Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need to know about the characters in a short amount of time. Illustrated by a diverse range of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity between film and architecture. Using a phenomenological approach, it describes how we, the viewers, can learn how to read architecture and design in film in order to see the many inherent messages. Architecture's representational capacity contributes to the plausibility or 'reality' possible in film. The book provides an ontological understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and a filmic world of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on both film and architecture.

Books orient, intrigue, provoke and direct the reader while editing, interpreting, encapsulating, constructing and revealing architectural representation. Binding Space: The Book as Spatial Practice explores the role of the book form within the realm of architectural representation. It proposes the book itself as another three-dimensional, complementary architectural representation with a generational and propositional role within the design process. Artists' books in particular - that is, a book made as an original work of art, with an artist, designer or architect as author - have certain qualities and characteristics, quite different from the conventional presentation and documentation of architecture. Paginal sequentiality, the structure and objecthood of the book, and the act of reading create possibilities for the book as a site for architectural imagining and discourse. In this way, the form of the book affects how the architectural work is conceived, constructed and read. In five main sections, Binding Space examines the relationships between the drawing, the building and the book. It proposes thinking through the book as a form of spatial practice, one in which the book is cast as object, outcome, process and tool. Through the book, we read spatial practice anew.

Examining discomfort's physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture's position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort's triumph so much as discomfort's curious dispersal into practices that form 'modern life' - and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture. The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects, extending our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, cities and ideas); and the conditions under which - by intention or accident - they discomfort.

Architecturally Speaking is an international collection of essays by leading architects, artists and theorists of locality and space. Together these essays build to reflect not only what it might mean to 'speak architecturally', but also the innate relations between the artist's and architect's work, how they are distinct, and in inspiring ways, how they might relate through questions of built form. This book will appeal to urbanists, geographers, artists, architects, cultural historians and theorists.

Buildings shape our identity and sense of self in profound ways that are not always evident to architects and town planners, or even to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they inhabit. Architecture and the Mimetic Self provides a useful theoretical guide to our unconscious behaviour in relation to buildings, and explains both how and why we are drawn to specific elements and features of architectural design. It reveals how even the most uninspiring of buildings can be modified to meet our unconscious expectations and requirements of them-and, by the same token, it explores the repercussions for our wellbeing when buildings fail to do so. Criteria for effective architectural design have for a long time been grounded in utilitarian and aesthetic principles of function, efficiency, cost, and visual impact. Although these are important considerations, they often fail to meet the fundamental needs of those who inhabit and use buildings. Misconceptions are rife, not least because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure, and are in large part unconscious. By bridging psychoanalytic thought and architectural theory, Architecture and the Mimetic Self frees the former from its preoccupations with interpersonal human relations to address the vital relationships that we establish with our nonhuman environments. In addition to providing a guide to the unconscious behaviours that are most relevant for evaluating architectural design, this book explains how our relationships with the built environment inform a more expansive and useful psychoanalytic theory of human relationship and identity. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists, architects, and all who are interested in the overlaps of psychology, architecture, and the built environment.

An understanding of architects' character traits can offer important insights into how they design buildings. These traits include leadership skills necessary to coordinate a team, honest and ethical behavior, being well educated and possessing a life-long love of learning, flexibility, resourcefulness, and visionary and strategic thinking. Characteristics such as these describe a successful person. Architects also possess these traits, but they have additional skills specifically valuable for the profession. These will include the ability to question the use of digital media, new materials, processes, and methods to convey meaning in architectural form. Although not exhaustive, a discussion of such subjects as defining, imaging, persuading, and fabricating will reveal representational meaning useful for the development of an understanding of architects' character. Through the analogies and metaphors found in Greek myth, the book describes the elusive, hard-to-define characteristics of architects to engage the dilemmas of a changing architectural landscape. Building the Architect's Character: Explorations in Traits examines traditional and archetypal characteristics of the successful architect to ask if they remain relevant today.

Whatever 'ugliness' is, it remains a problematic category in architectural aesthetics - alternately vilified and appropriated, either to shock or to invert conventions of architecture. This book presents eighteen new essays which rethink ugliness in architecture - from brutalism to eclectic postmodern architectural productions - and together offer a diverse reappraisal of the history and theory of postmodern architecture and design. The essays address both broad theoretical questions on ugliness and postmodern aesthetics, as well as more specific analyses of significant architectural examples dating from the last decades of the twentieth century, addressing the relation between the aesthetic register of ugliness and aesthetic concepts such as brutalism, kitsch, the formless, ad hoc-ism, the monstrous, or the grotesque. Architecture and Ugliness not only documents the history of a postmodern anti-aesthetic through a diverse set of case studies, it also sheds valuable light on an aesthetic problem which has been largely overlooked in architectural discourse. It is essential reading for all students and scholars with an interest in postmodern architectural history, architectural theory and aesthetics.

A History of Architecture and Trade draws together essays from an international roster of distinguished and emerging scholars to critically examine the important role architecture and urbanism played in the past five hundred years of global trading, moving away from a conventional Western narrative. The book uses an alternative holistic lens through which to view the development of architecture and trade, covering diverse topics such as the coercive urbanism of the Dutch East India Company; how slavery and capitalism shaped architecture and urbanization; and the importance of Islamic trading in the history of global trade. Each chapter examines a key site in history, using architecture, landscape and urban scale as evidence to show how trade has shaped them. It will appeal to scholars and researchers interested in areas such as world history, economic and trade history and architectural history.

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.

This collection focuses on how architectural material is transformed, revised, swallowed whole, plagiarized, or in any other way appropriated. It charts new territory within this still unexplored yet highly topical area of study by establishing a shared vocabulary with which to discuss, or contest, the workings of appropriation as a vital and progressive aspect of architectural discourse. Written by a group of rising scholars in the field of architectural history and criticism, the chapters cover a range of architectural subjects that are linked in their investigations of how architects engage with their predecessors.

Despite population trends toward urbanization, the forest continues to have a strong appeal to the human imagination, and the human preference for forest over many other types of terrain is well documented. This book re-imagines architecture and urbanism by allowing the forest to be a prominent consideration in the language of design, thus recognizing the forest as essential rather than just incidental to human well-being. In Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic, forest is a large-scale urban construct that is far more extensive and nuanced than trees and shrubbery. The forest aesthetic opens designers to the forest as a model for an urban architecture of permeable floors, protective canopies, connected food chains, beneficial decomposition, and resilient ecologies. Much can be learned about these features of the forest from the natural sciences; however, when they are given due consideration technically and metaphorically in the design of urban habitat, the places in which humans live become living forests. What is present here in Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic is both a review of many ingenious ways in which the forest aesthetic has already been expressed in design and urbanism, and an encouragement to further use the forest aesthetic in design language and design outcomes. Case study projects featured include the Chilotan building craft of Southern Chile, the yaki sugi of Japan, the Biltmore Forest in the Southeastern United States, the Australian capital city Canberra, Bosco Verticale in Milan, Italy, the Beijing Olympic Forest Park in China, and more.

***WINNER OF A NAUTILUS 2018 SILVER MEDAL BOOK AWARD*** From Vitruvius in the 1st century BCE on, there has been an attempt to understand how architecture works, especially in its poetic aspect but also in its basic functions. Design can encourage us to walk, to experience community, to imagine new ways of being, and can affect countless other choices we make that shape our health and happiness. Using the ideas of rational choice theory and behavioral economics, Choice Architecture shows how behavior, design, and wellness are deeply interconnected. As active agents, we choose our responses to the architectural meanings we encounter based on our perception of our individual contexts. The book offers a way to approach the design of spaces for human flourishing and explains in rich detail how the potential of the built environment to influence our well-being can be realized.

Time, History and Architecture presents a series of essays on critical historiography, each addressing a different topic, to elucidate the importance of two influential figures Walter Benjamin and Gottfried Semper for architectural history. In a work exploring themes such as time, autonomy and periodization, author Gevork Hartoonian unpacks the formation of architectural history; the problem of autonomy in criticism and the historiographic narrative. Considering the scope of criticism informing the contemporaneity of architecture, the book explores the concept of nonsimultaneity, and introduces retrospective criticism the agent of critical historiography. An engaging thematic dialogue for academics and upper-level graduate students interested in architectural history and theory, this book aims to deconstruct the certainties of historicism and to raise new questions and interpretations from established critical canons.

The most incisive texts on Rem Koolhaas / OMA The activities of Rem Koolhaas and his staff were widely discussed even before the foundation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975. Today, many contributions on the work of OMA can be found in the international architectural press, including Koolhaas' own writings. The book contains about 150 selected texts-interviews, feature articles, essays, lead articles, reviews, letters, introductions, appraisals, and competition reports that have been compiled for the first time. This compilation not only provides a fresh and critical view of the oeuvre of one the most important contemporary architects, but also represents an account of the debate on architectural and urban design in recent decades. The most incisive texts on the work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas, with many articles that have never before been translated into English An overview of notions, ideas, and debates in architectural discourse, theory, and criticism, from the 1970s until 2000, that remain relevant today Illustrated with more than 100 cover shoots

Once Upon a China is an unconventional architectural story of great beauty, empathy, honour and sadness. The chapters are ingenious reimaginations of 'Dream of the Red Mansion', 'Journey to the West ', 'The Water Margin', and 'Romance of the Three Kingdoms', and are conceived as specific themes of Chinese identity: domesticity, consumerism, democracy and adaptability. These four seminal pre-modern fictions contain diverse voices and philosophical perspectives on history as well as satires that have defined past developments of Chinese societies, politics and the built environment. Comics is an unorthodox but extraordinary medium for architectural speculations. The eccentric characteristics of comic-inspired drawings in this book enrich the processes of conception and conceptualisation of design - their fragmented yet sequential nature proves versatile in the imagination of spatial experiences, enabling the complex stories of place, brief and building to materialise. At the same time, the politicisation of architecture through comics engenders a sense of optimism to reappraise Chinese design futures and critical thinking beyond the exuberance of non-contextual Western capitalist models.

In 2020, the COVID pandemic unfolded and transformed the lives of billions across the world. As the invisible killer marched across continents, causing unprecedented disruption worldwide, architects and designers began rethinking how to design cities and adapt their practice so that we might continue to live together in the future. Architecture after COVID is the first book to explore the pandemic's transformative impacts upon the architectural profession. It raises new questions about the intertwined natures of architectural production, science, society, and spatial practice - questions which had lain latent in the profession for years, but which the COVID pandemic brought to the fore. The book explores how the pandemic modified the spatial conventions of everyday life in the city, and looks in detail at how it has transformed building typologies. It also shows how the continuing risk of pandemics leads us to rethink the social dimension of architecture and urban design; and ultimately proposes a radical re-evaluation of the conditions of architectural practice - making a compelling argument about the changing agency of architectural design and the importance of designers in re-ordering the post-pandemic world. Packed with interviews and case-studies from a wide range of contemporary design practices, Architecture after COVID will inspire debates among architectural practitioners and theorists alike. The broad view of the approach and the depth of the professional issues at stake mean that this book will offer key insights for the discipline long beyond the scope of the COVID pandemic - as it explores the long-lasting bond between city, science and society as the 'new normal' begins to emerge.

This book brings together a dozen of Philip Steadman's essays and papers on the geometry of architectural and urban form, written over the last 12 years. New introductions link the papers and set them in context. There are two large themes: a morphological approach to the history of architecture, and studies of possibility in built form. Within this framework the papers cover the geometrical character of the building stock as a whole; histories of selected building types; analyses of density and energy in relation to urban form; and systematic methods for enumerating building plans and built forms. They touch on a range of key topics of debate in architectural theory and building science. Illustrated with over 200 black and white images, this collection provides an accessible and coherent guide to this important work.

The Fundamentals of Architecture, 2nd Edition is an introduction to the basic ideas that inform architecture. It is intended to unravel the complexity of architecture to explain its process and make it more accessible. It guides students through the rich history of the discipline, and introduces aspects of contemporary theory and practice. The book explores the process of architecture starting from the initial ideas and concepts, and how these ideas are informed by understanding site and context. It examines the impact of the physical environment and the historical ideas that have informed and influenced the architectural solution. The second edition has been redesigned and updated with new material, including six case studies, exercise sections and contemporary visuals from students and leading architects.

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. -- .

**Finalist for the Thought and Criticism category of the FAD Awards 2019** This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Loenberg- Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Loenberg- Holm's ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting.

Learn about key concepts behind the world's most incredible buildings in The Architecture Book. Part of the fascinating Big Ideas series, this book tackles tricky topics and themes in a simple and easy to follow format. Learn about Architecture in this overview guide to the subject, brilliant for novices looking to find out more and experts wishing to refresh their knowledge alike! The Architecture Book brings a fresh and vibrant take on the topic through eye-catching graphics and diagrams to immerse yourself in. This captivating book will broaden your understanding of Architecture, with: - A global scope, covering architecture from all over the world - Packed with facts, charts, timelines and graphs to help explain core concepts - A visual approach to big subjects with striking illustrations and graphics throughout - Easy to follow text makes topics accessible for people at any level of understanding The Architecture Book is a captivating introduction to buildings and the ideas, and principles that make them key to the history and evolution of our built environment - aimed at adults with an interest in the subject and students wanting to gain more of an overview. Here you'll discover the most important ideas, technologies, and movements in the history of architecture and structural engineering, through exciting text and bold graphics. Your Architecture Questions, Simply Explained Learn about the evolution of construction, from ancient and classical architecture through Medieval, Gothic, and Renaissance buildings, Baroque and Rococo, to 19th-century emerging modernism and postmodernism and glittering skyscrapers. If you thought it was difficult to learn about buildings and the ideas behind them, The Architecture Book presents key information in a clear layout. Explore architectural movements, styles and celebrated buildings from all over the world, and stunning religious structures from mosques to churches, stupas to pagodas and temples. The Big Ideas Series With millions of copies sold worldwide, The Architecture Book is part of the award-winning Big Ideas series from DK. The series uses striking graphics along with engaging writing, making big topics easy to understand.

This book looks at architecture history in reverse, in order to follow chains of precedents back through time to see how ideas alter the course of civilization in general and the discipline of architecture in particular. Part I begins with present-day attitudes about architecture and traces them back to seminal ideas from the beginning of the twentieth century. Part II examines how pre-twentieth-century societies designed and understood architecture, how they strove to create communal physical languages, and how their disagreements set the stage for our information age practices. Architecture History and Theory in Reverse includes 45 black-and-white images and will be useful to students of architecture and literature.

In order to function, architectural theory and practice must be shaped to suit current cultural, economic, and political forces. Thus, architecture embodies reductive logic that conditions the treatment of human and social processes - which raises the question of how to define objectivity for architectural mentalities that must conform to a set of immediate conditions. This book focuses on meaning, and on the physical and mental processes that define life in built environments. The potential to draw knowledge from aesthetics, psychology, political economy, philosophy, geography, and sociology is offset by the fact that architectural logic is inevitably reductive, cultural, socio-economic, and political. However, despite the duty to conform, it is argued that the treatment of human processes, and the understanding of architectural mentalities, can benefit from interdisciplinary linkages, small freedoms, and cracks in a system of imperatives that can yield the means of greater objectivity. This is valuable reading for students and researchers interested in architectural theory as a working reality, and in the relationships between architecture and other fields.

In the 1920s, the urban theory of Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885-1967) redefined architecture's relationship to the city. His proposal for a high-rise city, where leisure, labor and circulation would be vertically integrated, both frightened his contemporaries and offered a trenchant critique of the dynamics of the capitalist metropolis. Hilberseimer's "Groszstadt-architektur" ("Metropolisarchitecture") is presented here for the first time in English translation. Two additional essays frame this international cross-section of metropolitan architecture: "Der Wille zur Architektur" (The Will to Architecture) and "Vorschlag zur City-Bebauung" (Proposal for City-Building). The propositions assembled here encourage us to reconsider mobility, concentration and the scale of architectural intervention in our own era of urban expansion. This is the second title in the "GSAPP Sourcebooks" series, devoted to recovering and translating overlooked texts on architecture and the city.