Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
|
Your cart is empty |
|||
Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
"Buildings and Power" shifts the focus of architectural debate from the dominant themes of art and technology to an analysis of meaning in terms of social relations. Buildings are primarily social objects - their forms provide answers to questions we ask about ourselves, questions of power, order, classification and function. Everything about a building has social meaning - its form, function and spatial structure are each capable of analysis. "Buildings and Power" focuses on the emergence of new building types during the critical period between the Enlightenment and the French and Industrial Revolutions. The range is divided between those which control relations between people directly - schools, institutions of various kinds, buildings for cleaning and hygiene, clubs, assembly rooms and hotels; those which reproduce knowledge - museums, galleries, institutes; and those used for production and exchange - mills, production utopias, markets, shops and exchanges.
Coding, Shaping, Making combines inspiration from architecture, mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics and computation to look towards the future of architecture, design and art. It presents ongoing experiments in the search for fundamental principles of form and form-making in nature so that we can better inform our own built environment. In the coming decades, matter will become encoded with shape information so that it shapes itself, as happens in biology. Physical objects, shaped by forces as well, will begin to design themselves based on information encoded in matter they are made of. This knowledge will be scaled and trickled up to architecture. Consequently, architecture will begin to design itself and the role of the architect will need redefining. This heavily illustrated book highlights Haresh Lalvani's efforts towards this speculative future through experiments in form and form-making, including his work in developing a new approach to shape-coding, exploring higher-dimensional geometry for designing physical structures and organizing form in higher-dimensional diagrams. Taking an in-depth look at Lalvani's pioneering experiments of mass customization in industrial products in architecture, combined with his idea of a form continuum, this book argues for the need for integration of coding, shaping and making in future technologies into one seamless process. Drawing together decades of research, this book will be a thought-provoking read for architecture professionals and students, especially those interested in the future of the discipline as it relates to mathematics, science, technology and art. It will also interest those in the latter fields for its broader implications.
* Introduces a holistic and embodied alternative to visually-driven architecture, demonstrating that it is more capable of sustaining our physical, emotional and psychological wellbeing * Written in an accessible manner that increases interest and understanding in what is a traditionally diffuse subject area * Illustrated with almost 100 black and white images
This book traces the history of urban design in tropical South East Asia with a view to offering solutions to contemporary architectural and urban problems. The book examines how pre-colonial forms and patterns from South East Asian traditional cities, overlaid by centuries of change, recall present notions of ecological and organic urbanism. These may look disorganised, yet they reflect and suggest certain common patterns that inform eco-urban design paradigms for the development of future cities. Taking a thematic approach, the book examines how such historical findings, debates and discussions can assist designers and policy makers to interpret and then instil identities in urban design across the Asian region. The book weaves a discourse across planning, urban design, architecture and ornamentation dimensions to reconstruct forgotten forms that align with the climate of place and resynchronise with the natural world, unearthing an ecologically benign urbanism that can inform the future. Written in an accessible style, this book will be an invaluable reference for researchers and students within the fields of cultural geography, urban studies and architecture.
This book introduces architectural applications of parametric methods in design, drawing direct connections between each phase of the architectural design process with relevant parametric approaches. Readers will find applications of parametric methods with straightforward explanations of concepts, commands as well as applicable examples for each phase of the architectural design process. In addition to learning about the historical and conceptual background of parametric design, readers can use this book as a go-to source during their day-to-day design practice. Chapters are organized according to different phases of the architectural design process, such as site analysis, spatial organization, skin systems, and environmental performance analyses. Together, they deliver concepts, applications, and examples utilizing in-depth visual guides that explain commands, their outcomes, and their interrelationships. With over 350 images, this book includes examples from the author's own design studio and parametric design teaching in elective classes. Based on the Rhinoceros and Grasshopper platforms, this book is an accessible, yet in-depth, resource for architecture students and early professionals who are considering integrating parametric applications into their design processes.
Architectural Philosophy is the first book to outline a philosophical account of architecture and to establish the singularity of architectural practice and theory. This dazzling sequence of essays opens out the subject of architecture, touching on issues as wide ranging as the problem of memory and the dystopias of science fiction. Arguing for the indissolubility of form and function, Architectural Philosophy explores both the definition of the site and the possibility of alterity. The analysis of the nature of the present and the complex sructure of repetition allows for the possibility of judgement, a judgement that arises from a reworked politics of architecture.
This book's overarching premise is that discussion and critique in the discourses of architecture and urbanism have their primary focus on engagements with form, particularly in the sense of the question as to what planning and architecture signify with respect to the forms they take, and how their meanings or content (what is "contained") is considered in relation to form-as-container. While significant critical work in these disciplines has been published over the past 20 years that engages pertinently with the writings of Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, there has been no address to the co-incidence in the work of Benjamin and Foucault of an architectural figure that is pivotal to each of their discussions of the emergence of modernity: The arcade for Benjamin and the panoptic prison for Foucault have a parallel role. In Foucault's terms, panopticism is a "diagram of power." The parallel, for Benjamin, would be his understanding of "constellation." In more recent architectural writings, the notion of the diagram has emerged as a key motif. Yet, and in as much as it supposedly relates to aspects of the work of Foucault, along with Gilles Deleuze, this notion of "diagram" amounts, for the most part, to a thinly veiled reinstatement of geometry-as-idea. This book redresses the emphasis given to form within the cultural philosophy of modernity and-particularly with respect to architecture and urbanism-inflects on the agency of force that opens a reading of their productive capacities as technologies of power. It is relevant to students and scholars in poststructuralist critical theory, architecture, and urban studies. "This is a book about Foucault and Benjamin and it is grounded in a deep knowledge of and reflection upon their works, but it is also underpinned by an impressive erudition. There are reflections on Hegel and Heidegger (central to the author) and Derrida, along with Kierkegaard, and others. This leads to a rich and suggestive discussion ... in staging a spatial-architectural-political conversation between Foucault and Benjamin." - Anonymous Reviewer "Mark Jackson's Diagrams of Power in Benjamin and Foucault, The Recluse of Architecture juxtaposes and interrogates its two leading actors so as to draw from and through them a theory of architecture, which is inseparable from its recluse. In doing so it elaborates a series of complex connections with their various interlocutors and inspirations, Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida, the Kabbalah, Agamben, allegory, Marx, Deleuze, Klossowski, tragedy, capitalism, modernity, and so on. The list is long and impressive. This is not only done with an extremely high degree of scholarship, but is presented in a light, lucid and very compelling manner in a voice both personal and authoritative. The recluse is the figure of mimesis itself, the appearance of a withdrawal, always already a ruin. This book not only contributes a highly astute reading of its philosophical objects, but it enacts the ontology of the recluse through its own unfolding, simultaneously revealing and withholding the meaning of architecture 'as such', so that we not only understand its meaning, but feel the pulsing differential of the book's object as if it were alive within us." - Stephen Zepke, Independent Researcher, Vienna
Delving into Pacific spaces from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and interpretations, this book looks at how the anthropological and architectural can be connected. The contributors to this book - architectural practitioners, architectural and spatial design theorists, anthropologists and historians - show not only how new theoretical perspectives can arise out of comparing aspects specific to one discipline with their equivalents of another, but also demonstrate how a space of emergence is created for something that goes beyond both, enhancing both fields of potentialities.
Over the last twenty years, Jeff Malpas' research has involved his engagement with architects and other academics around the issues of place, architecture and landscape and particularly the way these practitioners have used the work of Martin Heidegger. In Rethinking Dwelling, Malpas' primary focus is to rethink of these issues in a way that is directly informed by an understanding of place and the human relation it. With essays on a range of architectural and design concerns, as well as engaging with other thinkers on topics including textuality in architecture, contemporary high-rise construction, the significance of the line, the relation between building and memory and the idea of authenticity in architecture, this book departs from the traditional phenomenological focus and provides students and scholars with a new ontological assessment of landscape and architecture. As such, it may also be used on other 'spatial' or 'topographic' disciplines including geography, sociology, anthropology, and art in which the 'spatial turn' has been so important.
Responding to increasing levels of planetary pollution, waste generation, carbon dioxide emission and environmental collapse, Ecologies of Inception re-thinks potentiality-an object's ability to change-in architecture and design. The book problematizes the still-prevailing modern paradigm of design practice: the technical tabula rasa, a tendency to begin from scratch and use raw, amorphous, and obedient materials that can be easily and effectively manipulated, facilitating a seamless and faithful embodiment of intentions. Instead, the philosophy of design developed in the text prompts-through a variety of case studies, thinkers, and disciplines-a collective reconsideration of value, dissociating it from the projects and signatures of any one author or generation. Whereas the merits of up-cycling and circular design are canonically defined vis-a-vis status-quo economic and socio-cultural orthodoxies, this project unpacks the theoretical assumptions that underpin these practices, showing that they perpetuate the same biases and exclusions that generate waste in the first place. As an alternative, the book introduces a nodal and exaptive paradigm for design: a conceptual and methodological toolset for engaging the durational and anthropocenic materiality of the third millennium, and for radically prioritizing practices of maintenance, reuse, care, and co-option. This approach, which is inspired by (and builds upon) evolutionary biology, technological disobedience, queer use, adaptive reuse, experimental preservation, and improvisational practices such as collage, adhocism, bricolage, and kit-bashing, refuses to reduce pre-existing material substrates to abstract lists of properties or featureless lumps, encountering them on their own terms-as situated individuals and co-authors. Ecologies of Inception will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, educators, and professional architects and designers interested in sustainable design and seeking to develop conceptual and design tools commensurate with the magnitude and urgency of the climate emergency.
This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.
This extensive, edited volume investigates how architects, planners, and other related experts responded to the contexts and discourses of "development" after WWII. The essays encompass countries as diverse as Israel, Ghana, Greece, Belgium, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Venezuela, the Philippines, South Korea, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Turkey, Cyprus, Iraq, Zambia, and Canada. The subject matter is increasingly taught as part of a broader turn to globalize the field of architecture studies, incorporating hitherto unacknowledged geographies primarily from the global south, with a focus on how architecture production is part of technical, economic, and political processes.
This Handbook provides the first comprehensive international overview of significant contemporary Indigenous architecture, practice, and discourse, showcasing established and emerging Indigenous authors and practitioners from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, Canada, USA and other countries. It captures the breadth and depth of contemporary work in the field, establishes the historical and present context of the work, and highlights important future directions for research and practice. The topics covered include Indigenous placemaking, identity, cultural regeneration and Indigenous knowledges. The book brings together eminent and emerging scholars and practitioners to discuss and compare major projects and design approaches, to reflect on the main issues and debates, while enhancing theoretical understandings of contemporary Indigenous architecture.The book is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, policy makers, and other professionals seeking to understand the ways in which Indigenous people have a built tradition or aspire to translate their cultures into the built environment. It is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in the field of the built environment, who need up-to-date knowledge of current practices and discourse on Indigenous peoples and their architecture.
Architecture in Black argues that architecture, as an aesthetic practice, and blackness, as a lingusitic practice, operate within the same semiotic paradigm. The book presents the first systematic analysis of the theoretical relationship between architecture and blackness. Employing a technique whereby texts are realted through the repetition and revision of their semiotic structures, Architecture in Black reconstructs the genealogy of a black racial subject reprsented by the simultaneous reading of a range of canonical apparatus invented by this reading is then used to critique a discrete set of architectural texts, demonstrating the presence of the 'black venacular' in contemporary architectural theory.>
Vitruvius' De architectura is the only extant classical text on architecture, and its impact on Renaissance masters including Leonardo da Vinci is well-known. But what was the text's purpose in its own time (ca. 20s BCE)? In this book, Marden Fitzpatrick Nichols reveals how Vitruvius pitched the Greek discipline of architecture to his Roman readers, most of whom were undoubtedly laymen. The inaccuracy of Vitruvius' architectural rules, when compared with surviving ancient buildings, has knocked Vitruvius off his pedestal. Nichols argues that the author never intended to provide an accurate view of contemporary buildings. Instead, Vitruvius crafted his authorial persona and remarks on architecture to appeal to elites (and would-be elites) eager to secure their positions within an expanding empire. In this major new analysis of De architectura from archaeological and literary perspectives, Vitruvius emerges as a knowing critic of a social landscape in which the house made the man.
This book looks at alternative ways of analyzing traditional and contemporary architectural design and building practices in South Asia with a special focus on India. It showcases how collaborative projects between architects and local communities and drawing from local building traditions can lead to sustainable and equitable practices in architecture. The volume includes an analysis of projects in rural, tribal, and urban areas of India and Nepal and first-hand accounts of architects, teachers, and professionals engaged in the theory and practice of design and architecture. It examines the differences between the individualistic and the collective approach and explores the meaning of architecture as a process and as a product and as a decentralized, ecologically, and locally sensitive way of designing. While comparing traditional and modern methods of building, it also examines the impact of each method on the community, the economy and the surrounding environment. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, urban studies, urban planning, urban ecology, urban geography, and sustainable development. It will also be useful for architects, planners, urban designers, and professionals associated with these disciplines.
This book proposes and systematically discusses four trends of thoughts in contemporary Chinese urban design. As the first book to systematically introduce contemporary Chinese urban design thoughts, this book objectively displays the macroscopic picture of contemporary urban design development of China from the time dimension, sorting out seven historical stages and three disputes. This book is mainly divided into two parts. The first part focuses on the vertical description, taking the major events in the seven historical stages as the context, combing the macro picture of the development of contemporary urban design in China in the last 100 years, and describing the three controversies in this process: contention, subject, and legalization. The second part focuses on horizontal observations, puts forward and systematically discusses the four trends of thought formed in the development of contemporary urban design in China, including "Design of Form," "Synthesis of Design," "Control of Design," and "Design of Rule". This part discusses their development background, theoretical support, and key concepts in detail and finally conducts critical thinking. The whole book is based on historical events, archives, and papers published in Chinese academic journals. While sorting out, summarizing, and objectively discussing, it also makes a critique of urban design activities and academic thinking in China, which will greatly benefit scholars and readers who are interested in urban design history of contemporary China.
Architectural Type and Character provides an alternative perspective to the current role given to history in architecture, reunifying architectural history and architectural design to reform architectural discourse and practice. Historians provide important material for appreciating buildings and guiding those who produce them. In current histories, a building is the product of a time, its form follows its function, irresistible influences produce it, and style, preferably novel, is its most important attribute. This book argues for an alternative. Through a two-part structure, the book first develops the theoretical foundations for this alternative history of architecture. The second part then provides drawings and interpretations of over one hundred sites from different times and places. Architectural Type and Character: A Practical Guide to a History of Architecture is an excellent desk reference and studio guide for students and architectures alike to understand, analyze, and create buildings.
Phenomenological Perspectives on Place, Lifeworlds and Lived Emplacement is a compilation of fifteen previously published articles and chapters by David Seamon, one of the foremost researchers in environmental, architectural, and place phenomenology. These entries discuss such topics as body-subject, the lived body, place ballets, environmental serendipity, homeworlds, and the pedagogy of place and place making. The fifteen chapters are broken into three parts. Part I includes four entries that consider what phenomenology offers studies of place and place making. These chapters illustrate the theoretical and practical value of phenomenological concepts like lifeworld, natural attitude, and bodily actions in place. Part II incorporates five chapters that aim to understand place and lived emplacement phenomenologically. Topics covered include environmental situatedness, architectural phenomenology, environmental serendipity, and the value of phenomenology for a pedagogy of place and place making. Part III presents six explications of real-world places and place experience, drawing on examples from photography (Andre Kertesz's Meudon), television (Alan Ball's Six Feet Under), film (John Sayles' Limbo and Sunshine State), and imaginative literature (Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City and Louis Bromfield's The World We Live in). Seamon is a major figure in environment-behavior research, particularly as that work has applied value for design professionals. This volume will be of interest to geographers, environmental psychologists, architects, planners, policymakers and other researchers and practitioners concerned with place, place experience, place meaning, and place making.
Through a collection of 13 chapters, Peggy Deamer examines the profession of architecture not as an abstraction, but as an assemblage of architectural workers. What forces prevent architects from empowering ourselves to be more relevant and better rewarded? How can these forces be set aside by new narratives, new organizations and new methods of production? How can we sit at the decision-making table to combat short-term real estate interests for longer-term social and ethical value? How can we pull architecture-its conceptualization, its pedagogy, and its enactment-into the 21st century without succumbing to its neoliberal paradigm? In addressing these controversial questions, Architecture and Labor brings contemporary discourses on creative labor to architecture, a discipline devoid of labor consciousness. This book addresses how, not just what, architects produce and focuses not on the past but on the present. It is sympathetic to the particularly intimate way that architects approach their design work while contextualizing that work historically, institutionally, economically, and ideologically. Architecture and Labor is sure to be a compelling read for pre-professional students, academics, and practitioners.
Urban Environments and Health in the Philippines offers a retrospective view of women street vendors and their urban environments in Baguio City, designed by American architect and planner Daniel Burnham in the early twentieth century, and established by the American imperial government as a place for healing and well-being. Based on a transdisciplinary multi-method study of street vendors, the author offers a unique perspective as a researcher of the place, to ultimately ask how marginalized women authenticate and democratize prime urban spaces for their livelihoods. This book provides a portal to another way of seeing and understanding streets and people, covering spatial units at multiple scales, design imperialism and its impact on health, and resilience strategies for challenging realities. Blending subjects of architecture, planning, and health, this book is an ideal read for those interested in fields of urban planning and design, public health, landscape architecture, geography, and social sciences.
The first book to address all of the myriad issues surrounding this topic, from a wide range of well-positioned scholars, edited by vastly experienced and influential editors A vital resource book for institutional leaders, Architecture Heads of School and Programme leaders, architecture educators, particularly those responsible for curricula content, design briefs, module handbooks and reading lists, and students. Contributions from South Africa, Nigeria, Chile, Indonesia, Cambodia, Palestine, Mexico, Sudan, Qatar, Kuwait, Brazil, USA, Egypt, Singapore, Malaysia, Uganda, Thailand, Philippines, Australia, Botswana, Bahrain, India, Ethiopia, New Zealand, Japan, Belgium, Ecuador, China and Costa Rica and 200 illustrations.
Uniquely bridges the aesthetics of imperfection with areas of philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. Divided into seven thematic sections to offer a comprehensive study of how imperfectionist aesthetics connect to art and everyday life. As an interdisciplinary study, this book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies, and across the humanities.
This book reveals the 'epistemic imposition' of architectural ideas and practices by colonists from the Netherlands in the Dutch East Indies from the late-19th century onwards, exploring the ways in which this came to shape the profession up to the present day in what is now known as Indonesia. The author investigates the scope of these interventions by Dutch colonial agents in relation to existing Javanese building practices, pursuing two main lines of enquiry. The first is to examine the methods of dissemination of Dutch-taught technical knowledge and skills across the Dutch East Indies. The second is to scrutinise the effects of this dissemination upon the formation of architectural knowledge and practice within the colony. Throughout this book, the argument is made that what took place in architecture in the Dutch East Indies involved a process of disseminating building knowledge as a form of 'epistemic imposition' upon the indigenous citizens of the colony - in other words, as an effective instrument of Dutch colonial power. This book will be of interest to architecture academics and students interested in developing a broader global understanding of architecture, especially those interested in decolonising the teaching of architectural history and theory. |
You may like...
Graphical Heritage - Volume 3 - Mapping…
Luis Agustin-Hernandez, Aurelio Vallespin Muniesa, …
Hardcover
R5,536
Discovery Miles 55 360
Architectural Heritage in the Western…
Maurizio Boriani, Mariacristina Giambruno
Hardcover
R3,659
Discovery Miles 36 590
Before and After - Documenting the…
Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman
Paperback
Victoria's Lost Pavilion - From…
Paul Fyfe, Antony Harrison, …
Hardcover
R1,881
Discovery Miles 18 810
Less is Enough - On Architecture and…
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Paperback
Graphical Heritage - Volume 1 - History…
Luis Agustin-Hernandez, Aurelio Vallespin Muniesa, …
Hardcover
R7,207
Discovery Miles 72 070
|