Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture brings to light complex readings of transparent glass through close observations of six pivotal works of architecture. Written from the perspectives of a practitioner, the six essays challenge assumptions about fragility and visual transparency of glass. A material imbued with idealism and utopic vision, glass has captured architects' imagination, and glass's fragility and difficulties in thermal control continue to present technical challenges. In recent decades, architecture has witnessed an emergence of technological advancements in chemical coating, structural engineering, and fabrication methods that resulted in new kinds of glass transparencies. Buildings examined in the book include a sanatorium with expansive windows delivering light and air to recovering tuberculosis patients, a pavilion with a crystal clear glass plenum circulating air for heating and cooling, a glass monument symbolizing the screen of personal devices that shortened the distance between machines and humans, and a glass building symbolizing the social and material intertwining in the glass ceiling metaphor. Connecting material glass to broader cultural and social contexts, Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture enlightens students and practitioners of architecture as well as the general public with interest in design. The author demonstrates how glass is rarely crystal clear but is blurred both materially and metaphysically, revealing complex readings of ideas for which glass continues to stand.

This collection of previously unpublished essays from a diverse range of well-known scholars and architects builds on the architectural tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics as developed by Dalibor Veseley and Joseph Rykwert and carried on by David Leatherbarrow, Peter Carl and Alberto Perez-Gomez. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and drawing on ideas from beyond the architectural canon, contributors including Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karsten Harries, Steven Holl, Indra Kagis McEwen, Paul Emmons, and Louise Pelletier offer new insights and perspectives on questions such as the following: Given the recent fascination with all things digital and novel, what is the role of history and theory in contemporary architectural praxis? Is authentic meaning possible in a technological environment that is so global and interconnected? What is the nature and role of the architect in our shared modern world? How can these questions inform a new model of architectural praxis? Architecture's Appeal is a thought-provoking book which will inspire further scholarly inquiry and act as a basis for discussion in the wider field as well as graduate seminars in architectural theory and history.

Architects have long operated based on the assumption that a building is 'complete' once construction has finished. Striving to create a perfect building, they wish for it to stay in its original state indefinitely, viewing any subsequent alterations as unintended effects or the results of degeneration. The ideal is for a piece of architecture to remain permanently perfect and complete. This contrasts sharply with reality where changes take place as people move in, requirements change, events happen, and building materials are subject to wear and tear. Rumiko Handa argues it is time to correct this imbalance. Using examples ranging from the Roman Coliseum to Japanese tea rooms, she draws attention to an area that is usually ignored: the allure of incomplete, imperfect and impermanent architecture. By focusing on what happens to buildings after they are 'complete', she shows that the 'afterlife' is in fact the very 'life' of a building. However, the book goes beyond theoretical debate. Addressing professionals as well as architecture students and educators, it persuades architects of the necessity to anticipate possible future changes and to incorporate these into their original designs.

This volume examines one year of research and pedagogy at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, engaged in the conditions of
the built environment, relative to 3 states of Flux, Stasis and Crisis.
The questions we ask are: What is the impact of design on the forces that shape our contemporary reality? To what extent do contingencies of time and place impact our practice, and in return how effective is our response in re-shaping the same contingencies?
Contributions: Ghazal Abbasy-Asbagh, Inaki Alday, Robin Dripps, Rebecca Hora, Ryan Metcalf, Matthew Pinyan
Published with University of Virginia School of Architecture

Architecture and Armed Conflict is the first multi-authored scholarly book to address this theme from a comparative, interdisciplinary perspective. By bringing together specialists from a range of relevant fields, and with knowledge of case studies across time and space, it provides the first synthetic body of research on the complex, multifaceted subject of architectural destruction in the context of conflict. The book addresses several specific research questions: How has the destruction of buildings and landscapes figured in recent historical conflicts, and how have people and states responded to it? How has the destruction of architecture been represented in different historical periods, and to what ends? What are the relationships between the destruction of architecture and the destruction of art, particularly iconoclasm? If architectural destruction is a salient feature of many armed conflicts, how does it feature in post-conflict environments? What are the relationships between architectural destruction and processes of restoration, recreation or replacement? Considering multiple conflicts, multiple time periods, and multiple locations allows this international cohort of authors to provide an essential primer for this crucial topic.

Take a theoretical approach to architecture with "The Autopoiesis of Architecture," which presents the topic as a discipline with its own unique logic. Architecture's conception of itself is addressed as well as its development within wider contemporary society.

Author Patrik Schumacher offers innovative treatment that enriches architectural theory with a coordinated arsenal of concepts facilitating both detailed analysis and insightful comparisons with other domains, such as art, science and politics. He explores how the various modes of communication comprising architecture depend upon each other, combine, and form a unique subsystem of society that co-evolves with other important autopoietic subsystems like art, science, politics and the economy.

The first of two volumes that together present a comprehensive account of architecture's autopoiesis, this book elaborates the theory of architecture's autopoeisis in 8 parts, 50 sections and 200 chapters. Each of the 50 sections poses a thesis drawing a central message from the insights articulated within the respective section. The 200 chapters are gathering and sorting the accumulated intelligence of the discipline according to the new conceptual framework adopted, in order to catalyze and elaborate the new formulations and insights that are then encapsulated in the theses. However, while the theoretical work in the text of the chapters relies on the rigorous build up of a new theoretical language, the theses are written in ordinary language ? with the theoretical concepts placed in brackets. The full list of the 50 theses affords a convenient summary printed as appendix at the end of the book.

The second volume completes the analysis of the discourse and further proposes a new agenda for contemporary architecture in response to the challenges and opportunities that confront architectural design within the context of current societal and technological developments.

Why Architects Matter examines the key role of research- led, ethical architects in promoting wellbeing, sustainability and innovation. It argues that the profession needs to be clear about what it knows and the value of what it knows if it is to work successfully with others. Without this clarity, the marginalization of architects from the production of the built environment will continue, preventing clients, businesses and society from getting the buildings that they need. The book offers a strategy for the development of a twenty-first-century knowledge-led built environment, including tools to help evidence, develop and communicate that value to those outside the field. Knowing how to demonstrate the impact and value of their work will strengthen practitioners' ability to pitch for work and access new funding streams. This is particularly important at a time of global economic downturn, with ever greater competition for contracts and funds driving down fees and making it imperative to prove value at every level. Why Architects Matter straddles the spheres of 'Practice Management and Law', 'History and Theory', 'Design', 'Housing', 'Sustainability', 'Health', 'Marketing' and 'Advice for Clients', bringing them into an accessible whole. The book will therefore be of interest to professional architects, architecture students and anyone with an interest in our built environment and the role of professionals within it.

This is the second part of a major theoretical work by Patrik Schumacher, which outlines how the discipline of architecture should be understood as its own distinct "system of communication." "Autopoeisis" comes from the Greek and means literally self-production; it was first adopted in biology in the 1970s to describe the essential characteristics of life as a circular self-organizing system and has since been transposed into a theory of social systems. This new approach offers architecture an arsenal of general comparative concepts. It allows architecture to be understood as a distinct discipline, which can be analyzed in elaborate detail while at the same time offering insightful comparisons with other subject areas, such as art, science and political discourse. On the basis of such comparisons the book insists on the necessity of disciplinary autonomy and argues for a sharp demarcation of design from both art and engineering. Schumacher accordingly argues controversially that design as a discipline has its own "sui generis" intelligence - with its own internal logic, reach and limitations.

Whereas the first volume provides the theoretical groundwork for Schumacher's ideas - focusing on architecture as an autopoeitic system, with its own theory, history, medium and its unique societal function - the second volume addresses the specific, contemporary challenges and tasks that architecture faces. It formulates these tasks, looking specifically at how architecture is seeking to organize and articulate the complexity of post-fordist network society. The volume explicitly addresses how current architecture can upgrade its design methodology in the face of an increasingly demanding task environment, characterized by both complexity and novelty. Architecture's specific role within contemporary society is explained and its relationship to politics is clarified. Finally, the new, global style of Parametricism is introduced and theoretically grounded.

Projecting forward in time from the processes of design and construction that are so often the focus of architectural discourse, Consuming Architecture examines the variety of ways in which buildings are consumed after they have been produced, focusing in particular on processes of occupation, appropriation and interpretation. Drawing on contributions by architects, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, artists, film-makers, photographers and journalists, it shows how the consumption of architecture is a dynamic and creative act that involves the creation and negotiation of meanings and values by different stakeholders and that can be expressed in different voices. In so doing, it challenges ideas of what constitutes architecture, architectural discourse and architectural education, how we understand and think about it, and who can claim ownership of it. Consuming Architecture is aimed at students in architectural education and will also be of interest to students and researchers from disciplines that deal with architecture in terms of consumption and material culture.

The Place of Silence examines the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Silence and quietness are terms often used by designers and critics to describe buildings, but the terms carry complex and varied meanings which demand interpretation if the power of silence in architecture is to be fully understood. From the buildings of John Hejduk to auditory landscapes and the 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world, the book explores questions of sound and atmosphere through the lens of architecture and place. Examining the diverse practices, politics and cultural meanings of silent places and buildings in historical and contemporary contexts, the case studies in this book connect a number of themes - from the creation of atmospheric spaces to ideas of attunement and mood in architecture - making The Place of Silence the key resource to understanding this often-overlooked aspect of architecture and architectural design.

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.

Architecture and urbanism seem to be weak disciplines, constantly struggling for a better understanding of their nature and disciplinary borders. The huge amount of metaphors appearing in the discourse of both not only reference to their creative nature but also indicate their weakness and the missing piece strengthening their own understanding: a definition of space for architecture and of city for urbanism. But using metaphors in this field implies a problem -- though metaphors achieve to bring opposites together, there remains the question how literal they can actually become in order to relate to these subjects properly. In this volume, several authors from various fields using different approaches discuss this question.

Architecture and Capitalism tells a story of the relationship between the economy and architectural design. Eleven historians each discuss in brand new essays the time period they know best, looking at cultural and economic issues, which in light of current economic crises you will find have dealt with diverse but surprisingly familiar economic issues. Told through case studies, the narrative begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with 2011, with introductions by Editor Peggy Deamer to pull the main themes together so that you can see how other architects in different times and in different countries have dealt with similar economic conditions. By focussing on what previous architects experienced, you have the opportunity to avoid repeating the past. With new essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Keller Easterling, Lauren Kogod, Robert Hewison, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Schuldenfrei, Deborah Gans, Simon Sadler, Nathan Rich, and Micahel Sorkin.

American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1998) was one of the foremost analytical thinkers of the twentieth century, with groundbreaking contributions in the fields of logic, philosophy of science, epistemology, and aesthetics. This book is an introduction to the aspects of Goodman's philosophy which have been the most influential among architects and architectural theorists. Goodman specifically discussed architecture in his major work on aesthetics, The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968), and in two essays "How Buildings Mean" (1985), and "On Capturing Cities" (1991). His main philosophical notions in Ways of Worldmaking (1978) also apply well to architecture. Goodman's thought is particularly attractive because of its constructive aspect: there is not a given and immutable world, but both knowledge and reality are constantly built and rebuilt. Whereas other theories, such as deconstruction, implicitly entail an undoing of modern precepts, Goodman's conception of world-making offers a positive, constructive way to understand how a plural reality is made and remade. Goodman's approach to architecture is not only relevant thinking in providing new insights to understanding the built environment, but serves also as an illustration of analytical thinking in architecture. This book shows that the methods, concepts, and ways of arguing characteristic of analytical philosophy are helpful tools to examine buildings in a novel and fruitful way and they will certainly enhance the architect's critical skills when designing and thinking about architecture.

Edited by Ludger Hovestadt and Vera Buhlmann Applied Virtuality is a book series which is edited by Ludger Hovestadt, ITA Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich, Switzerland and Vera Buhlmann, Technical University Vienna, Institute for Architectural Theory. Based on the thesis that technology changes character over time, the series aims and scopes are to reflect that change by describing and analyzing the most recent explorations and innovations in technology, as well as their implications for a more philosophically comprehensive understanding of technics in our contemporary symbolical, information saturated, climatic environments. The overall interest thereby is to (1) affirm the mightiness of the generic without embracing homogeneity as a necessary consequence, (2) to affirm calculation, computation and automatization without embracing the reduction of human intellect to mechanisation without arcane esprit, and (3) to oppose in principle the contemporary attitude that tends towards a certain "intellectual chicness" that seems to rather narcissistically celebrate itself in a strangely detached competition for "critical divination" of soon-to-be-expected cultural doom and decay. With the birth of abstract/symbolic/universal algebra in the late 19th century, many scholars associate a fundamental crisis that affects human culture at large. We owe all of our contemporary electric and information-based infrastructures for living to these developments in mathematics, and it is no coincidence that we tend to find the symptoms that point to the manifestation of this crisis in the changes this new form of technics imposes on the people who begin to rely on it. This crisis is classically conceived as a crisis of intuition (Hans Hahn, Edmund Husserl et cetera). But from a more appreciative stance towards the sheer unlikeliness and fantastic power of intellection which is at work everywhere in the reality of such media-ized living environments, we might just as well see in this characterization an anxious (even if all-too understandable) misconception of the critical developments we are experiencing. From this stance, the sheer prominence of this misconception today indicates what appears like a certain fatigue of thinking, perhaps an exhaustion-through-overwhelming of our collective power to imagine. We mean no offence by saying this. Let us illustrate more concretely: John Orton maintains in his book Semiconductors and the Information Revolution: Magic Crystals That Made IT Happen, that "as a human achievement," semiconductors ought to "rank alongside the Beethoven Symphonies, Concord, Impressionism, medieval cathedrals and Burgundy wines and we should be equally proud of it" (2009, p. 2). Why is it, indeed, that this demand feels odd? Of course this lack of appreciating our current form of technics is owed partially to its abstractness and the degree of expertise it seems to demand from us. But has this not been the case for any of the abovementioned artifacts we all meanwhile hold as precious and dear? We hope to find the right dosage of irony and humor that seems so necessary for theorizing technics, arts, intellection in a manner that seeks to escape (1) the servile irresponsibility that attaches to programs of mechanization, as well as (2) the narrow-mindedness and missionary commitment that attaches to ideological doctrine and programmatic. By celebrating moments of intellectual quickness, with our interest in theory and abstraction, we pursue a genuinely comparatistic approach. We regard artifacts as theoretical objects, constituted by the intelligible codes and symbolic grammaticality that give them consistency. But we don't see the reality of artifacts in the white spectrum of these codes and symbols; rather, we see their reality in that which is enciphered thereby. The ambitions of a comparatistic approach to theory strive towards an alphabetization and literacy of these codes.

How to Read Architecture is based on the fundamental premise that reading and interpreting architecture is something we already do, and that close observation matters. This book enhances this skill so that given an unfamiliar building, you will have the tools to understand it and to be inspired by it. Author Paulette Singley encourages you to misread, closely read, conventionally read, and unconventionally read architecture to stimulate your creative process. This book explores three essential ways to help you understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture. This book erodes boundaries between the frequently compartmentalized fields of interior design, landscape design, and building design with chapters exploring concepts of terroir, scenography, criticality, atmosphere, tectonics, inhabitation, type, form, and enclosure. Using examples and case studies that span a wide range of historical and global precedents, Singley addresses the complex interaction among the ways a building engages its context, addresses its performative exigencies, and operates as an autonomous aesthetic object. Including over 300 images, this book is an essential read for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of architecture with a global focus on the interpretation of buildings in their context.

A systemic transformation is underway in architectural design, engineering and construction. The discipline and profession of architecture is being reshaped in a moment where information, insight and predictions generated during the design process move into construction no longer essentially via drawings. Other, more profound digital techniques yield fundamentally different workflows, responsibilities and business models for architects. This book offers a comprehensive framework, detailed analysis and critical assessment of the challenges and opportunities inherent in those changes. The author sets out to provide direction for a new era in architectural creation that can be understood and managed by a profession which must become better equipped to direct its future.

As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture's stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context. These ideas are studied through architectural precedents and framed by critical essays by Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Jimenez Lai, Spyros Papapetros, Kari Weil, as well as the editors. The shift from passive buildings to reactive structures is now imperative, as climate change and political turmoil exacerbate the unpredictability of environments. Werewolf expands on the architect's agency to critically address political, social, and environmental unrest. Revealing the cunning and agile ways in which architecture can negotiate rather than resist change, this book departs from the fixed Vitruvian man and uses the figure of the werewolf to propose a model where changes of state, mutation, and decomposition are conceptually fundamental.

With a practical approach to theory, Designing the City of Reason offers new perspectives on how differing belief systems and philosophical approaches impact on city design and development, exploring how this has changed before, during and after the impact of modernism in all its rationalism. Looking at the connections between abstract ideas and material realities, this book provides a social and historical account of ideas which have emerged out of the particular concerns and cultural contexts and which inform the ways we live. By considering the changing foundations for belief and action, and their impact on urban form, it follows the history and development of city design in close conjunction with the growth of rationalist philosophy. Building on these foundations, it goes on to focus on the implications of this for urban development, exploring how public infrastructures of meaning are constructed and articulated through the dimensions of time, space, meaning, value and action. With its wide-ranging subject matter and distinctive blend of theory and practice, this book furthers the scope and range of urban design by asking new questions about the cities we live in and the values and symbols which we assign to them.

Connects Cold War material and conceptual technologies to 21st century arts, society and cultureFrom futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War. Key FeaturesMakes connections between Cold War material and conceptual technologies, as they relate to the arts, society and cultureDraws on theorists such as Paul Virilio, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, Bernard Stiegler, Peter Sloterdijk and Carl SchmittThe contributors include leading humanities and critical military studies scholars, and practising artists, writers, curators and broadcastersContributorsJohn Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London.Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Arts and Politics, Director of Research and Co-Director of the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Ele Carpenter is a curator and writer, and senior lecturer in MFA Curating and convenor of the Nuclear Culture Research Group at Goldsmiths, University of London. Fabienne Collignon is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield. Mark Cote is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King's College London.Daniel Grausam is Lecturer in the Department of English at Durham University. Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster, visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art and Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design. Adrian Mackenzie is Professor of Technological Cultures at Lancaster University. Jussi Parikka is a media theorist and writer, and Professor of Technological Culture and Aesthetics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. John W. P. Phillips is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the National University of Singapore. Adam Piette is Professor of English at the University of Sheffield. James Purdon is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of St Andrews.Aura Satz is an artist and Moving Image Tutor at the Royal College of Art.Neal White is an artist and Professor of Media Art at the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University.

This book represents a reflection on the policies of preservation that were established and interventions for restoration that occurred in Iran before and in the years after the Khomeinist Revolution, as well as being an analysis of the impact that Italian restoration culture has had in the country. Research concerning the state of conservation and the ongoing restoration of the Armenian churches in the Khoy and Salmas areas is included, along with precise documentation of the observation of the two cities, their architecture and the context of their landscape. The problems of architectural restoration in present-day Iran and the compatible use of buildings no longer intended for worship are addressed. The book is bolstered by first-hand documentation obtained through inspections and interviews with Iranian specialists during three missions carried out between 2016 and 2018 and a large anthology of period texts that have only recently been made available for the first time for study in electronic form, including travel reports written by Westerners describing Persia between the 15th and 19th centuries.

Based on the recent discovery of his fully-preserved private archive-models, photos, letters, business files, and drawings-this book tells the story of Theodore Conrad (1910-1994), the most prominent and prolific architectural model-maker of the 20th century. Conrad's innovative models were instrumental in the design and realization of many icons of American Modernism-from the Rockefeller Center to Lever House and the Seagram Building. He revolutionized the production of architectural models and became a model-making entrepreneur in his own right. Yet, despite his success and the well-known buildings he helped to create, until now little has been known about Conrad's work and his impact on 20th century architectural history. With exclusive access to Conrad's archive, as well as that of model photographer Louis Checkman-both of which have lain undiscovered in private storage for decades-this book examines Conrad's work and legacy, accompanied by case studies of his major commissions and full-color photographs of his works. Set against the backdrop of the surge in model-making in the 1950s and 1960s-which Jane Jacobs called "The Miniature Boom"-it explores how Conrad's models prompt broader scholarly questions about the nature of authorship in architecture, the importance of craftsmanship, and about the translation of architectural ideas between different media. The book ultimately presents an alternative history of American modern architecture, highlighting the often-overlooked influence of architectural models and their makers.