Sniper's Log: Architectural Chronicles of Generation-X

The book is like a sniper's log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth. Written for different media and formats (professional magazines, speaking engagements, academic presentations...), the texts are thread together as part of a biographical experience that reveals that theory is here primarily instrumental and seeks efficiency rather than truth. We do not theorise because we want to understand the deep truths of the world, but because we need to organise the realm where we operate, understand how reality works and find an effective way to perform within it.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo is an architect and founder of London and Barcelona based AZPA. His work has consistent! merged the practice of architecture with theoretical practice, providing a strong intellectual rigor to the practice and the discourse on architecture.

He trained at the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectur de Madrid, graduating with Honors, and holds a MARCH II from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, with Distinction. He worked at OMA in Rotterdam between 1991 and 1993, prior to establishing Foreign Office Architects, which run until its dissolution in 2011.

He now runs AZPA, which integrates architecture, urban design and landscape architecture, working both for the public and private sector on an international scale. He is currently Dean of Princeton SOA and the Norman Foster professor at Yale SOA. He was Dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 2000-2005 and held the Delft University Berlage Chair.

He has also been Visiting Critic at Columbia GSAPP, Princeton SOA, UCLA School of Architecture and Yokohama University and he led a Diploma Unit at the Architectural Association in London. In addition to his professional role as an architect and an educator, Alejandro Zaera-Polo is a theorist and a thinker with a capacity to identify soda economical, technological and political trends and trans-late them into the architectural discourse. His texts can be found in many professional publications such as El Croquis, Quaderns, Log, A+U, Arch+, Harvard Design Magazine, Archis, and Volume, among many others