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.

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.

Dessau may be a mere speck on the map, but to this day the city of Bauhaus still occupies the most important place in the development of the New Building - otherwise known as the Neues Bauen - movement. Alongside the Modernist architecture, there is another World Cultural Heritage site which draws in visitors from all over the world to the region, namely the Garden Kingdom of Dessau Woerlitz (Gartenreich Dessau-Woerlitz). In the shape of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau) and the Dessau-Woerlitz Cultural Foundation (Kulturstiftung Dessau Woerlitz), two institutions have come together to publish the first comprehensive architectural guide on Dessau-Rosslau and Woerlitz, areas most closely linked to the UNESCO World Heritage sites domiciled there. The eighteenth-century Garden Kingdom of Dessau Woerlitz and the twentieth-century Bauhaus School of Design (Bauhaus Hochschule fur Gestaltung) have not only bequeathed the city and its surrounds inestimable architectural urban and rural properties and spaces, but also an associated intellectual heritage which has made a lasting impact on the world and, last but not least, accounts for the attraction the area holds for tourists. These and other notable historic and contemporary buildings alike are presented in this architectural guide which also raises issues about the nuanced handling of this architectural and cultural legacy and of future planning.

Portrait of Studio Hani Rashid Building on the previous volume Re: Futures (2017), Re: Action presents a selection of innovative designs by Studio Hani Rashid at the University of Applied Arts Vienna's Institute of Architecture. The selected projects address architectural strategies for ensuring vitality in cities and ecosystems as well as sustainable urban growth. In his studio, Hani Rashid, co-founder of the visionary New York firm Asymptote Architecture, focuses on architecture that responds to current and future ecological changes. Bringing together projects, texts, and conversations, the book highlights creative ways in which architecture can contribute to the development of a sustainable, progressive, and livable urban future. Innovative experimental architectural designs for vibrant cities and ecosystems Explores how architecture can respond to ecological changes With contributions by Hani Rashid, Anab Jain, Greg Lynn, Timothy Morton, Claudia Pasquero, and others

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 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.

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

50 years Learning from Las Vegas From the bustle of Johannesburg to the neon of Las Vegas, Denise Scott Brown's advocacy for "messy vitality" has transformed the way we look at the urban landscape. Unconventional, eloquent, and with a profound sociopolitical message, Scott Brown is one of our era's most influential thinkers on architecture and urbanism. The anthology Denise Scott Brown. In Other Eyes - marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal treatise Learning from Las Vegas - paints a portrait of Scott Brown as seen through the eyes of leading architectural historians and practitioners. It features new scholarship on her education on three continents, her multidisciplinary teaching, and her use of urban patterns and forces as tools for architectural design - a practice documented in a new comment by Scott Brown, noting that sometimes "1+1>2." With contributions by Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman, Sylvia Lavin, Stanislaus von Moos, Jacques Herzog, Robin Middleton, and Denise Scott Brown, among others A comprehensive portrait of one of contemporary architecture's most significant personalities

Design Ideas offers students a variety of different ways to go about finding a design solution. In addition to suggesting fundamental ways to get the creative process moving and develop a design approach, it also proposes various sources of inspiration for design ideas. It focuses on the three elements of place, form, and function, which can sometimes constitute immediate springboards for concrete designs. These elements must eventually be incorporated as the design process. Subjects: Creativity in the design process; Sources of inspiration and design approaches; Working with place; Working with form; Working with function.

Frank Lloyd Wright first noted the affinity between modern Western architecture and the philosophy of the ancient Chinese writer Laotzu. In this classic work, Amos Ih Tiao Chang expands on that idea, developing the parallel with the aid of architectural drawings and Chinese paintings. Now with a new foreword by David Wang, this book reveals the vitality of intangible, or negative, elements. Chang writes that these qualities make architectonic forms "come alive, become human, naturally harmonize with one another, and enable us to experience them with human sensibility." The Tao of Architecture continues to be essential reading for understanding the intersection between architecture and philosophy.

Urbanism Beyond 2020 explores numerous questions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic: Why is city making a health project? How are ecological and human wellbeing interrelated? How can leadership and governance help bridge gaps in our unjust cities? How might we renew our relationship with dwellings and neighbourhoods? How resilient and adaptable are our cities during uncertain times? Amidst climate change and global warming, is the pandemic a prelude to the challenges to come? Addressed to anyone invested in the well-being of our cities, this collection of essays by an accomplished urban designer and city planner reminds us why the pointers to our future will not emerge exclusively from affluent nations or less developed societies alone, why we live in an interconnected world, and why this pandemic is a crucial period to reexamine the impact of our cities on our planet's future.

The first major study to examine the rise to prominence of Jewish architects since 1945 and the connection of their work to the legacy of the Holocaust Since the end of World War II, Jewish architects have risen to unprecedented international prominence. Whether as modernists, postmodernists, or deconstructivists, architects such as Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Louis I. Kahn, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Moshe Safdie, Robert A.M. Stern, and Stanley Tigerman have made pivotal contributions to postwar architecture. They have also decisively shaped Jewish architectural history, as many of their designs are influenced by Jewish themes, ideas, and imagery. Building After Auschwitz is the first major study to examine the origins of this "new Jewish architecture." Historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld describes this cultural development as the result of important shifts in Jewish memory and identity since the Holocaust, and cites the rise of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and Holocaust consciousness as a catalyst. In showing how Jewish architects responded to the Nazi genocide in their work, Rosenfeld's study sheds new light on the evolution of Holocaust memory.

Ontology of Construction explores theories of construction in modern architecture, focusing on the relationship between nihilism of technology and architecture. The essays articulate the implications of technology in works by such architects as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies Van der Rohe. Hartoonian also examines Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic and the relationship between architecture and other crafts. Emphasizing "fabrication" as a critical theme for contemporary architectural theory and practice, Ontology of Construction is a provocative contribution to the current debate in these areas.

Set against the background of a 'general crisis' that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

The Power of Process explores Michael Pearson's fascinating career, from his work in British architecture in the 1960s and 70s through to his innovative projects of the 90s to the present. Michael Pearson is past President of the Architectural Association, London's prestigious architecture school. The Power of Process sets out the importance of Michael Pearson and his work, from his initial work within the family firm, his teaching and presidency of the Architectural Association, to small-scale artists' studios and large-scale hospital planning, to the first thorough appreciation of Burne House, his most important work.
The title The Power of Process, refers to Michael Pearson's abiding concern for 'process' in modern architecture -- that is, how the conception and making of architecture is driven by information systems, the inter-connectedness between a buildings use, how it is manufactured and, importantly how its use can adapt and change over time. As such, his interest in process puts him at the forefront of the British High-Tech architecture, more famously associated with Richard Rogers and Norman Foster.

Platform 8 catalogs a curated selection of work generated in the past year at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Alongside final products of design education, Platform 8 places particular emphasis on collecting and documenting the people and artifacts that shape research-driven design practices. Here, design is presented both as process and as a final product. The book s indexical structure, punctuated with a collection of portraits, presents a comprehensive picture of the school. Platform 8 shows the intention, direction, and passion seen and experienced every day at the GSD.

Museum Thresholds is a progressive, interdisciplinary volume and the first to explore the importance and potential of entrance spaces for visitor experience. Bringing together an international collection of writers from different disciplines, the chapters in this volume offer different theoretical perspectives on the nature of engagement, interaction and immersion in threshold spaces, and the factors which enable and inhibit those immersive possibilities. Organised into themed sections, the book explores museum thresholds from three different perspectives. Considering them first as a problem space, the contributors then go on to explore thresholds through different media and, finally, draw upon other subjects and professions, including performance, gaming, retail and discourse studies, in order to examine them from an entirely new perspective. Drawing upon examples that span Asia, North America and Europe, the authors set the entrance space in its historical, social and architectural contexts. Together, the essays show how the challenges posed by the threshold can be rethought and reimagined from a variety of perspectives, each of which have much to bring to future thinking and design. Combining both theory and practice, Museum Thresholds should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in museum studies, digital heritage, architecture, design studies, retail studies and media studies. It will also be of great interest to museum practitioners working in a wide variety of institutions around the globe.

Thinking Big: A History of Davis Langdon provides a history of one of the world's largest quantity surveying companies. They have been involved in the rebuilding of Ground Zero, Chek Lap Kok, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and the Millennium Dome in London, amongst thousands of other projects around the world. Thinking Big is complete with illustrations of projects and details the working of this global multi-million dollar corporation and their impact on some of the most exciting buildings of the last century. Organised around seven chapters that cover different elements of the company's history in detail and written by a senior partner of the company, Thinking Big provides details of the company's foundation in the early years of the twentieth century, through the difficult years of the depression, to the firm's growth in the 1930s and its international expansion in the post-war years. The book discusses the turbulent period of the 1970s and its leading to a merger and growth of new markets in the 1980s. Thinking Big outlines the company's survival during the recession through to its increasing growth and diversification in the new millennium. The book goes on to look at the new challenges the company faces, including sustainability and the current economic crisis.

Building-Art: Modern Architecture Under Cultural Construction is an anthology of essays by noted critic Joseph Masheck. Considering topics in nineteenth and twentieth century architecture, its theory and practice, as well as selected achievements by such great modernists as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Louis Kahn, Masheck also analyzes important monuments and architectural ideas of such artists as Giorgio di Chirico and Tony Smith. Contextualizing and culturally speculative, these studies address such issues as the distinction between architecture and "mere" building, and architecture and engineering, frequently drawing the reader into architectural problems that have persisted for at least two centuries. Demonstrating a concern with on-going modernism, Masheck's essays guide the reader through the anti-modernist polemics of the 1970s and 1980s, which are particularly relevant in light of Postmodernism's demise. Joseph Masheck, editor-in-chief of Artforum from 1977-1980, is Associate Professor of Art History and coordinator of the graduate humanities program at Hofstra University. He is the author of several books and many articles.

Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space investigates the relationship between the built environment and the organisation of space. The contributors are classical and prehistoric archaeologists, anthropologists and architects, who from their different backgrounds are able to provide some important and original insights into this relationship.

At the turn to the twentieth century, architects began to realize that architecture should no longer find ist expression in historic styles. They had recognized that the reason for arbitrarily resorting to historical building forms established in advance was that the design process had been completely separated from construction. In spite of the incidental paths of architectural design approaches, there seems to be a consensus emerging in view of today's global challenges: It is no longer just a question of what shall I build or how shall I build. Instead, the question is how shall I organize and improve my design tools to new dimensions of architecture in order to increase building performance while saving resources and energy and to let digital design solve design tasks that could hardly be solved previously? Today, many projects are pointing in this direction and seem to inaugurate a sustainable fourth dimension of architecture. This book is a comparative critical analysis of such seemingly incidental design approaches, and thus it is an attempt to serve as a historical scenario for the future.

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive—if hitherto overlooked—engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture—and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

Nearly every work of architecture can be characterized by specific approaches to forming and centering. An awareness of these "underpinnings" would facilitate a more informed approach to architectural design problems, as well as a deeper understanding of the central issues (and flaws) embodied by completed works of architecture. But the addressing of such topics has generally remained multifarious and diverse: more in the nature of a collection of independent issues than an overarching analytical argument. In this book, fresh looks at such issues are assembled and recast into a fully integrated narrative, based on two foundational and complementary aspects of architectural design: those that give shape and those that give focus-forming and centering. The author uses an equally weighted interplay of discussion and diagram, with over 450 illustrations throughout the book. In addition, the text includes many links to further information online in the form of narratives, photographs, delineations, and contextual views.