Author: Cruz Garcia
Co-Author: Nathalie Frankowski, Chen Hao (translations)
Published: Beijing: China Architecture and Building Press, 2021

The Chinese edition of Pure Hardcore Icons expands, in a redesigned book, the manifestoes on form first explored in the English edition of 2013. Pure Hardcore Icons presents a genealogy of buildings that reveal architecture’s intrinsic relationship with pure form, ideology, aesthetics, symbolism, technology, and power.

Translated and with contributions by Chen Hao, the Chinese edition of Pure Hardcore Icons includes interviews with Atelier Deshaus, Ove Arup Engineers, Francois Blanciak, and other architectural theorists, and practitioners.

Pure Hardcore Icons is the first manifesto on pure form in architecture. With text and design by WAI Architecture Think Tank (Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski), Pure Hardcore Icons is a vademecum that through collages, essays, interviews, and poetry brings form–a persistent taboo in the theoretical discourse–to the forefront of the architectural discussion. Through a mixture of perspicacity, conviction and humour, Pure Hardcore Icons aims to raise awareness about the dialectic of pure form and architecture, hoping that its potential and limitations could be fully grasped either in practice, academia, or as a cultural and intellectual exercise.

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