In "Frontier Fictions," Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet looks at the efforts of Iranians to defend, if not expand, their borders in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and explores how their conceptions of national geography influenced cultural and political change. The "frontier fictions," or the ways in which the Iranians viewed their often fluctuating borders and the conflicts surrounding them, played a dominant role in defining the nation. On these borderlands, new ideas of citizenship and nationality were unleashed, refining older ideas of ethnicity.

Kashani-Sabet maintains that land-based conceptions of countries existed before the advent of the modern nation-state. Her focus on geography enables her to explore and document fully a wide range of aspects of modern citizenship in Iran, including love of homeland, the hegemony of the Persian language, and widespread interest in archaeology, travel, and map-making. While many historians have focused on the concept of the "imagined community" in their explanations of the rise of nationalism, Kashani-Sabet is able to complement this perspective with a very tangible explanation of what connects people to a specific place. Her approach is intended to enrich our understanding not only of Iranian nationalism, but also of nationalism everywhere.

Rob Krier is a unique voice in today's architectural discourse through his commitment to developing a relevant and pragmatic theory of architecture based on his own experience and observations of architectural practice and opposed to the easy, abstract theorising so common in contemporary architectural writing. Together with his brother Leon, he has perfected a form of presentation in which the potency of his thinking finds its perfect counterpoint in detailed drawings and sketches which argue his case visually through the power of example. Following the success of his widely acclaimed "Urban Space", a work which looked at the problems of our cities from a historical, theoretical and practical standpoint, Krier now applies his particular, highly influential mode of didactic criticism to contemporary architecture in continuing search for fundamental architectural truths. Architectural Composition is both a theoretical and visual analysis which clearly illustrates the creative process which informs Krier's vision and praxis. The culmination of a lifetime's thought and experience by one of Europe's most important architectural theorists, it is without doubt a major achievement and is a standard work of reference for both students and practising architects. The book, published for the first time in 1988 by Academy Editions in London, has been supported by funds from the Fond zur Foerderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung der Republik OEsterreich, and it was carried out at Krier's former Institut fur Gestaltungslehre at the Technische Universitat in Vienna.

The making of shadows is an act as old as architecture itself. From the gloom of the medieval hearth through to the masterworks of modernism, shadows have been an essential yet neglected presence in architectural history. Shadow-Makers tells for the first time the history of shadows in architecture. It weaves together a rich narrative - combining close readings of significant buildings both ancient and modern with architectural theory and art history - to reveal the key places and moments where shadows shaped architecture in distinctive and dynamic ways. It shows how shadows are used as an architectural instrument of form, composition, and visual effect, while also exploring the deeper cultural context - tracing differing conceptions of their meaning and symbolism, whether as places of refuge, devotion, terror, occult practice, sublime experience or as metaphors of the unconscious. Within a chronological framework encompassing medieval, baroque, enlightenment, sublime, picturesque, and modernist movements, a wide range of topics are explored, from Hawksmoor's London churches, Japanese temple complexes and the shade-patterns of Islamic cities, to Ruskin in Venice and Aldo Rossi and Louis Kahn in the 20th century. This beautifully-illustrated study seeks to understand the work of these shadow-makers through their drawings, their writings, and through the masterpieces they built.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy,literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

With a bias for action, this book offers valuable insight into the origins of the much-celebrated Danish design tradition and how it can be employed to create design solutions to address today's environmental crisis using the planetary boundaries as positive creative constraints. Danish design has long been revered for its high-quality aesthetics, materials and craftmanship, encouraging sustainability without compromise. This book explores the lessons to be learnt from Scandinavian design ideals, introduces the philosophy and principles of circular economy, and showcases the potential power of combining circular economy and design in helping to mitigate the effects of climate change. It presents a range of case study examples across multiple sectors and includes interviews with Danish designers in architecture, furniture, fashion, digital design and industrial design, providing unique insights from some of the world's leading contemporary designers. Bridging theory and real-world insights and experiences, the book builds on the framework of the 4R’s The Circular Way: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Replace to encourage innovation through the replacement of environmentally damaging materials and business models. A must-read for product designers, industrial designers, consultants, business developers, sustainability professionals and students interested in learning how to design and implement circular, sustainable models into practice.

Die Beitrage dieses Bandes vereinigen in sich die Aufgabe, ein uberzeugendes und kritisches wissenschaftliches Konzept vorzulegen, das aussichtsreich und nachvollziehbar Bedingungen formuliert und Moeglichkeiten aufzeigt, den "komplexen Sitz" einer beherbergenden Architektur im Leben methodisch kontrolliert zu erkunden.

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.

Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraftwill change how we think about cities-and, perhaps, how we live in them.

Treatise on digital architecture Hovestadt's treatise strictly follows the model of the famous treatises by Vitruvius (De architectura) and Alberti (De re aedificatoria), based on the supposition that we find ourselves in a comparable situation today. Vitruvius and Alberti expressed the meaning of architecture in their eras: Roman antiquity and the Renaissance. Hovestadt has done the same for the present day, incorporating considerations of physics, mathematics, technology, literature, and philosophy. Books I to III deal with the role of the architect and the objectivity of architecture. Books IV to VI address the modalities of speaking about and encoding architecture: the secret, the public, and the private. Books VII to X are dedicated to actual digital mechanisms: artificial intelligence, natural communication, gnomonics, and cultural heritage. An architectural treatise for our age in 10 books Inspired by the works of Vitruvius and Alberti Published in three volumes in the Applied Virtuality Book Series

Now as before, Japanese architecture is very popular in Europe and the western world. This publication provides an overview of its many design concepts and cross-references. Using design examples and interviews, the book presents thirteen current positions.The publication focuses on young architects who take up extremely independent positions within Japanese architecture, as well as on Pritzker Prize winners Toyo Ito and Fumihiko Maki. Six essays by European specialists on Japan provide supplementary insights into the aesthetics and space concepts of Japanese architecture, making cross-references to Japan's architectural history, and explaining current lines of development. The book thus combines a self-reflective approach with an outsider's analytical view.

Swedish-American architect Lars Lerup's writings suggest a mindful collector as their author, rather than a scholar or a theoretician. Lerup sharply observes and analyses his urban environment and its properties, before adding his findings to his own theory of the modern city. Lerup wrote the fourteen essays in this new book as self-contained pieces, yet together they still form a coherent entity. The fourteen essays in The Continuous City offer a survey of Lerup's thinking on identity and monumentality are the relationship between nature and culture. His interest and reflections focus, among other things, on Roberto Burle Marx, a founder of modern landscape design; the 'dancing floors' of Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Central Library; Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road project in Miami Beach; and the character of urban icons like Coop Himmelb(l)au's Dalian International Conference Center. Lars Lerup invites his readers to join him on his journey and to be enriched, rather than instructed, en route.

The Atelier de la Conception de l'Espace (ALICE), affiliated with the School of Architecture at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, is an educational facility focusing on preparing students for the practice of architecture. To cultivate the ability to create or shape space, students must be confronted with an educational framework that prepares them for the field's many practical challenges, from cultural, social, environmental, and physical concerns to working with the wide range of collaborators who must bring their creativity and expertise together in the design process. The second volume in a four-part series on ALICE, The House 1 Catalogue focuses on a prototype, House I, developed and constructed throughout the academic year. This mobile structure incorporates ALICE's core values of communication and collaboration in building processes, and it will travel as part of an exhibition to several major cities, where it will be continually modified and reconfigured. With five hundred illustrations, this book continues the experimental narrative Dieter Dietz, Matthias Michel, and Daniel Zamarbide began in The Invention of Space, which will be further developed in the forthcoming third and fourth volumes in the series. ALICE plays a key role in the success of one of Europe's leading schools of architecture, and this book, together with the three other volumes in the series, provides an opportunity to explore the exceptional learning environment ALICE offers.

In 1871, the city of Chicago was almost entirely destroyed by what became known as The Great Fire. Thirty-five years later, San Francisco lay in smoldering ruins after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. Or consider the case of the Jerusalem, the greatest site of physical destruction and renewal in history, which, over three millennia, has suffered wars, earthquakes, fires, twenty sieges, eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religious faith to another. Yet this ancient city has regenerated itself time and again, and still endures.
Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Viewing a wide array of urban disasters in global historical perspective, The Resilient City traces the aftermath of such cataclysms as: --the British invasion of Washington in 1814
--the devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during World War II
--the late-20th century earthquakes that shattered Mexico City and the Chinese city of Tangshan
--Los Angeles after the 1992 riots
--the Oklahoma City bombing
--the destruction of the World Trade Center
Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.

Rudolf Arnheim has been known, since the publication of his groundbreaking "Art and Visual Perception" in 1974, as an authority on the psychological interpretation of the visual arts. Two anniversary volumes celebrate the landmark anniversaries of his works in 2009. In "The Power of the Center", Arnheim uses a wealth of examples to consider the actors that determine the overall organization of visual form in works of painting, sculpture, and architecture. "The Dynamics of Architectural Form" explores the unexpected perceptual consequences of architecture with Arnheim's customary clarity and precision.

This book is a series of curated essays by high-profile architecture and design leaders and educators on the topic of professionalism. The book first sets out the current agenda - defining professionalism for the architecture sector - before moving on to focus on delivering the increased professional skills curriculum content within architecture schools as set by the RIBA. With an introduction and conclusion by the Editors, this book explores what contemporary professionalism within architecture is, and its future, encouraging the current and future profession to address professionalism across the industry.

Why some architects fail to realize their ideal buildings, and what architecture critics can learn from novelists. The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection. As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting buildings to a Victorian litmus test of "real" versus "fake," Brittain-Catlin explains the effect this superficial criticality has had not only on architectural discourse but on the quality of buildings. The fact that most buildings receive no critical scrutiny at all has resulted in vast stretches of ugly modern housing and a pervasive public illiteracy about architecture.