This book deals with the economic aspects of changing attitudes in arts and sciences. The effects of the public good character of culture, along with the very long production period and lifetime for its products, are emphasized, since both contribute to the failure of normal market solutions. Embodiment of ideas, and the consequences of modern reproduction technology for protection of property rights are closely examined.

The Institute of Architecture and Planning at University of Liechtenstein in Vaduz pursues highly innovative approaches in architectural education. A focus on practice and bringing students together with craftsmen and their businesses are a key part of this. Model Workshop documents one of these programs at the institute. Students are confronted with different aspects of construction at a scale of 1:1, ranging from experimental wood structures through assembly techniques to questions of manufacturing. Complementing theoretical groundwork, the students' design ideas are produced by timber construction firms as prototypes at a scale of 1:1, tested for functionality, and further developed. The book introduces this design work and direct transition into practice and analyses the learning process of building at full scale. It also offers guidance through texts and images for an in-depth engagement with these didactic methods in close cooperation with local trades businesses. Text in English and German.

Bringing together the reflections of an architectural theorist and a philosopher, this book encourages philosophers and architects, scholars and designers alike, to reconsider what they do as well as what they can do in the face of challenging times. It does so by exploring the notion that architecture and design can (and possibly should), in their own right, make for a distinctive form of ethical investigation. The book is less concerned with absolutist understandings of the two components of ethics, a theory of 'the good' and a theory of 'the right', than with remaining open to multiple relations between ideas about the built environment, design practices and the plurality of kinds of human subjects (inhabitants, individuals and communities) accommodated by buildings and urban spaces. The built environment contributes to the inculcation of all sorts of values (good and bad). Thus, this book aims to change the way people commonly think about ethics, not only in relation to the built environment, but to themselves, their ways of thinking and modes of behaviour.

Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome examines methods and techniques that enabled builders to construct some of the most imposing monuments of ancient Rome. Focusing on structurally innovative vaulting and the factors that influenced its advancement, Lynne Lancaster also explores a range of related practices, including lightweight pumice as aggregate, amphoras in vaults, vaulting ribs, metal tie bars, and various techniques of buttressing. She provides the geological background of the local building stones and applies mineralogical analysis to determine material provenance, which in turn suggests trading patterns and land use. Lancaster also examines construction techniques in relation to the social, economic, and political contexts of Rome, in an effort to draw connections between changes in the building industry and the events that shaped Roman society from the early empire to late antiquity. This book was awarded the James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in 2007.

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.

Modern Architectural Theory is the first book to provide a comprehensive survey of architectural theory, primarily in Europe and the United States, during three centuries of development. In this synthetic overview, Harry Mallgrave examines architectural discourse within its social and political context. He explores the philosophical and conceptual evolution of its ideas, discusses the relation of theory to the practice of building, and, most importantly, considers the words of the architects themselves, as they contentiously shaped Western architecture. He also examines the compelling currents of French rationalist and British empiricist thought, radical reformation of the theory during the Enlightenment, the intellectual ambitions and historicist debates of the nineteenth century, and the distinctive varieties of modern theory in the twentieth century up to the profound social upheaval of the 1960s. Modern Architectural Theory challenges many assumptions about architectural modernism and uncovers many new dimensions of the debates about modernism.

The title of this issue of the Nexus Network Journal, "Architecture, Mathematics and Structure," is deliberately ambiguous. At first glance, it might seem to indicate the relationship between what buildings look like and how they stand up. This is indeed one aspect of what we are concerned with here. But on a deeper level, the fundamental concept of structure is what connects architecture to mathematics. Both architecture and mathematics are highly structured formal systems expressed through a symbolic language. For architecture, the generating structure might be geometrical, musical, modular, or fractal. Once we understand the nature of the structure underlying the design, we are able to "read" the meaning inherent in the architectural forms. The papers in this issue all explore themes of structure in different ways.

The Olympiapark in Munich is one of the most famous projects of the landscape architect Günther Grzimek (1915–1996), yet his entire oeuvre has proved to be pioneering and timeless. He advocated for a new form of urban green space in Germany, a “demokratisches Grün� (democratic green space), while also campaigning for practice-oriented training in landscape architecture. Grzimek’s biography offers a wellspring of new discoveries. It traverses the history of modern Germany and encompasses his collaborations with famous architects, town planners, and designers – including Otl Aicher, who developed the basic outline of this volume together with Grzimek in the 1980s. Featuring plans, images, texts, and excerpts from Grzimek’s own writings, this comprehensive new book offers a vivid and in-depth encounter with this major innovator and illustrates the lively history of landscape architecture in Germany from the 1930s in Berlin to the 1990s in Munich.

An Atlas of Another America is a work of speculative architectural fiction and theoretical analysis of the American single-family house and its native habitat, the suburban metropolis. Mass-marketed and endlessly multiplied, and the definitive symbol of success in America and around the world, the suburban house has also become a global economic calamity and an impending environmental catastrophe. Yet, as both object and idea, it remains largely unexamined from an architectural perspective. This new book fills this gap through projects and essays that reflect upon, critique, and reformulate the equation that binds the house as an object to the American dream as a concept. Adopting tone and format of an historical architectural treatise, it builds upon an eminent lineage of architectural research from Piranesi and Ledoux to Branzi and Koolhaas in which imaginary but not implausible worlds are constructed through drawing in order to reframe reality and reorient the discipline towards new territories of action.

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.

Bridging the gap between architectural theory and professional practice studies, this book offers critical inquiry into the shifting ground of ethical thought in the changing climate of the global economy. Looking at issues of contemporary significance to architectural critics, practitioners, educators, and students, the book also examines the role of the architectural academy in providing an education in ethical judgement. Including transcripts of responses and discussions among its contributors, a broad interdisciplinary set of perspectives are debated and often controversial points of view are put forward.

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.

This is a scholarly examination of the theoretical work of one of the most important architects of early modern Europe. Trained as a scientist, Wren applied the seventeenth-century scientific methods to his study of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and contemporary architecture. From his study of ancient buildings, he posited a new version of the origins and development of the Classical style, thereby becoming one of the first to challenge theoretical principles of architecture that had been upheld since the Renaissance. Rejecting the idea of beauty as absolute and innate, Wren formulated an empirical definition, based on visual perception and custom. His acceptance of the relativity of beauty also led him to recognize the Gothic style, then disparaged by himself and his contemporaries throughout Europe, as a legitimate one that evolved within particular cultural circumstances. This edition of Wren's writings includes accurate, annotated transcriptions of the texts.

The constant in architecture's evolution is change. Adaptive Architecture explores structures, or environments that accommodate multiple functions at the same time, sequentially, or at periodically recurring events. It demonstrates how changing technological, economic, ecological and social conditions have altered the playing field for architecture from the design of single purpose structures to the design of interacting systems of synergistically interdependent, distributed buildings. Including contributors from the US, UK, Japan, Australia, Germany and South Africa, the essays are woven into a five-part framework which provides a broad and unique treatment of this important and timely issue.

Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical emancipatory project? And if so, what would be the contours of such a discourse?

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.

The modes of diffusion of ideas that shape planned environments, and the ways these ideas are realised, have been gaining prominence as subjects of study and discussion among planning historians and others. However, most studies have focused on the diffusion that has occurred within the sphere of the so-called First World, where the participants have been considered as relatively equal partners. On the other hand, where the diffusion took place between the First and Third Worlds, these exchanges have often been projected as one-way impositions where the receivers are silent, oppressed, impotent – if not outright invisible.

More recently, some researchers have begun to approach the relations between actors and stakeholders in processes of planning diffusion in a more complex and ambiguous way. To begin with, the natives in developing countries, whether colonial or post-colonial, are being recognised as fully-fledged actors in the shaping of the built environment, with a variety of roles to play and means to play them, even if they frequently face many constraints to their actions. Moreover, the planning influences have started to be acknowledged as going in multiple directions, including back to the source of dissemination. Adaptation, hybridisation, mimicry and appropriation are just some of the forms of diffusion and adoption that are relevant. The specific traits of the indigenous also came to be viewed as something that is not necessarily evident: ultimately, who are the ‘locals’?

Urbanism – Imported or Exported? is the first book to examine the full complexity of these issues in detail. It raises conceptual questions concerning the identities of locals, the roles of relevant actors, and the modes of diffusion, as well as investigating the methodological implications for historians of the city-building process. Using examples from around the world, with a particular emphasis on Mediterranean countries, it offers a bold new approach to the concepts and methods of the study of planning history.

This study peers behind the veil of architectural styles to the underlying social microcosm of the ‘building world’ of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, to examine how the fragile authority of the architect took root. Bringing to architectural history methods more familiar from studies of the social content of poetry and painting, Brian Hanson is able to establish new, and often surprising relationships between many of the key figures of the period - including Chambers, Soane, Barry, Pugin, Scott and Street - and to shed new light on lesser figures, and on agencies as diverse as freemasonry and magazine publishing. John Ruskin in particular emerges here in an entirely new light, as do his arguments concerning ‘The Nature of Gothic’. Following recent rethinking of the pace of industrialisation, and the dynamic between the metropolitan centres and the more slowly evolving ‘fringes’, Hanson concludes that in some respects Ruskin was closer to William Chambers than to William Morris.

Decoding Homes and Houses uses a computer-based method of analysis to explore the relation between the design and layout of traditional, vernacular, speculative and architect-designed houses and people's evolving tastes, lifestyles, habits and domestic routines. Its purpose is to show how it is possible to explore the relation between house form and culture by looking at the social information that is crystallized in the layouts of the houses themselves (as opposed to asking people how they respond to them).

A witty and engaging examination of style in architecture by bestselling author Witold Rybczynski

Contemporary architectural theory emphasizes the importance of "tectonics," the term used to articulate the relationship among construction, structure, and architectural expression. Yet, little consideration has been given to the term's origins or historical significance. In this study, Oechslin examines the attempts by early Modern theoreticians of architecture to grapple with the relationship between appearance and essence. He locates the culmination of this search for "truth" in architectural expression in the work of Adolf Loos and the writings of theorists such as Bötticher, Le Corbusier, and Lux.

City of Play shows how play is built into the very fabric of the modern city. From playgrounds to theme parks, skittle alleys to swimming pools, to the countless uncontrolled spaces which the urban habitat affords – play is by no means just a childhood affair. A myriad essentially unproductive playful pursuits have, through time, modelled the modern city and landscape. Architect and scholar Rodrigo Pérez de Arce’s erudite, original, and often surprising study explores a curiously neglected dimension of architectural design and practice: ludic space. It is an architectural history of the playground – from the hippodrome to the Situationist city – of space released from productive ends in the pursuit of leisure. But this is more than just a book about how architecture has incorporated play into its spaces and structures, it is a history of the modern city itself. The ludic imagination impregnated modernist ideals, and what begins with the playground ends with a re-consideration of the whole sweep of the modern movement through the filter of leisure and play. Because play is such a basic or fundamental human experience, the book re-grounds the architect’s concerns with those of non-architects – and not only those of adults but also of children. It seeks to give everyone – architects and other ordinary city-dwellers alike – a better understanding about what is at stake in the making of the public spaces of our cities.

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

Gathering twenty essays written over twenty years, Figments of the Architectural Imagination explores the frontiers of speculative architectural design, theory, and pedagogy to offer clear-eyed and incisive treatments of some of the most important projects, practices, and polemics at work making contemporary architecture contemporary. These sharp and insightful texts, whether addressing the impact of digital technology, the design of an effective hotel, the emergence of the Los Angeles vanguard, or the proper execution of a thesis project, combine frontline reportage, archival scholarship, trenchant prose, and impressive critical acumen to cut through the cacophony of recent architectural discourse with uncommon clarity, intelligence, rigor, and wit. Taken together, these essays provide essential orientation for practitioners, academics, students, and aficionados hoping to understand how contemporary architecture came to be where it is and to speculate on where it might go next.