The Kaisersrot “Stadtigel” at the NAI in Rotterdam, 2009.

Just recently Alex Lehnerer published the book Grand Urban Rules with 010 Publishers, Rotterdam. Grand Urban Rules is a tribute to the city’s will to form, manifest in its vast number of steering regimes. The book contains a total of 115 significant ingredients for the Grand Projet of our contemporary metropolis. Not always positive but always powerful, these rules are the inverted, abstracted and extracted image of a city’s actual situation. Setting standards is first and foremost a cultural act. You can read cities by their rules! Rules link the physical with the social city, connecting quality with quantity and latent characteristics to manifest ones. Thereby and almost unnoticed, they have become design instruments. In fact, regarding rules as tools offers a valuable (urban) design attitude – departing from an approach that wants to control everything, and moving towards a non–fatalistic form of control between freedom and coercion.

Alex will discuss the content of the book and show its relevance for designers by relating it to other (urban design) projects of his. A limited amount of books will be available for sale.

Alex Lehnerer is an architect and urban designer, received his PhD from the ETH in Zurich where he was also a lecturer before moving to the US. With his studio he is currently based in Chicago where he holds a position as Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture. He is partner of the urban research practice Kaisersrot in Zurich (CH) and ALSO-Architekten.

Related Links
http://www.010.nl/catalogue/book.php?id=666
http://www.alexlehnerer.com