Matters of Engineering Design: Akt II

Since the firm’s founding twenty-five years ago, AKT II have forged an international practice that unifies the cultures and disciplines of architecture and structural engineering. This book is an engine for critical reflection on the scope, potential, and limits of what they have come to define as design engineering.

Structured into five discursive domains—scale, variability, attitude, reverse engineering, and the craftsmanship of engineering—the book presents a robust selection of the firm’s endeavours, which together demonstrate a vast range of encounters and processes in design. Common among them is a desire to understand and reshape the boundaries of the discipline of structural engineering, along with its links to fields such as philosophy, computer science, and geography. Interlaced with the projects, texts by contributors from varying fields engage the theoretical discussions and social conditions that bind contemporary practice.

Matters of Engineering Design: AKT II balances structural concerns that require an equilibrium of internal and external forces, a clear understanding of boundary conditions, and knowledge of the properties of material with the overarching challenges that society faces today, including advances in technology, changing economic orders, and ecological responsibility.

With contributions by William Baker, David Basulto, Hanif Kara, Jayne Kelley, Priya Khanchandani, Adrian Lahoud, Lesley Lokko, Ibrahim Mahama, Stephen Parnell, Vicky Richardson, and Ellis Woodman.

Hanif Kara OBE is co-founder and Design Director of AKT II and professor in practice of architectural technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has gained international standing in the field of the built environment through practice, pioneering research, and education in interdisciplinary design.

Paul Scott is a design director of AKT II. Since joining the practice in 1997, he has been instrumental in the design and delivery of some of the practice’s key projects in London, across the UK, and internationally, working with signature architects such as Foster + Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects, and AHMM. He was involved in the new Bloomberg European headquarters, winner of the 2018 RIBA Stirling Prize, and in the design of AKT II’s own office, the White Collar Factory at London’s Old Street. Internationally, his projects include the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, in Abu Dhabi, and the Phaeno Science Centre, in Germany. Scott is a fellow of the Institution of Structural Engineers, where he has lectured and presented papers, and a working member of the BCO, for whom he has co-authored the guide for specification since 2009.