, among old friends. Others take on the tension of a conversation of parents and children. There are also interventions that test relationships with neighbours, the ability to share spaces, combine languages and reconcile functions. Each one has its own good manners, with more or less sophistication, with different budgets and diverse disciplinary rigour. The thousands of kilometres between them does not prevent them from being part of the same group of friends.

The volume forms part of the Civilities series.

This issue is part 4 of In Common, a special series on collective spaces.

In a context governed by mobility and centers of consumerism, operations carried out within the urban fabric are exercises bordering on the heroic. In a society where fear of the Other prevails over desire for interaction, and where closed, protected spaces are invading the public domain, it becomes more and more difficult to create open-air places of encounter.

The importance of the series In common, hence, lies in the selection of projects, both right in urban cores and in outskirts, where the merging of architecture and landscaping has yielded encouraging results.

This issue is part 3 of In common, a special series on collective spaces.

In a context governed by mobility and centers of consumerism, operations carried out within the urban fabric are exercises bordering on the heroic. In a society where fear of the Other prevails over desire for interaction, and where closed, protected spaces are invading the public domain, it becomes more and more difficult to create open-air places of encounter.

The importance of the series In common, hence, lies in the selection of projects, both right in urban cores and in outskirts, where the merging of architecture and landscaping has yielded encouraging results.

The In common series attempts:

- To interpret urban space within landscape as an extended field, a field between architecture and landscape, a field on which architects and landscape designers agree.
- To comprehend that public space is vulnerable, uncontrolled and diverse, and that its capacity for social integration stems precisely from these characteristics.
- To admit that spontaneous appropriation of spaces by citizens is a legitimate form of urban design.
- To confirm the capacity of public spaces as regenerators of urban centres, giving birth to renewed civic activity.