![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
Rethinking Basic Design in Architectural Education provides historical and computational insights into beginning design education for architecture. Inviting the readers to briefly forget what is commonly known as basic design, it delivers the account of two educators, Denman W. Ross and Arthur W. Dow, from the turn of the twentieth century in Northeast America, interpreting key aspects of their methodology for teaching foundations for design and art. This alternate intellectual context for the origins of basic design as a precursor to computational design complements the more haptic, more customized, and more open-source design and fabrication technologies today. Basic design described and illustrated here as a form of low-tech computation offers a setting for the beginning designer to consciously experience what it means to design. Individualized dealings with materials, tools, and analytical techniques foster skills and attitudes relevant to creative and technologically adept designers. The book is a timely contribution to the theory and methods of beginning design education when fast-changing design and production technology demands change in architecture schools' foundations curricula.
Everyone is a designer. But while many practitioners may be looking for solutions or ideological certainties, Easterling argues that solutions are mistakes and ideologies are unreliable markers. Instead, Medium Design speaks to anyone looking for alternative approaches to the world's unresponsive or intractable dilemmas-from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. Such an approach joins many disciplines in considering not only separate objects, ideas and events but also the space between them. In case studies dealing with everything from automation and migration to explosive urban growth and atmospheric changes, Medium Design looks not to new innovations but rather to sophisticated relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. It does not try to eliminate problems but put them together into productive combinations. And it offers forms of activism for modulating power and temperament in organization of all kinds
Approaches the subject of building technology from the perspective of theory Encourages the larger field of architectural technology to think more critically about the deployment of its methods, products and processes Written in highly intelligible language to convey complexities clearly and succinctly to the reader.
This previously unpublished work is essential reading for anyone who has followed Marco Frascari's scholarship and teachings over the last three decades. It also provides the perfect introduction for anyone new to his writings. As ever, Frascari does not offer prescriptive tools and frameworks to enact his theories of drawing and imagination; instead, he teaches how to build one's own through individual practice. An illuminating introduction places the text in a wider context, providing the reader with a fascinating and important context and understanding to this posthumous work. Frascari's sketchbooks are reproduced faithfully in full colour to provide the reader with a remarkable insight into the design process of this influential mind.
One of the greatest and most in uential architects of Japan's postwar generation, Shinohara Kazuo (1925-2006) has remained virtually unknown outside the small community of devoted followers. As one of the leaders of architectural movement Metabolism, Shinohara achieved cult- gure stature with sublimely beautiful, purist houses that break away from Japan's postwar suburban architecture.Perhaps the most iconic of Shinohara's works, House of White (1964-66), rearranges a familiar design palette-a square plan, a pointed roof, white walls, and a symbolic heart pillar-to give the almost oceanic spaciousness through abstraction. The underlying formalism in Shinohara's architecture-its basic explorations of geometry and color-lends his work a poetic quality that fuses simplicity and surprise, the ordered and the unexpected.This volume brings together new scholarship from the foremost specialists on Shinohara and Japan's modern architecture. New perspectives and historical frameworks range from the develop- ment of the small house as a building type in postwar Japan to Shinohara's engagement with French critical theory. Hitherto unpublished archival drawings and personal travel photographsby Shinohara complement the essays.
How do digital media (mobile phones, GPS, iPods, portable computers, internet, virtual realities, etc.) affect the way we perceive, inhabit and design space? Why do architects traditionally design, draw and map the visual, as opposed to other types of sensations of space (the sound, the smell, the texture, etc.)? Architecture is not only about the solid, material elements of space; it is also about the invisible, immaterial, intangible elements of space. This book examines the design, representation and reception of the ephemeral in architecture. It discusses how architects map and examine the spatial qualities that these elements create and questions whether - and if so, how - they take them into account in the designing process. Karandinou argues that current interest in the ephemeral in contemporary culture and architecture is related to the evolution of digital media; and that it is related to the new ways of thinking about space and everyday situations that new media enables. With sound and video recording devices now being embedded in everyday gadgets and mobile phones, capturing sounds or ephemeral situations and events has become an everyday habit. New animation techniques allow designers to think about space through time, as they are able to design dynamic and responsive spaces, as well as static spaces explored by someone over time. Contemporary video games are no longer based on a simple visual input and a keyboard; they now involve other senses, movement, and the response of the whole body in space. This book therefore argues that the traditional binary opposition between the sensuous and the digital is currently being reversed. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool-to-think-with about space. Designers are now able to think through time, and design spaces accordingly. Time, temporality, ephemerality, become central issues in the designing process. The notion first claimed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, that the emergence of new di
The Gensler Research Catalogue, Volume 3 profiles the work of 35+ research projects conducted by Gensler professionals around the world, spanning topics from the future of autonomous vehicles to how workplace design drives great customer and workplace experiences. Graphic designers from across the firm collaborated to design the Catalogue, giving each entry a unique design language tailored to the expression of each projects' methods and findings. The diverse set of projects are unified by a human-centric approach to design research, focused on ways to improve the human experience through great design. The research is organised into chapters focused on broad topics of interest, each with an introduction focused on broad trends and implications for the future of design. In addition to profiling Gensler's myriad research investigations, the publication also highlights the history and ethos of the Gensler Research Institute. The Catalogue offers not only thought-provoking descriptions of individual research, but an overall evidence-based approach to thinking about the approach to and design of space with the human experience at its heart.
A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the 'starchitecture' system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007-8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a 'disinterested' position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization. At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.
Frank Lloyd Wright : The Early Years : Progressivism : Aesthetics : Cities examines Wright's belief that all aspects of human life must embrace and celebrate an aesthetic experience that would thereby lead to necessary social reforms. Inherent in the theory was a belief that reform of nineteenth-century gluttony should include a contemporary interpretation of its material presence, its bulk and space, its architectural landscape. This book analyzes Wright's innovative, profound theory of architecture that drew upon geometry and notions of pure design and the indigenous as put into practice. It outlines the design methodology that he applied to domestic and non-domestic buildings and presents reasons for the recognition of two Wright Styles and a Wright School. The book also studies how his design method was applied to city planning and implications of historical and theoretical contexts of the period that surely influenced all of Wright's community and city planning.
Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesthetics make powerful use of it. Journalists and legal professionals pore over open source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call "investigative aesthetics": mobilising sensibilities often associated with art, architecture and other such practices to find new ways of speaking truth to power. This book draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology, evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art, and examines radical practices such as those of Wikileaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. Investigative Aesthetics takes place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as it strives towards the construction of a new 'common sensing'. The book is an inspiring introduction to a new field that brings together investigation and aesthetics to change how we understand and confront power today. To Nour Abuzaid for your brilliance, perseverance, and unshaken belief in the liberation of Palestine.
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.
Introducing Architectural Tectonics is an exploration of the poetics of construction. Tectonic theory is an integrative philosophy examining the relationships formed between design, construction, and space while creating or experiencing a work of architecture. In this text, author Chad Schwartz presents an introductory investigation into tectonic theory, subdividing it into distinct concepts in order to make it accessible to beginning and advanced students alike. The book centers on the tectonic analysis of twenty contemporary works of architecture located in eleven countries including Germany, Italy, United States, Chile, Japan, Bangladesh, Spain, and Australia and designed by such notable architects as Tadao Ando, Herzog & de Meuron, Kengo Kuma, Olson Kundig, and Peter Zumthor. Although similarities do exist between the projects, their distinctly different characteristics - location and climate, context, size, program, construction methods - and range of interpretations of tectonic expression provide the most significant lessons of the book, helping you to understand tectonic theory. Written in clear, accessible language, these investigations examine the poetic creation of architecture, showing you lessons and concepts that you can integrate into your own work, whether studying in a university classroom or practicing in a professional office.
The past is weaponised in culture wars and cynically edited by those who wish to impose their ideology upon the physical spaces around us. Holocaust deniers use details of the ruins of the gas chambers Auschwitz to promote their lies: 'No Holes; No Holocaust'. Yet long-standing concepts such as 'authenticity' in heritage are undermined and trivialised by gatekeepers such as UNESCO. At the same, time, opposition to this manipulation is being undermined by cultural ideas that prioritise memory and impressions over history and facts. In Monumental Lies, Robert Bevan argues that monuments, architecture and cities are material evidence of history. They are the physical trace of past events, of previous ways of thinking and of politics, economics and values that percolate through to today. When our cities are reshaped as fantasies about the past, when monuments tell lies about who deserves honour or are destroyed and the struggle for justice forgotten, the historical record is being manipulated. When decisions are based on misinformed assumptions about how the built environment influences our behaviour or we are told, falsely, that certain architectural styles are alien to our cities, or when space pretends to be public but is private, or that physical separation is natural, we are being manipulated. There is a growing threat to the material evidence of the truth about history. We are in serious trouble if we can no longer trust the tangible world around us to tell us the truth. Monumental Lies explores the threats to our understanding of the built environment and how it impacts on our lives, as well as offers solutions to how to combat the ideological manipulations. Chosen as one of the best Architecture and Design books of 2022 by The Financial Times
First published in 2007, this book examines the designs of seventeen architecture and design schools and answers questions such as: How has architectural education evolved and what is its future? Are architectural schools discernible types of designs and what are their effects on those who experience them? What lessons can be learned from evaluations of recently completed school buildings and what guidance do they provide for the design of future ones? Included in the multiple approaches to evaluation are examinations of the history of architectural education and building form; typologies of school for architecture; and the systematic user evaluations of the aesthetics, function, and technology which reveal the strengths to encourage and weaknesses to avoid in future designs. While offering specific guidelines for schools of design, it also includes findings that extend beyond the walls of design schools and can be applied to everything from the interiors of educational and campus buildings to planning offices and gathering places to build communities. This book will make readers more aware of problems in architectural interiors and suggest ways to make interiors work better for the building occupants.
The introduction of iron - and later steel - construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart - for the first time - the global reach of iron's architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture's traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism's supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.
The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Perez-Gomez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people's experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems. This book summarizes what Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has to offer specifically for architects. It locates architectural thinking in the context of his work, placing it in relation to themes such as space, movement, materiality and creativity, introduces key texts, helps decode difficult terms and provides quick reference for further reading.
First published in 1966, and since translated into 16 languages, this remarkable book has become an essential document in architectural literature. As Venturi's ""gentle manifesto for a nonstraightforward architecture,"" Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture expresses in the most compelling and original terms the postmodern rebellion against the purism of modernism. Three hundred and fifty architectural photographs serve as historical comparisons and illuminate the author's ideas on creating and experiencing architecture. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was the winner of the Classic Book Award at the AIA's Seventh Annual International Architecture Book Awards.
At a time when the technologies and techniques of producing the built environment are undergoing significant change, this book makes central architecture's relationship to industry. Contributors turn to historical and theoretical questions, as well as to key contemporary developments, taking a humanities approach to the Industries of Architecture that will be of interest to practitioners and industry professionals, as much as to academic researchers, teachers and students. How has modern architecture responded to mass production? How do we understand the necessarily social nature of production in the architectural office and on the building site? And how is architecture entwined within wider fields of production and reproduction-finance capital, the spaces of regulation, and management techniques? What are the particular effects of techniques and technologies (and above all their inter-relations) on those who labour in architecture, the buildings they produce, and the discursive frameworks we mobilise to understand them?
For the past 30 years, The Chinese journal Time + Architecture (Shidai Jianzhu) has focused on publishing innovative and exploratory work by emerging architects based in private design firms who were committed to new material, theoretical and pedagogical practices. In doing so, this book argues that the journal has engaged in the presentation and production of a particular form of critical architecture - described as an 'intermediate criticality' - as a response to the particular constraints of the Chinese cultural and political context. The journal's publications displayed a 'dual critique' - a resistant attitude to the dominant modes of commercial building practice, characterised by rapid and large-scale urban expansion, and an alternative publishing practice focusing on emerging, independent architectural practitioners through the active integration of theoretical debates, architectural projects, and criticisms. This dual critique is illustrated through a careful review and analysis of the history and programme of the journal. By showing how the work of emerging architects, including Yung Ho Chang, Wang Shu, Liu Jiakun and Urbanus, are situated within the context of the journal's special thematic editions on experimental architecture, exhibition, group design, new urban space and professional system, the book assesses the contribution the journal has made to the emergence of a critical architecture in China, in the context of how it was articulated, debated, presented and perhaps even 'produced' within the pages of the publication itself. The protagonists of critical architecture have endeavoured to construct an alternative mode of form and space with strong aesthetic and socio-political implications to the predominant production of architecture under the current Chinese socialist market economy. To rebel against certain forms of domination and suppression by capital and power is by no means to completely reject them; rather, it is to use thos
In 1811, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe spurred American builders into action when he called for them to reject "the corrupt Age of Dioclesian, or the still more absurd and debased taste of Louis the XIV," and to emulate instead the ancient temples of Greece. In response, people in the antebellum trans-Appalachian region embraced the clean lines, intricate details, and stately symmetry of the Grecian style. On newly built public buildings, private homes, and religious structures, references to classical Greek architecture became the preferred ornamentation. Several antebellum cities and towns adopted the moniker of "Athens," styling themselves as centers of culture, education, and sophistication. As the trend grew, American citizens understood the name as a link between the Grecian style and the founding principles of democracy - signaling a change of taste in service to the larger American cultural ideal. In Athens on the Frontier, Patrick Lee Lucas examines the material culture of Grecian-style buildings in antebellum America to help recover nineteenth-century regional identities. As communities worked to define their built landscape and develop a shared Western identity, Lucas's study invites readers to question many of the assumptions Americans have made about divisions and cultural formation in antebellum society.
Drawing Parallels expands your understanding of the workings of architects by looking at their work from an alternative perspective. The book focuses on parallel projections such as axonometric, isometric, and oblique drawings. Ray Lucas argues that by retracing the marks made by architects, we can begin to engage more directly with their practice as it is only by redrawing the work that hidden aspects are revealed. The practice of drawing offers significantly different insights, not easily accessible through discourse analysis, critical theory, or observation. Using James Stirling, JJP Oud, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, and Cedric Price as case studies, Lucas highlights each architect's creative practices which he anaylses with reference to Bergson's concepts of temporality and cretivity, discussing ther manner in which creative problems are explored and solved. The book also draws on a range of anthropological ideas including skilled practice and enchantment in order to explore why axonometrics are important to architecture and questions the degree to which the drawing convention influences the forms produced by architects. With 60 black-and-white images to illustrate design development, this book would be an essential read for academics and students of architecture with a particular interest in further understanding the inner workings of the architectural creative process.
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. -- .
Bringing together an international range of contributors from the fields of practice, theory and history, this book takes a fresh look at occupation. It argues that occupation is a prospect that begins with ruin--a residue from the past, an implied or even a resounding presence of something previous that holds the potential for transformation. This prospect invites us to repudiate, re-imagine and re-define lived space, thereby asserting occupation as an act of revolution. Authors drawn from the fields of architecture, urbanism, interior architecture, dance dramaturgy, art history, design and visual arts, cultural studies and media studies provide a unique, holistic view of occupation, examining topics such as: the authority of architecture; architecture as an act of revolution; women in hypersexual space; occupation as a serialized act of ruin; and the definition of space as repudiation. They discuss how acts that re-invent territory and/or shift boundaries--psychological, social and physical--affect identity and demonstrate possession. This theme of occupation is significant and topical at a time of radical flux, generated by the proliferation of hypermedia, and also by the dramatically shifting environmental, political and economic context of this era. The book concludes by asserting that it is through occupation (private and public: real, virtual, remembered, re-invented) that we appear or disappear as the individual or collective self, because the spaces we construct assert particular agendas which we may either contest or live in accord with.
The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum, exceptional in the completeness of its ruins, came to fascinate architects, artists, writers, and tourists alike, who documented the site in drawings and texts. In Rediscovering Architecture, Sigrid de Jong analyzes extensive original source material, including letters, diaries, drawings, paintings, engravings, and published texts, which are attractively reproduced here. The book offers new insights on the explorations of the site, the diverse reactions to it, and their dramatic and enduring effect on architectural thought, as they influenced intellectual debates in England, France, and Italy during the long 18th century. This unique study of the experience of architecture reconstructs Paestum's key role in the discourse on classical architecture and its historiography, primitivism, the sublime and the picturesque, and the growing importance of science and history in architectural thought. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Advances in Heat Transfer, Volume 50
Ephraim M. Sparrow, John Patrick Abraham, …
Hardcover
R4,964
Discovery Miles 49 640
Shepherding UxVs for Human-Swarm Teaming…
Hussein A. Abbass, Robert A. Hunjet
Hardcover
R5,625
Discovery Miles 56 250
Charge Transport in Low Dimensional…
Vito Dario Camiola, Giovanni Mascali, …
Hardcover
R2,922
Discovery Miles 29 220
|