Who are the new primitivists? People who see the need to change the formulaic planning of today's cities and recover the intensity and spirit of other cultures; those striving to create a collaborative society that integrates life and work, brings different generations together and uses natural resources as efficiently and economically as possible. In architecture, new primitivism is about understanding all architecture, from every era, as part of a CONTINUOUS PRESENT, a source of inspiration to find new forms of organisation. New primitivists take a historical perspective: western and eastern monasteries; rural cooperatives or communes; vernacular dwellings where families, animals and workers live together in productive units. They realize, however, that a literal return to those models would be a naive exercise in nostalgia. Instead, their architecture is a careful equation of form, matter and thermodynamic flows. It is based on material culture and state-of-the-art technology to achieve the utmost simplicity, simultaneously tackling both tectonic and thermodynamic issues. Book jacket.