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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
In a globalizing world, frontiers may be in flux but they remain as significant as ever. New borders are established even as old borders are erased. Beyond lines on maps, however, borders are spatial zones in which distinctive architectural, graphic, and other design elements are deployed to signal the nature of the space and to guide, if not actually control, behaviour and social relations within it. This volume unpacks how manipulations of space and design in frontier zones, historically as well as today, set the stage for specific kinds of interactions and convey meanings about these sites and the experiences they embody. Frontier zones organize an array of functions to facilitate the passage of goods, information, and people, and to define and control access. Bringing together studies from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, this collection of essays casts a wide net to consider borders of diverse sorts. Investigations of contemporary political frontiers are set within the context of examinations of historical borders, borders that have existed within cities, and virtual borders. This range allows for reflection on shifts in how frontier zones are articulated and the impermanence of border emplacements, as well as on likely scenarios for future frontiers. This text is unique in bringing together a number of scholarly perspectives in the arts and humanities to examine how spatial and architectural design decisions convey meaning, shape or abet specific social practices, and stage memories of frontier zones that no longer function as such. It joins and expands discussions in social science disciplines, in which considerations of border practices tend to overlook the role of built form and material culture more broadly in representing social practices and meanings.
This book offers a diverse understanding and practical approach towards the growing area of atmosphere research, in the context of philosophy, geography and architecture. It begins by tracing back to the model of experience called the "pathic". Drawing on the phenomenology of theorists Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Boehme, introductory chapters offer a grounding for the beginnings of pathic research. The chapters go on to apply pathic framework to a range of practical cases from theatre studies to education. Atmospheres are often defined as affects one feels in a "lived space" and researchers are becoming more interested in the emotions we feel in natural and artificial environments across day to day life. By providing a critical re-evaluation of phenomenology and aesthetics, the book brings a series of unexplored and controversial subjects to light, opening up a new context for thinking about our everyday life and experiences inscribed within aesthetics, politics, literature, spatial practices and pedagogy and effectively merging abstract philosophy and concrete practice. This book is particularly poignant in the emerging field of Atmosphere and New Aesthetics research. Practitioners, academics and researchers working within Cultural Geography, Aesthetics, Art and Philosophy will find this book extremely valuable.
Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World is an introduction to the methods and basic concepts of phenomenological philosophy through an analysis of the phenomenon of the built world. The conception of the built world that emerges is of space and time fashioned in accordance with a living understanding of what it is for human beings to exist in the world. Human building and making is thus no mere supplementary instrument in the pursuit of the ends of life, but a fundamental embodiment of the self-understanding of human beings. Phenomenological description is uniquely capable of bringing into view the physiognomy of this understanding, its texture and complexity, thereby providing an important basis for a critique of what constitutes its essence and its conditions of possibility.
This book discusses the status of urban design as a disciplinary field and as a practice under the current and pervasive neoliberal regime. The main argument is that urban design has been wholly reshaped by neoliberalism. In this transformation, it has become a discipline that has neglected its original ethos - designing good cities - aligning its theory and practice with the sole profit-oriented objectives typical of advanced capitalist societies. The book draws on Marxism-inspired scholars for a conceptual analysis of how neoliberalism influenced the emergence of urbanism and urban design. It looks specifically at how, in urbanism's everyday dimensions, it is possible to find examples of resistance and emancipation. Based on empirical evidence, archival resources, and immersion in the socio-spatial reality of Santiago de Chile, the book illustrates the way neoliberalism compromises urban designers' ethics and practices, and therefore how its theories become instrumental to the neoliberal transformation of urban society represented in contemporary urbanisms. It will be a valuable resource for academics and students in the fields of architecture, urban studies, sociology and geography.
Fluid Space and Transformational Learning presents a critique of the interlocking questions of 'school architecture' and education and attempts to establish a field of questioning that aspectualises and intersects concepts, theories and practices connected with the contemporary school building and the deschooling of learning and of the space within and through which it takes place. Tying together the historicity of architectural theory, criticism and practice and the plural dynamic of social fields and sciences, this book outlines the qualities and modalities of experiential fields of transformational learning. The three qualities of space that are highlighted along the way - activated, polyphonic and playful space - as they emerge (without being instrumentalised) through architecturalised spatial modalities - flexibility, variability, interactivity, taut fluid polyphony, multiplicity, transcendence of boundaries - tend to construct and establish a school environment rich in heretical socio-spatial codes. Meshing cooperative, participatory, intrapsychic and interpsychic dimensions, they invite the factors of learning to a creative, imponderable, transformational disorder and deconstruct dominant conditioned reflexes of a disciplinary, methodical and productive order.
Peter Eisenman is one of the most controversial protagonists of the architectural scene, who is known as much for his theoretical essays as he is for his architecture. While much has been written about his built works and his philosophies, most books focus on one or the other aspect. By structuring this volume around the concept of form, Stefano Corbo links together Eisenman's architecture with his theory. From Formalism to Weak Form: The Architecture and Philosophy of Peter Eisenman argues that form is the sphere of mediation between our body, our inner world and the exterior world and, as such, it enables connections to be made between philosophy and architecture. From the start of his career on, Eisenman has been deeply interested in the problem of form in architecture and has constantly challenged the classical concept of it. For him, form is not simply a cognitive tool that determines a physical structure, which discriminates all that is active from what is passive, what is inside from what is outside. He has always tried to connect his own work with the cultural manifestations of the time: firstly under the influence of Colin Rowe and his formalist studies; secondly, by re-interpreting Chomsky's linguistic theories; in the 80's, by collaborating with Derrida and his de-constructivist approach; more recently,by discovering Henri Bergson's idea of Time. These different moments underline different phases, different projects, different programmatic manifestos; and above all, an evolving notion of form. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach based on the intersections between architecture and philosophy, this book investigates all these definitions and, in doing so, provides new insights into and a deeper understanding of the complexity of Eisenman's work.
Drawing Imagining Building focuses on the history of hand-drawing practices to capture some of the most crucial and overlooked parts of the process. Using 80 black and white images to illustrate the examples, it examines architectural drawing practices to elucidate the ways drawing advances the architect's imagination. Emmons considers drawing practices in the Renaissance and up to the first half of the twentieth century. Combining systematic analysis across time with historical explication presents the development of hand-drawing, while also grounding early modern practices in their historical milieu. Each of the illustrated chapters considers formative aspects of architectural drawing practice, such as upright elevations, flowing lines and occult lines, and drawing scales to identify their roots in an embodied approach to show how hand-drawing contributes to the architect's productive imagination. By documenting some of the ways of thinking through practices of architectural handdrawing, it describes how practices can enrich the ethical imagination of the architect. This book would be beneficial for academics, practitioners, and students of architecture, particularly those who are interested in the history and significance of hand-drawing and technical drawing.
Progressive Studio Pedagogy provides guidance to educators in all design fields by questioning processes and assumptions about teaching and learning, utilising examples from architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design. Through a series of case studies, this book presents innovative approaches to learning and teaching in design studio. Traditionally, design education is perceived to be a process for acquiring skills and a site for developing creative potential. However, contemporary higher education is embracing issues that include widening participation, managing transition, and fostering independent learning and graduate employability. This book situates design learning within this varied context and offers insights into how to confront the challenge of facilitating learning through divergent contexts by presenting projects and courses that use a range of approaches that require students to think and act critically and evaluatively. Progressive Studio Pedagogy presents new practices that readers can adapt into their own creative education, making it an ideal read for those interested in teaching design.
In this collection of idiosyncratic lessons, architect and teacher Pier Paolo Tamburelli engages with the very foundations of arch-itecture, proposing a series of new and open-ended perspectives on how we build the world. Developed for the 'Grundkurs', or 'basic course', at Vienna Technical University, Tamburelli's lessons are presented through the annotated sketches that form the basis of his lectures - variously rough and precise, sarcastic and sincere, and always uniquely expressive. This volume is a rich visual sourcebook of architectural ideas that form an accessible and discursive introduction to the discipline - one which pauses on the road to grand theories to learn from the intuitive processes of notetaking, drawing, and association. Tamburelli's lessons are based around a series of dialectic couples, including Roof/Wall, Shelter/Memory, and Language/Action. The pairs are experimental and often provocative, offering a framework to be used to climb in the direction of architecture. Tamburelli trusts in the capacity of images to suspend the restraints of more rigorous theoretical approaches, embraces the flexible wisdom of the note, and relishes the intrigue of the cryptic messages we leave for ourselves. Reproduced here in their entirety, these eight lessons offer countless routes towards, through, and around architecture, providing newcomers and experts alike with an intimate and refreshing encounter with a millennia-old discipline. With an introduction by the author and a text by Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design
In this fresh and authoritative account John Macarthur presents the eighteenth century idea of the picturesque - when it was a risky term concerned with a refined taste for everyday things, such as the hovels of the labouring poor - in the light of its reception and effects in modern culture. In a series of linked essays Macarthur shows: what the concept of picture does in the picturesque and how this relates to modern theories of the image how the distaste that might be felt today at the sentimentality of the picturesque was already at play in the eighteenth century how visual values such as 'irregularity' become the basis of modern architectural planning; how the concept of appropriating a view moves from landscape design into urban design why movement is fundamental to picturing the stillness of buildings, cities and landscapes. Drawing on examples from architecture, art and broader culture, John Macarthur's account of this key topic in cultural history, makes engaging reading for all those studying architecture, art history, cultural history or visual studies.
Freud for Architects explains what Freud offers to the understanding of architectural creativity and architectural experience, with case examples from early modern architecture to the present. Freud's observations on the human psyche and its influence on culture and social behavior have generated a great deal of discussion since the 19th century. Yet, what Freud's key ideas offer to the understanding of architectural creativity and experience has received little direct attention. That is partly because Freud opened the door to a place where conventional research in architecture has little traction, the unconscious. Adding to the difficulties, Freud's collection of work is vast and daunting. Freud for Architects navigates Freud's key ideas and bridges a chasm between architecture and psychoanalytic theory. The book highlights Freud's ideas on the foundational developments of childhood, developments on which the adult psyche is based. It explains why and how the developmental stages could influence adult architectural preferences and preoccupations, spatial intuition, and beliefs about what is proper and right for architectural design. As such, Freud for Architects will be of great interest to students, practitioners, and scholars in a range of disciplines including architecture, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.
A History of Architecture and Trade draws together essays from an international roster of distinguished and emerging scholars to critically examine the important role architecture and urbanism played in the past five hundred years of global trading, moving away from a conventional Western narrative. The book uses an alternative holistic lens through which to view the development of architecture and trade, covering diverse topics such as the coercive urbanism of the Dutch East India Company; how slavery and capitalism shaped architecture and urbanization; and the importance of Islamic trading in the history of global trade. Each chapter examines a key site in history, using architecture, landscape and urban scale as evidence to show how trade has shaped them. It will appeal to scholars and researchers interested in areas such as world history, economic and trade history and architectural history.
Reconstruction and Restoration of Architectural Heritage 2020 includes contributions on the protection, and restoration of architectural monuments and the reconstruction of major historical urban development sites, as well as various complex issues and aspects of engineering reconstruction of monuments and preservation of historical heritage. The contributions were presented at the eponymous conference (RRAH 2020, St Petersburg, Russia, 25-28 March 2020), and cover a wide range of topics: - Historical, architectural and urban planning research and restoration of monuments - Urban and regional planning - Engineering reconstruction, performance of repair and reconstruction works on monuments - Training of architects and restorers Reconstruction and Restoration of Architectural Heritage 2020 will be of interest to academics and professionals involved in the history and restoration of nature reserves, estates, cities and monuments.
The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture's increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture - research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called 'nature'. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes - History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice - supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.
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.
This anthology of selected works outlines three critical instigators of architecture, all tied directly to the tectonic makeup of our built environment - place, material, and assembly. These catalysts provide the organizational framework for a collection of essays discussing their significant influence on the processes of architectural design and construction. With content from a diverse collection of notable architects, historians, and scholars, this book serves as a theoretical structure for understanding the tectonic potential of architecture. Each chapter is thematically driven, consisting of a pair of essays preceded by an introduction highlighting the fundamental issues at hand and comparing and contrasting the points of view presented. Situate, Manipulate, Fabricate offers an opportunity to explore the essential topics that affect the design and construction, as well as the experiential qualities, of our built environment.
The Optimum Imperative examines architecture's multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia's entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops' occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzik and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects' optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.
In the wake of an unparalleled housing crisis at the end of the Second World War, Glasgow Corporation rehoused the tens of thousands of private tenants who were living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in unimproved Victorian slums. Adopting the designs, the materials and the technologies of modernity they built into the sky, developing high-rise estates on vacant sites within the city and on its periphery. This book uniquely focuses on the people's experience of this modern approach to housing, drawing on oral histories and archival materials to reflect on the long-term narrative and significance of high-rise homes in the cityscape. It positions them as places of identity formation, intimacy and well-being. With discussions on interior design and consumption, gender roles, children, the elderly, privacy, isolation, social networks and nuisance, Glasgow examines the connections between architectural design, planning decisions and housing experience to offer some timely and prescient observations on the success and failure of this very modern housing solution at a moment when high flats are simultaneously denigrated in the social housing sector while being built afresh in the private sector. Glasgow is aimed at an academic readership, including postgraduate students, scholars and researchers. It will be of interest to social, cultural and urban historians particularly interested in the United Kingdom.
In 1935, the Russian-born Jewish architect Berthold Lubetkin and his firm Tecton designed Highpoint, a block of flats in London, which Le Corbusier called 'revolutionary'. Three years later, Lubetkin completed a companion design. Yet Highpoint II felt very different, and the sense that the ideals of modernism had been abandoned seemed hard to dispute. Had modern architecture failed to take root in England? This book challenges the belief that English architecture was on hiatus during the 1930s. Using Highpoint II as a springboard, Deborah Lewittes takes us on a journey through the defining moments of modern English architecture - the 'high points' of the period surrounding Highpoint II. Drawing on Lubetkin's work and his writings, the book argues that he advanced influential, lasting theories which were rooted in his design for Highpoint II. Lubetkin's work is explored within the context of wider Jewish emigration to London during the interwar years as well as the anti-Semitism that pervaded Britain during the 1930s. As Lewittes demonstrates, this decade was anything but quiet. Providing a new perspective on twentieth-century English architecture, this book is of interest to students and scholars in architectural history, urban studies, Jewish studies, and related fields.
Examining the relationships between architecture, home and community in the Claremont Court housing scheme in Edinburgh, Home and Community provides a novel perspective on the enabling potential of architecture that encompasses physical, spatial, relational and temporal phenomena. Based on the AHRC funded project "Place and Belonging", the chapters draw on innovative spatial layouts amid Scottish policymakers' concerns of social change in the 1960s, to develop theoretical understandings between architecture, home, and community. By approaching the discourse on home, and by positioning the home at the confluence of a network of sociocultural identities bound by spatial awareness and design, the writers draw on sociological interpretations of cultural negotiation as well as theoretical underpinnings in architectural design. In so doing, they suggest a reinterpretation of the facilitating role of architecture as sensitive to physical and socio-cultural reconstruction. Drawn from interviews with residents, architectural surveys, contextual mapping and other visual methods, Home and Community explores home as a construct that is enmeshed with the architectural affordances that the housing scheme represents, that is useful to both architecture and sociology students, as well as practitioners and urban planners.
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.
Both architecture and anthropology emerged as autonomous theoretical disciplines in the 18th-century enlightenment. Throughout the 19th century, the fields shared a common icon-the primitive hut-and a common concern with both routine needs and ceremonial behaviours. Both could lay strong claims to a special knowledge of the everyday. And yet, in the 20th century, notwithstanding genre classics such as Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture without Architects or Paul Oliver's Shelter, and various attempts to make architecture anthropocentric (such as Corbusier's Modulor), disciplinary exchanges between architecture and anthropology were often disappointingly slight. This book attempts to locate the various points of departure that might be taken in a contemporary discussion between architecture and anthropology. The results are radical: post-colonial theory is here counterpoised to 19th-century theories of primitivism, archaeology is set against dentistry, fieldwork is juxtaposed against indigenous critique, and climate science is applied to questions of shelter. This publication will be of interest to both architects and anthropologists. The chapters in this book were originally published within two special issues of Architectural Theory Review.
The human body has been used as both a model and metaphor in architecture since antiquity. This book explores how it has been an inspiration for the exterior form of architectural colossi through the years. It considers the body as a source of architectural and artistic representation and in doing so explores the results of such practices in colossal sculptures and architectural praxis within a philosophical discourse of space, time and media. Architectural Colossi and the Human Body discusses the role of Platonic and Cartesian philosophy and how philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and theoreticians such as Frascari and Pallasmaa, have seen, described and analysed the human body and the role of architecture and perception. Drawing upon three key case studies and by employing theoretical ideas of Venturi and others, this book will provide an understanding of the role of anthromorphism and the relation and use of the human body with reference to selected architects and artists.
David Wang's Architecture and Sacrament considers architectural theory from a Christian theological perspective, specifically, the analogy of being (analogia entis). The book tracks social and cultural reasons why the theological literature tends to be separate from contemporary architecture theory. Wang argues that retrieval of the sacramental outlook embedded within the analogy of being, which informed centuries of art and architecture in the West, can shed light on current architectural issues such as "big box stores," the environmental crisis and the loss of sense of community. The book critiques the materialist basis of current architectural discourse, subsumed largely under the banner of critical theory. This volume on how European ideas inform architectural theory complements Wang's previous book, A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future, and will appeal to architecture students and academics, as well as those grappling with the philosophical moorings of all built environments.
Through a collection of 13 chapters, Peggy Deamer examines the profession of architecture not as an abstraction, but as an assemblage of architectural workers. What forces prevent architects from empowering ourselves to be more relevant and better rewarded? How can these forces be set aside by new narratives, new organizations and new methods of production? How can we sit at the decision-making table to combat short-term real estate interests for longer-term social and ethical value? How can we pull architecture-its conceptualization, its pedagogy, and its enactment-into the 21st century without succumbing to its neoliberal paradigm? In addressing these controversial questions, Architecture and Labor brings contemporary discourses on creative labor to architecture, a discipline devoid of labor consciousness. This book addresses how, not just what, architects produce and focuses not on the past but on the present. It is sympathetic to the particularly intimate way that architects approach their design work while contextualizing that work historically, institutionally, economically, and ideologically. Architecture and Labor is sure to be a compelling read for pre-professional students, academics, and practitioners. |
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