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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Landscape art & architecture > City & town planning - architectural aspects
This book offers a controversial reanalysis of the rise and dominance of managerialist approaches to development. Linking two British inner-city community development projects with projects in the developing world it shows how 'managed development' runs counter to participatory values and aspirations of communities receiving development aid. This, in effect, mutes the voices of these communities. In conclusion, Holmes draws implications for the emerging community development agenda in urban development throughout the world.
Illustrated by critical analyses of significant buildings, including examples by such eminent architects as Adler and Sullivan, Erich Mendelsohn, and Louis Kahn, this book examines collaboration in the architectural design process over a period ranging from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s. The examples chosen, located in England, the United States, Israel and South Africa, are of international scope. They have intrinsic interest as works of architecture, and illustrate all facets of collaboration, involving architects, engineers and clients. Prior to dealing with the case studies the theoretical framework is set in three introductory essays which discuss in general terms the organizational implications of partnerships, associations and teams; the nature of interactions between architect and engineer; and cooperation and confrontation in the relationship between architect and client. From this original standpoint, the interactive role of the designers, it examines and reinterprets such well-known buildings as the Chicago Auditorium and the Kimbell Art Museum. The re-evaluation of St Pancras Station and its hotel questions common presumptions about the separation of professional roles played by its engineer and architect. The account of the troubled history of Mendelsohn's project for the first Haifa Power House highlights the difficulties that arise when a determined and eminent architect confronts a powerful and demanding client. In a later era, the examination of the John Moffat Building, which is less well known but deserving of wider recognition, reveals how the fruitful collaboration of multiple architects can result in a successful unified design. These case studies comprise a wide range of programmes, challenges, personalities and interactions. Ultimately, in five different ways, in five different epochs, and in five different circumstantial and cultural contexts, this book shows how the dialogue between the players in the design process resonates upo
In 1975, the Nigerian authorities decided to construct a new postcolonial capital called Abuja, and together with several internationally renowned architects these military leaders collaborated to build a city for three million inhabitants. Founded five years after the Civil War with Biafra, which caused around 1.7 million deaths, the city was envisaged as a place where justice would reign and where people from different social, religious, ethnic, and political backgrounds would come together in a peaceful manner and work together to develop their country and its economy. These were all laudable goals, but they ironically mobilized certain forces from around the country in opposition against the Federal Government of Nigeria. The international and modernist style architecture and the fact that the government spent tens of billions of dollars constructing this idealized capital ended up causing more strife and conflict. For groups like Boko Haram, a Nigerian Al-Qaida affiliate organization, and other smaller ethnic groups seeking to have a say in how the country's oil wealth is spent, Abuja symbolized everything in Nigeria they sought to change. By examining the creation of the modernist national public spaces of Abuja within a broader historical and global context, this book looks at how the successes and the failures of these spaces have affected the citizens of the country and have, in fact, radicalized individuals with these spaces being scene of some of the most important political events and terrorist targets, including bombings and protest rallies. Although focusing on Nigeria's capital, the study has a wider global implication in that it draws attention to how postcolonial countries that were formed at the turn of the twentieth century are continuously fragmenting and remade by the emergence of new nation states like South Sudan.
Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction framing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory and practice of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.
The Academy of Urbanism was founded in 2006 with a mission to recognise, encourage and celebrate great places across the UK, Europe and beyond, and the people and organisations that create and sustain them. This book is a compendium of seventy five places that have been shortlisted as part of the Academy's annual awards scheme which covers great Places, Streets, Neighbourhoods, Towns and Cities. Included are 75 places shortlisted between 2009 and 2013. Each has been visited by a team of Academicians who have spent time in the place, talked to officials and local people and sought to understand what it is that makes them special and how they have achieved what they have achieved. The Academy also commissions a poem, a drawing and a figure ground plan to understand and interpret the place. David Rudlin, Rob Thompson and Sarah Jarvis have drawn on this treasure trove of material to tell the story of these 75 places. In doing so they have created the most comprehensive compendium of great urban places to have been published for many years.
Since the late 1990s, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been hailed as a potentially revolutionary feature of the planning and management of Western cities. Economic regeneration and place promotion strategies have exploited these new technologies; city management has experimented with electronically distributed services, and participation in public life and democratic decision-making processes can be made more flexible by the use of ICTs. All of these technological initiatives have often been presented and accessed via an urban front-end information site known as 'digital city' or 'city network.' Illustrated by a range of European case studies, this volume examines the social, political and management issues and potential problems in the establishment of an electronic layer of information and services in cities. The book provides a better understanding of the direction European cities are going towards in the implementation of ICTs in the urban arena.
Sir James Stirling was arguably the greatest British architect of the twentieth century. This book provides the most comprehensive critical survey of Stirling's work to date, charting the development of his ideas from his formative years, through his partnership with James Gowan, on to his period in practice as sole partner; and finally, his partnership with Michael Wilford. Using archival material, extensive interviews with his partners and others who worked for him, together with analytical examination of key buildings, this detailed critical examination explains his philosophy, working method and design strategy. In doing so, it sheds new light on the atelier structure of his office and who did what on his major buildings. Geoffrey Baker is the first to analyse in depth the articulation systems used in major projects undertaken by Stirling. He confirms that the Staatsgalerie complex at Stuttgart does not demonstrate Stirling's interest in post modernism but rather an enhanced sensitivity towards context informed by his growing allegiance to the classical canon. Baker explains how this important development in his work, powerfully influenced by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, is consummated in perhaps the finest of Stirling's uncompleted works, the extension to London's National Gallery. In a discussion of his mature works, Baker explains how Stirling's work can be understood in terms of several interconnected ideas. These include surrealism, historicism, myth and metaphor, inconsistency and ambiguity, bi-lateral symmetry, the garden, rusticity and arcadia, and the archetype, seen as the repository of the collective architectural memory. As well as discussing his interests and those who influenced Stirling, the book compares his oeuvre with that of the pioneers of modern architecture, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier. This book charts a remarkable career, and offers invaluable insights not only into the masterly, timeless architecture, but also into the man himself: charismatic, irreverent, courageous, serious; sometimes rude, often stubborn, belligerent, yet gentle. He was endlessly inventive and deeply dedicated to his art, producing buildings that reflect all of the above, buildings that are magnificent and ultimately humane.
Expanding Disciplinarity in Architectural Practice presents an argument for the role of an architect as a generalist with a particular ability to bring spatial intelligence to bear on the significant issues of planning, settlement, and identity. The book draws on strategy and planning, landscape, infrastructure, urbanism, historical conservation, and interpretation, architecture, and the creative reuse of existing structures to encourage you to incorporate a holistic approach to your designs. Tracing a series of projects developed by his practice 5th Studio, author Tom Holbrook argues the critical importance of involving spatial practitioners in large scale strategies and designs to combine interdisciplinary thinking and concrete experience of buildings. The book incorporates interviews with prominent figures in the field of architecture, eleven UK case studies, and over 200 beautiful illustrations including the author's own award-winning designs. With twenty years of evolving practical experience, together with associated research, teaching, and writing, Holbrook shows you how a participatory infrastructure creates a crucial bridge between strategic thinking and the reality of the built environment. This book is a must-read for professionals seeking to incorporate broader design strategy into their practice.
At the end of the Second World War, America's newly acquired status of hegemonic power- together with the launch of ambitious international programs such as the Marshall Plan- significantly altered existing transatlantic relations. In this context, Italian and American architectural cultures developed a fragile dialogue characterized by successful exchanges and forms of collaboration but also by reciprocal wariness. The dissemination of models and ideas concerning architecture generated complex effects and frequently led to surprising misinterpretations, obstinate forms of resistance and long negotiations between the involved parties. Issues of continuity and discontinuity dominated Italian culture and society at the time since at stake was the possible balance between allegedly long-established traditions and the prospect of a radical rupture with recent history. Architectural culture often contributed to reach a compromise between very diverging attitudes. Situated in the larger realm of studies on Americanization, this book questions current interpretations of transatlantic relations in architecture. By reconsidering the means and effects of the dialogue that unfolded between the two sides of the Atlantic during the postwar years, the volume analyzes how cultural and formal models were developed in one context and then modified when transferred to a new one as well as the fortune of this cultural exchange in terms of circulation, amplification, and simplification.
Bringing together leading urban scholars, this book discusses the linkages between the economic, social and psychological factors of the urban environment. It focuses on the growth of private urbanity that has led to a 'spectactularization' of the city, the most extreme component of attention being the fascination which is aroused by attractions and state-managed events. The complex characteristics of this fascination are examined under the dimensions of aesthetics, emotions, lived experiences and power structures and governance. The interdisciplinary nature of this collection has wide international appeal and will be of interest to academics of social and cultural geography and cultural and media studies.
This book takes a Lacanian, and related post-structuralist perspective to demythologize ten of the most heavily utilised terms in spatial planning: rationality, the good, certainty, risk, growth, globalization, multi-culturalism, sustainability, responsibility and 'planning' itself. It highlights that these terms, and others, are mere 'empty signifiers', meaning everything and nothing. Based on international examples of planning practice and process, Planning in Ten Words or Less suggests that spatial and urban planning is largely based on the construction and deployment of ideological knowledge claims.
Cities in both North and South America are confronting tremendous challenges in urban growth and management as they enter the new century. Curitiba in Brazil and Portland in Oregon, US are cities that have achieved recognition for exemplary urban planning programmes over the past three decades. As such, they provide particularly useful illustrations of the intense development pressures that many urban areas currently face. This book explores the dynamics of their urban governance, arguing that, in general, there has been a unique synergy derived from the combination of visionary leadership, innovative urban plans and effective citizen involvement. The book argues that, while urban design and architecture are key to the success in making cities livable and in augmenting the global reputations, such sensitive, innovative urban planning and design projects first need to be governed effectively and grounded within the specifics of their local cultures and existing built environments.
Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.
Planners internationally have employed green belts to contain the explosive sprawl of cities as varied as Tokyo, Vienna and Melbourne during the twentieth century. As yet, no collection has gathered these experiences together to consider their contribution to planning. Juxtaposing examples of green belt implementation worldwide, this book adds to understanding of how green belts can be effected in theory and how practitioners have adapted them in practice. The book provides a typology of green belt implementation and reform, enabling planners to grasp why these policies are employed and whether they are relevant to twenty-first century planning.
This book is an account of how the Milan Provincial Administration and a team of researchers from Milan Polytechnic worked together to develop a new 'Strategic Plan' for Milan's urban region. Informed by innovative conceptions of both how to understand cities in the contemporary world, and engage in strategic planning work, this experience has already attracted considerable international attention. The authors now consolidate their contribution into a comprehensive account which continually relates theory and practice Examining the Milan Plan in detail, the book explains the profound transformations which put great pressure on the traditional descriptive tools so planners must engage in the production of new ones. It also proposes that these transformations affect the way in which urban policies and planning processes are designed. The project offers insights into - and new directions for - planning theory more generally, while at the same time testing this powerful and innovative research hypothesis in an important European city empirical study. In detailing the results of this project, this book proposes useful ground-breaking approaches to planning for similar urban regions.
With the exponential rise in leisure mobility, tourism has increasingly become of great economic significance. Cultural heritage, such as museums, churches, historical landscapes, urban parks, and exhibitions attract many visitors and countries, regions and cities which house such historic-cultural amenities have seen increasingly large waves of tourists. While an avalanche of tourists has a positive impact on the local economy, such modern mass tourism also brings about negative externalities such as congestion, decline in quality of life, low access to cultural amenities and loss of local identity; to the extent that the sustainability conditions of a locality might be endangered. This tourism dilemma is particularly pronounced in cities with a rich cultural past, such as Venice, Naples and Amsterdam. Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars from North America and Europe, this book examines the interface of local cultural resources and modern mass tourism from a sustainability perspective. It puts forward innovative methodologies and best case practice for future cultural conservation policies.
The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model "Aryan" society in Norway during World War II Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia. From ideal new cities to a scenic superhighway stretching from Berlin to northern Norway, plans to remake the country into a model "Aryan" society fired the imaginations of Hitler, his architect Albert Speer, and other Nazi leaders. In Hitler's Northern Utopia, Despina Stratigakos provides the first major history of Nazi efforts to build a Nordic empire-one that they believed would improve their genetic stock and confirm their destiny as a new order of Vikings. Drawing on extraordinary unpublished diaries, photographs, and maps, as well as newspapers from the period, Hitler's Northern Utopia tells the story of a broad range of completed and unrealized architectural and infrastructure projects far beyond the well-known German military defenses built on Norway's Atlantic coast. These ventures included maternity centers, cultural and recreational facilities for German soldiers, and a plan to create quintessential National Socialist communities out of twenty-three towns damaged in the German invasion, an overhaul Norwegian architects were expected to lead. The most ambitious scheme-a German cultural capital and naval base-remained a closely guarded secret for fear of provoking Norwegian resistance. A gripping account of the rise of a Nazi landscape in occupied Norway, Hitler's Northern Utopia reveals a haunting vision of what might have been-a world colonized under the swastika.
Our world is unquestionably one in which ubiquitous movements of people, goods, technologies, media, money, and ideas produce systems of flows. Comparing case studies from across the world, including those from Benin, the United States, India, Mali, Senegal, Japan, Haiti, and Romania, this book focuses on quotidian landscapes of mobility. Despite their seemingly familiar and innocuous appearances, these spaces exert tremendous control over our behavior and activities. By examining and mapping the politics of place and motion, this book analyzes human beings' embodied engagements with their built world and provides diverse perspectives on the ideological and political underpinnings of landscapes of mobility. In order to describe landscapes of mobility as a historically, socially, and politically constructed condition, the book is divided into three sections-objects, contacts, and flows. The first section looks at elements that constitute such landscapes, including mobile bodies, buildings, and practices across multiple geographical scales. As these variable landscapes are reconstituted under particular social, economic, ecological, and political conditions, the second section turns to the particular practices that catalyze embodied relations within and across such spaces. Finally, the last section explores how the flows of objects, bodies, interactions, and ecologies are represented, presenting a critical comparison of the means by which relations, processes, and exchanges are captured, depicted, reproduced and re-embodied.
Over the past few years there has been a proliferation of new kinds of retail space. Retail space has cropped up just about everywhere in the urban landscape: in libraries, workplaces, churches and museums. In short, retail is becoming a more and more manifest part of the public domain. The traditional spaces of retail, such as city centres and outlying shopping malls, are either increasing in size or disappearing, producing new urban types and whole environments totally dedicated to retail. The creation of these new retail spaces has brought about a re- and de-territorialisation of urban public space, and has also led to transformations in urban design and type of materials used, and even in the logic and ways through which these design amenities meet the needs of retailers and/or consumers. This book describes how the retailisation of public domains affects our everyday life and our use of the built environment. Taking an architectural and territorial perspective on this issue, it looks specifically at how retail and consumption spaces have changed and territorialised urban life in different ways. It then develops a methodology and a set of concepts to describe and understand the role of architecture in these territorial transformations.
Between 1935 and 1959, the architecture of childhood was at the centre of architectural discourse in a way that is unique in architectural history. Some of the seminal projects of the period, such as the Secondary Modern School at Hunstanton by Peter and Alison Smithson, Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles, or Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds and orphanage, were designed for children; At CIAM, architects utilized photographs of children to present their visions for reconstruction. The unprecedented visibility of the child to architectural discourse during the period of reconstruction is the starting point for this interdisciplinary study of modern architecture under welfare state patronage. Focusing mainly on England, this book examines a series of innovative buildings and environments developed for children, such as the adventure playground, the Hertfordshire school, the reformed children hospital, Brutalist housing estates, and New Towns. It studies the methods employed by architects, child experts and policy makers to survey, assess and administer the physiological, emotional and developmental needs of the 'user', the child. It identifies the new aesthetic and spatial order permeating the environments of childhood, based on endowing children with the agency and autonomy to create a self-regulating social order out of their own free will, while rendering their interiority and sociability observable and governable. By inserting the architectural object within a broader social and political context, The Architectures of Childhood situates post-war architecture within the welfare state's project of governing the self, which most intensively targeted the citizen in the making, the children. Yet the emphasis on the utilization of architecture as an instrument of power does not reduce it into a mere document of social policy, as the author uncovers the surplus of meaning and richness of experience invested in these environments at the historical mom
The notion of 'creative cities' - where cultural activities and creative and cultural industries play a crucial role in supporting urban creativity and contributing to the new creative economy - has become central to most regional and urban development strategies in recent years. A creative city is supposed to develop imaginative and innovative solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental problems: economic stagnancy, urban shrinkage, social segregation, global competition or more. Cities and regions around the world are trying to develop, facilitate or promote concentrations of creative, innovative and/or knowledge-intensive industries in order to become more competitive. These places are seeking new strategies to combine economic development with quality of place that will increase economic productivity and encourage growth. Against this increasing interest in creative cities, this volume offers a coherent set of articles on sustainable and creative cities, and addresses modern theories and concepts relating to research on sustainability and creativity. It analyses principles and practices of the creative city for the formulation of policies and recommendations towards the sustainable city. It brings together leading academics with different approaches from different disciplines to provide a comprehensive and holistic overview of creativity and sustainability of the city, linking research and practice. In doing so, it puts forward ideas about stimulating the production of an innovative knowledge for a creative and sustainable city, and transforming a specific knowledge into a general common knowledge, which suggests best future policy actions, decision-making processes and choices for the change towards a human sustainable development of the city.
Two of the key theoretical shifts over the past two decades of critical work have been the 'visual turn' and the 'material turn'. This book argues that these hitherto distinct fields should be understood as in continual dialogue and co-constitution and focuses on reconceptualising the visual as an embodied, material, and often politically-charged realm. This edited volume elaborates this conceptual argument through a series of contemporary case studies, drawn from the disciplines of Architecture, Sociology, Media Studies, Geography and Cultural Studies. The case studies included are paired around four themes: consumption, translation, practice and ethics. As well as exploring the bringing together of visuality and materiality studies, the contributors raise questions of social identity and social critique, and also focus on the ethics of material visualities.
Women continue to be extremely under-represented in the architectural profession. Despite equal numbers of male and female students entering architectural studies, there is at least 17-25% attrition of female students and not all remaining become practicing architects. In both the academic and the professional fields of architecture, positions of power and authority are almost entirely male, and as such, the profession is defined by a heterosexual, Eurasian male perspective. This book argues that it is vital for all architectural students and practitioners to be exposed to a diversity of contemporary architectural practices, as this might provide a first step into broadening awareness and transforming architectural engagement. It considers the relationships between feminist methodologies and the various approaches toward design and their impact upon our understanding and relationship to the built environment. In doing so, this collection challenges two conventional ideas: firstly, the definition of architecture and secondly, what constitutes a feminist practice. This collection of up-and-coming female architects and designers use a wide range of local and global examples of their work to question different aspects of these two conventional ideas. While focusing on feminist perspectives, the book offers insights into many different issues, concerns and interpretations of architecture, proposing through these types of engagement, architecture can become more culturally, politically and environmentally relevant. This 'next generation' of architects claim feminism as their own and through doing so, help define what feminism means and how it is evolving in the 21st century.
Over the past decade or so, the wealth produced by Qatar's oil and gas exports has generated a construction development boom in its capital city of Doha and the surrounding vicinity. Since the late 1990s, the number of inhabitants has grown from less than 400,000 to more than 1.7 million today. In many respects, Doha is portrayed as an important emerging global capital in the Gulf region, which has been positioning and re-inventing itself on the map of international architecture and urbanism, with a global image of building clusters of glass office towers, as well as cultural and educational facilities. While focusing on the architectural and planning aspects of Doha's intensive urbanization, this first comprehensive examination of the city sets this within the socio-political and economic context of the wider Arabian Peninsula. 'Demystifying Doha - On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City' features a comprehensive discussion on contemporary architecture and urbanism of Doha as an emerging regional metropolis. It provides a critical analysis of the evolution of architecture and urbanism as products of the contemporary global condition. Issues that pertain to emerging service hubs, decentralised urban governance, integrated urban development strategies, image-making practices, urban identity, the dialectic relations between the city and its society and sustainable urbanism are all examined to elucidate the urban evolution and the contemporary condition of Doha. 'Demystifying Doha - On Architecture and Urbanism in an Emerging City' concludes by suggesting a framework for future studies of the city as well as for investigating the future of similar cities, setting out an agenda for sustainable urban growth, while invigorating the multiple roles urban planners and architects can play in shaping this future.
This book explores how the weather and city-form impact the mind, and how city-form and mind interact. It builds on Merleau-Ponty's contention that mind, the human body and the environment are intertwined in a singular composite, and on Walter Benjamin's suggestion that mind and city-form, in mutual interaction, through history, have set the course of civilization. Bringing together the fields of philosophy, urbanism, geography, history, and architecture, the book shows the association of existentialism with prevalence of mood disorder in Northern Europe at the close of Little Ice Age. It explains the implications of city-form and traces the role of the myths and allegories of urban design as well as the history of gender projection onto city-form. It shows how urbanization in Northern Europe provided easier access to shelter, yet resulted in sunlight deprivation, and yielded increasing incidence of depression and other mental disorder among the European middle-class. The book uses the examples of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and Kafka, to show how walking through the streets, squares and other urban voids became the informal remedy to mood disorder, a prominent trait among founders of modern Existentialism. It concludes by describing how the connection of anguish and violence is relevant to winter depression in cities, in North America in particular. |
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