For over three decades, the firm Toshiko Mori Architects has been dedicated to designing ecological, technologically innovative architecture at the forefront of “the social turn in architecture”, as Andres Lepik calls it in the foreword to this book.

Toshiko Mori is a New York-based architect, and is Professor in the Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. As a long-time member of the World Economic Forums Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities, Mori led research and inquiry into sustainable architecture. She is on the board of Dassault Systems, a company connecting technology to environment and life science, and she founded the platform VisionArc, a think tank dedicated to exploring the role of design within complex social and environmental issues.

This book focuses on her practice’s projects. The book illustrates how the observation of the architect operates, as opposed to how the imagination of the architect manifests itself. Seven chapters are divided into specific projects and look at the hidden thought processes that can take place behind the ideas, solutions, and physical manifestations of architecture.

The projects include the Portable Concert Hall, called Paracoustica, which is an ongoing nonprofit work to come up with an affordable and shareable concert hall among many constituents in remote and underserved community; the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research focusing on socialization among scientists as a new model of work that promotes further discovery and teamwork; research on the role of libraries in the future using the example of the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch; and the vernacular typology development in Senegal with the Albers Foundation.