What Architecture Means introduces you to architecture and allows you to explore the connections between design ideas and values across time, space, and culture. It equips you to play an active and informed role in architecture either as a professional or as a consumer, client, and citizen. By analyzing famous and everyday buildings while presenting and questioning the positions of important architects and theorists, this book will help you to evaluate and decide what qualities, ideas, and values you believe are important in architecture. You'll learn: -How various definitions of "architecture" establish different relationships with all buildings, and even non-buildings; -How buildings express and accommodate ideas of the sacred, the family, and the community; -What an architect is, and what priorities they bring to design and construction; -How an architect's expertise relates to that of the engineer, and why these are distinct disciplines; -About values like beauty, originality, structural expression, and cultural memory and their purpose in architectural design; -About the interests and ethical values that architects, and architecture, serves and promotes. Topics include sacred spaces, the house, the city, architects and engineers, aesthetics and design, originality and method, technology and form, memory and identity, and power and politics.

Architecture has long been understood as a cultural discipline able to articulate the human condition and lift the human spirit, yet the spirituality of architecture is rarely directly addressed in academic scholarship. The seventeen chapters provide a diverse range of perspectives, grouped according to topical themes: Being in the World; Sacred, Secular, and the Contemporary Condition; Symbolic Engagements; Sacred Landscapes; and Spirituality and the Designed Environment. Even though the authors' approach the subject from a range of disciplines and theoretical positions, all share interests in the need to rediscover, redefine, or reclaim the sacred in everyday experience, scholarly analysis, and design.

At a time dominated by the disappearance of Future, as claimed by the French anthropologist Marc Auge, Utopia and Religion seem to be two different ways of giving back an inner horizon to mankind. Therefore this book, on the one hand, considers the importance of utopia as a tool and how it offers an economic and social resource to improve cities' wealth, future and livability. On the other, it explores the impact of religious and cultural ideals on cities that have recently emerged in this context. Based on numerous observations, the book examines the intellectual legacy of utopian theory and practices across various academic disciplines. It also presents discussions, theories, and case studies addressing a range of issues and topics related to utopia.

Your eyes meet with the memory of everything you have heard and this has a huge in uence on your opinion of the place where you live. The summary of your story in a city will have slowly crystallized, not into emotional richness but into a single powerful image known as Supernapoli.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of the 20th century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, and poet, he was a quintessentially American self-made man. But he was also an outsider: a technologist with a poet's imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties ("more with less") and who anticipated the globalization of our planet ("think global-act local"). In light of the reawakening interest in his works and thoughts, and of their growing importance for our technological world, it is time for a reedition of this comprehensive and legendary publication from 1999. The visual reader Your Private Sky examines and documents Fuller's theories, ideas, and projects, and critically deals with his ideology of "rescue through technology."

What is tropical architecture? Instead of assuming it as a "natural" asocial, apolitical and ahistorical entity, this book provides the first thorough account of its formations and transformations historically.

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A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture" traces the origins of tropical architecture to eighteenth and early nineteenth century British colonial architectural knowledge and practices. It uncovers how systematic knowledge and practices on environmental technologies in the tropics such as ventilation and sun-shading were linked to military technologies, medical theories, cultural assumptions, and sanitary practices, and were manifested in building types such as military barracks, hospitals and housing.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary scholarships on postcolonial studies, science studies, and environmental history, Jiat-Hwee Chang argues that tropical architecture was inextricably entangled with the socio-historical constructions of tropical nature and the politics of colonial governance and postcolonial development. Drawing its main case studies from Singapore, these case studies are situated in relation to the production, circulation and reception of the knowledge and practices of tropical architecture across different time-spaces in the larger British colonial networks, from Britain to British India, from the West Indies to West Africa.

By bringing to light new historical materials through formidable research and tracing the history of tropical architecture beyond what is widely considered today as its "founding moment" in the mid-twentieth century, this important and original book bears not only upon our understanding of the colonial urban environment but also upon contemporary concerns with sustainable architecture. "

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.

The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design presents an in-depth exploration of criticism and criticality in theory and practice across the disciplines of art, architecture, and design. Professional criticism is a vital part of understanding the cultural significance of designed objects and environments that we engage with on a daily basis, yet there is evidence to show that this practice is changing. This edited volume investigates how practitioners, researchers, educators, and professionals engage with, think about, and value the practice of critique. With contributions from a multi-disciplinary authorship from nine countries - the UK, USA, Australia, India, Netherlands, Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, and Denmark - this companion provides a wide range of leading perspectives evaluating the landscape of criticality and how it is being shaped by technological and social advances. Illustrated with over 60 black and white images and structured into five sections, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design is a comprehensive volume for researchers, educators, and students exploring the changing role of criticism through interdisciplinary perspectives.

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – ‘naming’ through timber, ‘process-based’ through concrete, and ‘performance specification’ through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or ‘Preliminary Operations’ as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

Interweaving architecture, philosophy and cultural history, Materials and Meaning in Architecture develops a rich and multi-dimensional exploration of materials and materiality, in an age when architectural practice seems otherwise preoccupied with image and visual representation. Arguing that architecture is primarily experienced by the whole body, rather than chiefly with the eyes, this broad-ranging study shows how the most engaging built works are as tactile as they are sensuous, communicating directly with the bodily senses, especially touch. It explores the theme of 'material imagination' and the power of establishing 'place identity' in an architect's work, to consider the enduring expressive possibilities of material use in architecture. The book's chapters can be dipped into, each individual chapter providing close readings of built works by selected modern masters (Scarpa, Zumthor, Williams and Tsien), insights into key texts and theories (Ruskin, Loos, Bachelard), or short cultural histories of materials (wood, brick, concrete, steel, and glass). And yet, taken together, the chapters build to a powerful book-length argument about how meaning accrues to materials through time, and about the need to reinsert the bodily experience of materiality into architectural design. It is thus also, in part, a manifesto: arguing for architecture to act as a bulwark against the tide of an increasingly depersonalised built environment. With insights for a wide range of readers, ranging from students through to researchers and professional designers, Materials and Meaning in Architecture will cause theorists to rethink their assumptions and designers to see new potential for their projects.

Modern buildings are both wasteful machines that can be made more efficient and instruments of the massive, metropolitan system engendered by the power of high-quality fuels. A comprehensive method of environmental design must reconcile the techniques of efficient building design with the radical urban and economic reorganization that we face. Over the coming century, we will be challenged to return to the renewable resource base of the eighteenth-century city with the knowledge, technologies, and expectations of the twenty-first-century metropolis. This book explores the architectural implications of systems ecology, which extends the principles of thermodynamics from the nineteenth-century focus on more efficient machinery to the contemporary concern with the resilient self-organization of ecosystems. Written with enough technical material to explain the methods, it does not include in-text equations or calculations, relying instead on the energy system diagrams to convey the argument. Architecture and Systems Ecology has minimal technical jargon and an emphasis on intelligible design conclusions, making it suitable for architecture students and professionals who are engaged with the fundamental issues faced by sustainable design. The energy systems language provides a holistic context for the many kinds of performance already evaluated in architecture-from energy use to material selection and even the choice of building style. It establishes the foundation for environmental principles of design that embrace the full complexity of our current situation. Architecture succeeds best when it helps shape, accommodate, and represent new ways of living together.

This book is concerned with cultural and political discourses that affect the production of architecture. It examines how these discursive mechanisms and technologies combine to normalise and aestheticise everyday practices. It queries the means by which buildings are appropriated to give shape and form to political aspirations and values. Architecture is not overtly political. It does not coerce people to behave in certain ways. However, architecture is constructed within the same rules and practices whereby people and communities self-govern and regulate themselves to think and act in certain ways. This book seeks to examine these rules through various case studies including: the reconstructed Notre Dame Cathedral, the Nazi era Munich Konigsplatz, Auschwitz concentration camp and the Prora resort, Sydney's suburban race riots, and the Australian Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island.

Socially engaged architecture is a broad and emerging architectural genre that promises to redefine architecture from a market-driven profession to a mix of social business, altruism, and activism that intends to eradicate poverty, resolve social exclusion, and construct an egalitarian global society. The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement offers a critical enquiry of socially engaged architecture's current context characterized by socio-economic inequity, climate change, war, increasing global poverty, microfinance, the evolving notion of professionalism, the changing conception of public, and finally the growing academic interest in re-visioning the social role of architecture. Organized around case studies from the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Nepal, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Germany, Australia, Taiwan, and Japan the book documents the most important recent developments in the field. By examining diverse working methods and philosophies of socially engaged architecture, the handbook shows how socially engaged architecture is entangled in the global politics of poverty, reconstruction of the public sphere, changing role of the state, charity, and neoliberal urbanism. The book presents debates around the issue of whether architecture actually empowers the participators and alleviates socio-economic exclusion or if it instead indirectly sustains an exploitive capitalism. Bringing together a range of theories and case studies, this companion offers a platform to facilitate future lines of inquiry in education, research, and practice.

"Derham Groves has written this illuminating story of an exceptional but hitherto unsung Australian architect whose distinctive designs in China as well as his homeland may still be seen and enjoyed. In this book Groves has for the first time revealed some characteristic strands of Arthur Purnell's talents, whereby his subject's remarkable creativity is now clear for us to enjoy." - Robert Irving, architecture historian and pupil of Arthur Purnell Arthur Purnell's 'Forgotten' Architecture: Canton and Cars focuses on two early phases in the career of the much overlooked and underrated Australian architect, Arthur Purnell (1878-1964). In 1903, Purnell teamed up with the American engineer, Charles Paget (1874-1933) in Canton, China. Between 1903 and 1910, Purnell and Paget designed many important and impressive buildings, including the Arnhold, Karberg & Co. building (1907), one of the first reinforced concrete buildings in Southern China, and the South China Cement Factory (1907), which would later become the headquarters of Dr. Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), the first president of the Republic of China. Not many architects can design a cement factory fit for a president's palace! When Purnell returned to Australia in 1910, he had to start again from scratch. As cars were taking over from horses in a big way, he saw that designing for cars would be the next big thing in architecture. The fledgling Australian car industry was full of colourful, larger-than-life characters like Col. Harley Tarrant (1860-1949), who built his first car in 1897 and Australia's first petrol-fuelled car in 1901, and Alec Barlow Sr. (1880-1937), the archetypal dodgy car salesman. Purnell wanted in, designing many buildings for both men, including early car factories and car showrooms. In this unique book, Groves asks: why isn't Arthur Purnell more famous?

The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender reframes the discussion of modernity, space and gender by examining how "modernity" has been defined in various cultural contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how this definition has been expressed spatially and architecturally, and what effect this has had on women in their everyday lives. In doing so, this volume presents theories and methods for understanding space and gender as they relate to the development of cities, urban space and individual building types (such as housing, work spaces or commercial spaces) in both the creation of and resistance to social transformations and modern global capitalism. The book contains a diverse range of case studies from the US, Europe, the UK, and Asian countries such as China and India, which bring together a multiplicity of approaches to a continuing and common issue and reinforces the need for alternatives to the existing theoretical canon.

The Interior Architecture Theory Reader presents a global compilation that collectively and specifically defines interior architecture. Diverse views and comparative resources for interior architecture students, educators, scholars, and practitioners are needed to develop a proper canon for this young discipline. As a theoretical survey of interior architecture, the book examines theory, history, and production to embrace a full range of interior identities in architecture, interior design, digital fabrication, and spatial installation. Authored by leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, fifty chapters refine and expand the discourse surrounding interior architecture.

This book presents a selection of papers from the International Conference Geometrias'17, which was hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Coimbra from 16 to 18 June 2017. The Geometrias conferences, organized by Aproged (the Portuguese Geometry and Drawing Teachers' Association), foster debate and exchange on practical and theoretical research in mathematics, architecture, the arts, engineering, and related fields. Geometrias'17, with the leitmotif "Thinking, Drawing, Modelling", brought together a group of recognized experts to discuss the importance of geometric literacy and the science of representation for the development of scientific and technological research and professional practices. The 12 peer-reviewed papers gathered here show how geometry, drawing, stereotomy, and the science of representation are still at the core of every act leading to the conception and materialization of form, and highlight their continuing relevance for scholars and professionals in the fields of architecture, engineering, and applied mathematics.

This title is a commemorative volume celebrating the life and work of the architect and architectural historian Alan Colquhoun, who died in December 2012.

Innovative forms of visual representation in the long eighteenth century were made possible through the medium of print. In turn, they enabled the dissemination of knowledge about the ancient world and its relationship to the ever-refining set of cultural values applied to and associated with the past.

"Tracing" "Architecture" discusses the study of the ancient world - including Egyptian, Greek, Roman and British antiquities - through the medium of print as a Europe-wide phenomenon, where the visual language of the printed image transcended national boundaries. This book allows the reader to explore the relationship between the international currency of 'antiquity' and indigenous traditions of aesthetic philosophy and architectural design. The importance of this and the changing relationship between text and image is also considered, thereby raising questions about the relationship between the mass-produced image and the original, in an era before Walter Benjamin's age of mechanical reproduction.

"Tracing Architecture" is a fascinating study of the relationship between architecture, antiquity and aesthetics in a European context. It will be of interest to those studying and working in the fields of art history, architecture, classics and ancient history.

This book presents the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Graphic Design in Architecture, EGA 2020, focusing on heritage - including architectural and graphic heritage as well as the graphics of heritage. Consisting of two parts: "Representation and Analysis" and "Concept and Creation", this second volume gathers selected contributions on topics ranging from graphic representation to the graphic presentation of ideas, i.e. artistic creation, to bridge the gap between graphic heritage and the graphics of heritage. Given its scope, this volume will appeal to architectural and graphic designers, artists and engineers, providing them with extensive information on new methods and a source of inspiration for future research and interdisciplinary collaborations.

This book presents the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Graphic Design in Architecture, EGA 2020, focusing on heritage - including architectural and graphic heritage as well as the graphics of heritage. The third of three volumes, this book discusses topics related to mapping, cartography and landscape, as well as innovative education methods, particularly in the context of teaching architectural heritage. It covers historical cartography and new cartographies, as well as methods for representing the landscape, and reports on different learning methods and practices, including classroom methods but also those involving more active participation and multidisciplinary and collaborative production. Given its scope, this book will appeal cartographers, designers and teachers, providing them with extensive information on innovative methodologies and a source of inspiration for their future work.