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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
This book is concerned with cultural and political discourses that affect the production of architecture. It examines how these discursive mechanisms and technologies combine to normalise and aestheticise everyday practices. It queries the means by which buildings are appropriated to give shape and form to political aspirations and values. Architecture is not overtly political. It does not coerce people to behave in certain ways. However, architecture is constructed within the same rules and practices whereby people and communities self-govern and regulate themselves to think and act in certain ways. This book seeks to examine these rules through various case studies including: the reconstructed Notre Dame Cathedral, the Nazi era Munich Konigsplatz, Auschwitz concentration camp and the Prora resort, Sydney's suburban race riots, and the Australian Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island.
This book provides an extended exploration of the multimodal analysis of spatial (three-dimensional) texts of the built environment, culminating in a holistic approach termed Spatial Discourse Analysis (SpDA). Based on existing frameworks of multimodal analysis, this book applies, adapts, and extends these frameworks to spatial texts. The authors argue that choices in spatial design create meanings about what we perceive and how we can or should behave within spatial texts, influence how we feel in and about those spaces, and enable these texts to function as coherent wholes. Importantly, a spatial text, once built, is also a resource which is then used, and an essential aspect of understanding these texts is to consider what users themselves contribute to the meaning potential of these texts. The book takes the metafunctional approach familiar from Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) and foregrounds each metafunction in turn (textual, interpersonal, experiential, and logical), in relation to the detailed analysis of a particular spatial text.
That the topic ofdesign review is somehow trou My biases are clearfrom the start: I am among blesome is probably one thing all readers can those who believe that, despite all signals to the contrary, the physical structure of our environ agree on. Beyond this, however, I suspect pros pects of consensus are dim. Differing opinions ment can be managed, and that controlling it is on the subject likely range from those desiring the key to the ameliorationofnumerous problems control tothosedesiringfreedom. Saysonecamp: confronting society today. I believe that design our physical and natural environments are going can solve a host ofproblems, and that the design to hell in a hand basket. Says the other: design of the physical environment does influence be review boards are only as good as their members; havior. more often than not their interventions produce Clearly, this is a perspective that encompasses mediocre architecture. more than one building at a time and demands As a town planner and architect, I am sympa that each building understand its place in a larger thetic to the full range of sentiment. Perhaps a context-the city. Indeed, anyone proposing discussion of these two concepts-control and physical solutions to urban problems is designing freedom-and their differences would now be or, as may seem more often the case, destroying useful. But let me instead suggest that both posi the city."
Critical Regionalism is a notion which gained popularity in architectural debate as a synthesis of universal, 'modern' elements and individualistic elements derived from local cultures. This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is 'softened' and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. A further benefit is that several responses dependent on factors that initial definitions of Critical Regionalism never took into account can now be considered. At the book's centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili PietilA's Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical 'western' exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. The book argues that there are different Critical Regionalisms and not all of them impose Western paradigms on non-Western cultures. Non-Western regionalists can also successfully participate in the Western enlightened discourse, even when they do not directly and consciously act against Western models. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain 'architectural rationality' can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort, or even tradition, but flowing out of a social game of which architecture is a part. The key concept is that of the 'form of life', as developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thoughts are here linked to Critical Regionalism. Kenneth Frampton argues that Critical Regionalism offers something well beyond comfort and accommodation. What he has in mind are ethical prescripts closely linked to a
This comprehensive catalogue of contemporary work examines the renewed investment in the relationship between representation, materiality, and architecture. It assembles a range of diverse voices across various institutions, practices, generations, and geographies, through specific case studies that collectively present a broader theoretical intention.
Migrant Housing, the latest book by author Mirjana Lozanovska, examines the house as the architectural construct in the processes of migration. Housing is pivotal to any migration story, with studies showing that migrant participation in the adaptation or building of houses provides symbolic materiality of belonging and the platform for agency and productivity in the broader context of the immigrant city. Migration also disrupts the cohesion of everyday dwelling and homeland integral to housing, and the book examines this displacement of dwelling and its effect on migrant housing. This timely volume investigates the poetic and political resonance between migration and architecture, challenging the idea of the 'house' as a singular theoretical construct. Divided into three parts, Histories and theories of post-war migrant housing, House/home and Mapping migrant spaces of home, it draws on data studies from Australia and Macedonia, with literature from Canada, Sweden and Germany, to uncover the effects of unprivileged post-war migration in the late twentieth century on the house as architectural and normative model, and from this perspective negotiates the disciplinary boundaries of architecture.
"Architectural Theory: Vitruvius to 1870" is a landmark anthology
that surveys the development of the field of architecture from its
earliest days to the year 1870. The first truly comprehensive
anthology that brings together the classic essays in the field, the
volume chronicles the major developments and trends in architecture
from Vitruvius to Gottfried Semper.
Using empathy, as established by the Vienna School of Art History, complemented by insights on how the mind processes visual stimuli, as demonstrated by late 19th-century psychologists and art theorists, this book puts forward an innovative interpretative method of decoding the forms and spaces of Modern buildings. This method was first developed as scholars realized that the new abstract art appearing needed to be analysed differently than the previous figurative works. Since architecture experienced a similar development in the 1920s and 30s, this book argues that the empathetic method can also be used in architectural interpretation. While most existing scholarship tends to focus on formal and functional analysis, this book proposes that Modern architecture is too diverse to be reduced to a few common formal or ornamental features. Instead, by relying on the viewer's innate psycho-physiological perceptive abilities, sensual and intuitive understandings of composition, form, and space are emphasized. These aspects are especially significant because Modern Architecture lacks the traditional stylistic signs. Including building analyses, it shows how, by visually reducing cubical forms and spaces to linear configurations, the exteriors and interiors of Modern buildings can be interpreted via human perceptive abilities as dynamic movement systems commensurate with the new industrial transportation age. This reveals an inner necessity these buildings express about themselves and their culture, rather than just an explanation of how they are assembled and how they should be used. The case studies highlight the contrasts between buildings designed by different architects, rather than concentrating on the few features that relate them to the zeitgeist. It analyses the buildings directly as the objects of study, not indirectly, as designs filtered through a philosophical or theoretical discourse. The book demonstrates that, with technology and science affecting culture
Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture presents a communicable and useful definition of organic architecture that reaches beyond constraints. The book focuses on the works and writings of architects in Nordic countries, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, Jorn Utzon, Sverre Fehn and the Aaltos (Aino, Elissa and Alvar), among others. It is structured around the ideas of organic design principles that influenced them and allowed their work to evolve from one building to another. Erik Champion argues organic architecture can be viewed as a concerted attempt to thematically unify the built environment through the allegorical expression of ongoing interaction between designer, architectural brief and building-as-process. With over 140 black and white images, this book is an intriguing read for architecture students and professionals alike.
Examines how both artist and writer in the Victorian era responded to the shared challenges, assumptions, and dilemmas of their time, often unaware that the same problems were being confronted in the kindred media. The placing of such writers as Dickens, G.Eliot, Hopkins, and Henry James within the context of Victorian painting, architecture, and interior design offers fresh insights into their works, as well as reassessments of such themes as the mid-century representation of the Fallen Woman or the impact of commodity culture upon contemporary aesthetic standards.
There are a number of recent texts that draw on psychoanalytic theory as an interpretative approach for understanding architecture, or that use the formal and social logics of architecture for understanding the psyche. But there remains work to be done in bringing what largely amounts to a series of independent voices, into a discourse that is greater than the sum of its parts, in the way that, say, the architect Peter Eisenman was able to do with the architecture of deconstruction or that the historian Manfredo Tafuri was able to do with the Marxist critique of architecture. The discourse of the present volume focuses specifically for the first time on the subject of the unconscious in relation to the design, perception, and understanding of architecture. It brings together an international group of contributors, who provide informed and varied points of view on the role of the unconscious in architectural design and theory and, in doing so, expand architectural theory to unexplored areas, enriching architecture in relation to the humanities. The book explores how architecture engages dreams, desires, imagination, memory, and emotions, how architecture can appeal to a broader scope of human experience and identity. Beginning by examining the historical development of the engagement of the unconscious in architectural discourse, and the current and historical, theoretical and practical, intersections of architecture and psychoanalysis, the volume also analyses the city and the urban condition.
Each of these Analysing Architecture Notebooks is devoted to a particular theme in understanding the rich and varied workings of architecture. They can be thought of as addenda to the foundation volume Analysing Architecture, which first appeared in 1997 and has subsequently been enlarged in three further editions. Examining these extra themes as a series of Notebooks, rather than as additional chapters in future editions, allows greater space for more detailed exploration of a wider variety of examples, whilst avoiding the risk of the original book becoming unwieldy. Metaphor is the most powerful component of the poetry of architecture. It has been a significant factor in architecture since the earliest periods of human history, when people were finding ways to give order and meaning to the world in which we live. It is arguable that architecture began with the realisation of metaphor in physical form, and that subsequent movements - from Greek to Gothic, Renaissance to Modern, Victorian to Vernacular... - have all been driven by the emergence or rediscovery of different metaphors by which architecture might be generated.
The Production Sites of Architecture examines the intimate link between material sites and meaning. It explores questions such as: how do spatial configurations produce meaning? What are alternative modes of knowledge production? How do these change our understanding of architectural knowledge? Featuring essays from an international range of scholars, the book accepts that everything about the production of architecture has social significance. It focuses on two areas: firstly, relationships of spatial configuration, form, order and classification; secondly, the interaction of architecture and these notions with other areas of knowledge, such as literature, inscriptions, interpretations, and theories of classification, ordering and invention. Moving beyond perspectives which divide architecture into either an aesthetic or practical art, the authors show how buildings are informed by intersections between site and content, space and idea, thought and materiality, architecture and imagination. Presenting illustrated case studies of works by architects and artists including Amale Andraos, Dan Wood, OMA, Koen Deprez and John Soane, The Production Sites of Architecture makes a major contribution to our understanding of architectural theory.
Arches to Zigzags introduces its audience (both young and old) to the world of architecture through the alphabet. It challenges young readers with new words and images, while adults will widen their own knowledge of architecture. Captivating images and clever wordplay entertain folks of all ages to explore the built environment. The book begins its journey through architecture with an Arch (for the letter A), then a Balcony, and next on to Column Capitals. Along the way, readers will learn about some less-familiar architectural examples (like Finial, for instance), Keystone, Obelisk, and Quoin. Each letter and its corresponding image are described with light verse, which asks the reader some quick questions about what they see. This colourful, lively, and entertaining book closes with some thoughts about what architecture is, why it's important, and where you'll find examples of architecture in the buildings you visit and use every day. There's also information on the location and history of each of the 26 beautiful images in the book, in case you want to check them out on your own. Created by an architect, writer, photographer, and librarian, Arches to Zigzags connects architecture with the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z.
Architecture has long been understood as a cultural discipline able to articulate the human condition and lift the human spirit, yet the spirituality of architecture is rarely directly addressed in academic scholarship. The seventeen chapters provide a diverse range of perspectives, grouped according to topical themes: Being in the World; Sacred, Secular, and the Contemporary Condition; Symbolic Engagements; Sacred Landscapes; and Spirituality and the Designed Environment. Even though the authors' approach the subject from a range of disciplines and theoretical positions, all share interests in the need to rediscover, redefine, or reclaim the sacred in everyday experience, scholarly analysis, and design.
"Sources of Architectural Form" provides a critical history of
Western architecture theory from the ancient world to the present
day. It focuses on design theory's central question: how does the
architect generate architectural form? Theorists necessarily tackle
this fundamental question in order to explain a number of puzzling
issues including the origins of style, the persistence of tradition
and the role of genius.
Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation, we know that our current ways of living are not resilient. This volume takes resilience as a transformative concept to ask where and what architecture might contribute. Bringing together cross-disciplinary perspectives from architecture, urban design, art, geography, building science and psychoanalysis, it aims to open up multiple perspectives of research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges, defining the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse. Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138065802_oachapter16.pdf
This book explores contemporary urban experiences and how they are connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. There is a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and politics of urban commons, and Stavrides uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity emerges today in, against and beyond existing societies of inequality. The concept of space commoning is discussed and considered in terms of its potential to promote emancipation. This is an exciting book, which explores the cultural meaning and politics of common spaces in conjunction with ideas connected with neighbourhood and community, justice and resistance, in order to trace elements of a different emancipating future. -- .
Resilience will be a defining quality of the twenty-first century. As we witness the increasingly turbulent effects of climate change, the multiple challenges of resource depletion and wage stagnation, we know that our current ways of living are not resilient. This volume takes resilience as a transformative concept to ask where and what architecture might contribute. Bringing together cross-disciplinary perspectives from architecture, urban design, art, geography, building science and psychoanalysis, it aims to open up multiple perspectives of research, spatial strategies and projects that are testing how we can build local resilience in preparation for major societal challenges, defining the position of architecture in urban resilience discourse. Chapter 16 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138065802_oachapter16.pdf
The essays consider the contemporary architectural scene from a variety of perspectives in theory and practice. They include seminal pieces that framed important debates in the field, such as the introduction to the exhibition catalogue Monolithic Architecture, as well as observations on buildings and practices from around the world, from Santiago, to Beirut and Beijing. Together, the polemical provocations and interpretive insights construct a critical panorama of a global architectural landscape in rapid transformation since the 1990s. * The book is divided into there parts. "Polemics" addresses broad issues and trends with essays that claim a position in current debates. "Agents" examines the oeuvres of particular architects, with pieces that situate their work in relation to such debates. "Artifacts" takes on single buildings, instances where ideas are sedimented into form to situate current architectural discussions in concrete objects.
City Works 6 is the sixth in a series of books which document the exciting work of students from The City College of New York Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. The City College of New York has a long and important tradition of producing internationally recognized scholarship and research while maintaining its promise of an accessible public education for the city of New York. Through an emphasis on hand craft and digital fabrication, interdisciplinary research, and ecologically and culturally sustainable practices, SSA encourages a responsible engagement with the discipline of architecture, while cultivating rigorous exploration of new theories, materials and technologies. With three unique programs including Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture, the student work represented here reflects some of the most progressive ideas about how we inhabit both the natural and the built environment.
The Architect's Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture is the first book to consider the relationship between the neurosciences and architecture, offering a compelling and provocative study in the field of architectural theory. * Explores various moments of architectural thought over the last 500 years as a cognitive manifestation of philosophical, psychological, and physiological theory * Looks at architectural thought through the lens of the remarkable insights of contemporary neuroscience, particularly as they have advanced within the last decade * Demonstrates the neurological justification for some very timeless architectural ideas, from the multisensory nature of the architectural experience to the essential relationship of ambiguity and metaphor to creative thinking |
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