Out of the Box: 13 Spatial Configurations

A highly original visual exploration of three decades of agps’s design and building activities.

Swiss-American architectural studio agps, with offices in Zurich and Los Angeles, has delved deep into their archive and woven a visual thread of some 160 illustrations that guides readers through this new book. These images literally emerge from archival boxes and model crates and include models, model photos, small hand-drawn studies, visualizations, and photographs of realized buildings, covering agps’s entire output over decades of practice.

The images are organized according to thirteen keywords, spatial configurations that characterize agps’s core design concepts and summarize central elements of their ideas. At the same time, they are terms that define the formal presence of their designs. The result offers multifaceted and inspiring insight into the work of an international firm that proves just how important spatial constellations are for the formulation of good architecture. An essay by architecture writer and critic Sabine von Fischer, along with an index of all featured buildings and projects, round out this volume that offers a truly unique perspective on the work of agps.
 

Manuel Scholl is partner at agps Zurich and was professor of urban design at Leibniz University in Hanover.

Sarah Graham is partner at agps Los Angeles and has taught as adjunct professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and as visiting professor at Harvard University, University of California Berkeley, and Nanjing University in China.

Marc Angélil is partner at agps Zurich and Los Angeles, professor emeritus at ETH Zurich, and visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.