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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
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.
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.
- Presents the basics of design practice through twelve real-life ethical scenarios - Provides professional resources in solving the dilemma from several perspectives followed by discussion questions and suggested additional resources - Includes practiceâ€based topics such as contracts and project delivery methods and soft skills such as effective communication - Encourages architecture and design students to become ethical professionals ready to contribute effectively to design teams and to ask the right questions
This volume reframes the development of US-American avant-garde art of the long 1960s—from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art—in the context of contemporary architectural discourses. Susanneh Bieber analyzes the work of seven major artists, Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, who were closely associated with the formal-aesthetic innovations of the period. While these individual artists came to represent diverse movements, Bieber argues that all of them were attracted to the field of architecture—the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because they believed these practices more directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book’s contribution to the field of art history is thus twofold. First, it shows that the avant-garde of the long 1960s did not simply develop according to an internal logic of art but also as part of broader sociocultural discourses about buildings and cities. Second, it exemplifies a methodological synthesis between social art history and poststructural formalism that is foundational to understanding the role of art in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architecture, urbanism, and environmental humanism.
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.
More than ever, architecture is in need of provocation, a new path beyond the traditional notion that buildings must serve as vessels, or symbols of something outside themselves. Non-Referential Architecture is nothing less than a manifesto for a new architecture. It brings together two leading thinkers, architect Valerio Olgiati and theorist Markus Breitschmid, who have grappled with this problem since their first encounter in 2005. In a world that itself increasingly rejects ideologies of any kind, Olgiati and Breitschmid offer Non-Referential Architecture as a radical, new approach free from rigid ideologies. Non-referential buildings, they argue, are entities that are themselves meaningful outside a vocabulary of fixed symbols and images and their historical connotations. For more than a decade, Olgiati and Breitschmid's thinking has placed them at the forefront of architectural theory. Indispensable for understanding what the future might hold for architecture, Non-Referential Architecture will become a new classic. The book's first edition, published in May 2018 by Simonett & Baer, was sold-out within months. This revised and slightly redesigned new edition makes this key text available again.
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.
The theory of buildings was introduced by J Tits in order to focus on geometric and combinatorial aspects of simple groups of Lie type. Since then the theory has blossomed into an extremely active field of mathematical research having deep connections with topics as diverse as algebraic groups, arithmetic groups, finite simple groups, and finite geometries, as well as with graph theory and other aspects of combinatorics. This volume is an up-to-date survey of the theory of buildings with special emphasis on its interaction with related geometries. As such it will be an invaluable guide to all those whose research touches on these themes. The articles presented here are by experts in their respective fields and are based on talks given at the 1988 Buildings and Related Geometries conference at Pingree Park, Colorado. Topics covered include the classification and construction of buildings, finite groups associated with building-like geometries, graphs and association schemes.
• Examines architecture that tie water, as a physical and symbolic property, with the sacred • All chapters are based on original archival studies, historical documents, and field visits to the sites and buildings • A stellar group of scholars and practitioners from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa • Includes 173 black and white illustrations
• Examines architecture that tie water, as a physical and symbolic property, with the sacred • All chapters are based on original archival studies, historical documents, and field visits to the sites and buildings • A stellar group of scholars and practitioners from the US, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa • Includes 173 black and white illustrations
This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Loenberg- Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Loenberg- Holm's ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting.
This book investigates the architectural history of China in the Mao era (1949–1976), focusing on the rise of modernism in the last seven years of the Cultural Revolution from 1969 to 1976. It highlights the new architecture of this period, exemplified by three clusters of buildings for foreign affairs, namely buildings for foreign diplomacy in Beijing, buildings for foreign trade in Guangzhou and China’s foreign aid projects overseas. The emergence of new architecture in the early 1970s is closely associated with China’s political and diplomatic shift of the time, from a radical emphasis on ideological struggle to a dynamic balance between leftist ideology and pragmatic concerns. In this context, China’s relations with the West quickly improved, culminating with American president Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The increasing foreign affairs brought new opportunities to Chinese architects who referenced both Western modernism and Chinese architectural traditions to create a new version of Chinese modernism. The book brings dimensions of form, politics and knowledge to the analysis of architecture, to construct an understanding of architectural design as an aesthetic, political and intellectual practice. Modernism in Late-Mao China will be an enriching and useful reference for students and scholars who are interested in the global architectural history of the twentieth century, especially Cold War modernism.
Trajectories in Architecture: Plan, Sensation, Temporality presents a compelling examination of underlying issues in late twentieth century architecture. Three formal preoccupations and conceptual orientations are used as guiding threads or trajectories. These three trajectories - the plan as conceptual device, a logic of sensation, and temporalities - serve to organise individual chapters in the central sections of the book and provide a new lens to the study of period work, revealing architectural conditions and consequent spatial effects little explored to date. Trajectories in Architecture adds to scholarship and expands our understanding of the role of conceptual and formal criteria in the analysis and creation of works of architecture. The book provides potentially transformative new interpretations of influential architects and key projects from the last half of the twentieth century to reveal new alignments and potentialities in architecture's recent past as a contribution to identifying future possibilities. In so doing the book argues for the still latent potential in modern architecture's traditions and design principles and their future expression. Trajectories in Architecture includes analysis of significant projects of Le Corbusier, Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, John Hejduk, Louis I. Kahn, and I. M. Pei.
Provides an index of ideas, theories, projects, and definitions that string into a methodology for evaluating the contemporary language of architecture. Beautifully designed with text and image spreads, it includes over 160 full colour illustrations. Includes interviews and contributions from Toyo Ito, Anthony Vidler, Ben van Berkel, Sou Fujimoto, Christian Kerez and Greg Lynn.
The Spatialities of Radio Astronomy examines the multidisciplinary overlap between the spatial disciplines and the studies of science and technology through a comparative study of four of the world’s most important radio telescopes. Employing detailed analysis, historical research, interviews, personal observations, and various conceptual manoeuvres, Guy Trangoš reveals the depth of spatial process active at these scientific sites and the territories they traverse. Through the conceptual frameworks of territory, hyper-concentration, and contingency, Trangoš interprets the telescope as exploded across space and time, present in multiple connected sites simultaneously, and active in the production of space. He develops a historiographic and contemporary analysis of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA, Chile); the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST, China); the Arecibo Observatory (Puerto Rico); and the MeerKAT/SKA (South Africa). These case studies are global exemplars of the different spatial transformations that occur through science. Their relationships to surrounding communities and landscapes reveal deeper constitutional processes embodied in each institutional and spatial form. This book spans the modern history of architecture and science, the studies of science, technology and society, and urban theory. It is of specific interest to architects and designers expanding their analysis of spatial production, scholars in the study of geography, landscape, science, technology, and astronomy, and people fascinated with how these radio telescopes were conceptualised, built, and operate today.
The Architect's Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture is the first book to consider the relationship between the neurosciences and architecture, offering a compelling and provocative study in the field of architectural theory. * Explores various moments of architectural thought over the last 500 years as a cognitive manifestation of philosophical, psychological, and physiological theory * Looks at architectural thought through the lens of the remarkable insights of contemporary neuroscience, particularly as they have advanced within the last decade * Demonstrates the neurological justification for some very timeless architectural ideas, from the multisensory nature of the architectural experience to the essential relationship of ambiguity and metaphor to creative thinking
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.
Presents the work of Bryan Cantley who is an influential architect and artist working at the edge of architectural representation. Includes full colour illustrations in a special graphic package. Includes essays from leading architectural practitioners and theorists such as Nat Chard, Dora Epstein-Jones, Wes Jones, Bob Sheil, Martin Summers, Laura Allen and Deborah Ryan.
This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history, and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth-century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism's infinite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, even ontological/aesthetic 'networks'. What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of AI networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical; from studies of the history of modernity to reflections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth century naturphilosophie, this project focuses in probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post' pandemic constellation of neo-naturalism in design, climate change, complex systems and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.
This book offers a detailed insight into the desire for, and consequences of, precise communications in the daily life of contemporary architectural practice through close readings of constructed architectural details by Sigurd Lewerentz, Caruso St John Architects, Mies van der Rohe and OMA. In the professionalised context of the contemporary architectural profession, precise communications - drawings, specifications, letters, faxes and emails - are charged with the complex task of translating architectural intent into a neutral and quantifiable language which is expected to guarantee an exact match between the architects' intentions and the constructed result. Yet, as any architectural practitioner will know, it is doubtful whether the construction of any architectural project may ever exactly match all written and drawn predictions. This book challenges claims to certainty which have been attributed to such communications from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and critiques ongoing expectations of certainty in contemporary architectural production.
Cognition and the Built Environment argues that interacting with our built environment, as users and as architects, is a cognitive process. It claims that architecture, in its form and meaning, is a basic, embodied level of human cognition. The assumption is that we and our built environment together form an intelligent system, a cognitive feedback loop between us and the world of which we are part. With this as a vantage point, the book discusses the meaning and intelligence of concrete architectural environments as well as the agency of the architect, of his client and of the user. The inquiry oscillates between abstract thought, topological models and cognitive semiotics, between pragmatist philosophy and the professional practice of planning cities, developing projects and using objects. Architecture serves more complex purposes than our caves, paths and landmarks did. Written for students and academics of urban design, urban planning and architectural theory, Cognition and the Built Environment argues that human cognition feeds on the interaction between thought, agency and built environment, and that architecture is the spatial form of this interaction.
Ideas gain legitimacy as they are put to some practical use. A study of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) supports this pragmatism as a way of thinking about truth and meaning. Architecture has a strong pragmatic strand, not least as we think of building users, architecture as a practice, the practical demands of building, and utility. After all, Vitruvius placed firmness and delight in the company of utilitas amongst his demands on architecture. Peirce (pronounced 'purse') was a logician, and so many of his ideas are couched in terms of formal propositions and their limitations. His work appeals therefore to many architects grappling with the digital age, and references to his work cropped up in the Design Methods Movement that developed and grew from the 1950s. That movement sought to systematise the design process, contributing to the idea of the RIBA Plan of Work, computer-aided design, and various controversies about rendering the design process transparent and open to scrutiny. Peirce's commitment to logic led him to investigate the basic elements of logical statements, notably the element of the sign. His best-known contribution to design revolves around his intricate theory of semiotics, the science of signs. The study of semiotics divided around the 1980s between advocates of Peirce's semiotics, and the broader, more politically charged field of structuralism. The latter has held sway in architectural discourse since the 1980s. Why this happened and what we gain by reviving a Peircean semiotics is the task of this book.
The architectures of capitalist development's present phase manifest themselves through a very diverse range of episodes: data centers, warehouses, container terminals, logistics parks. Generally considered as mediocre and banal examples that sit outside of pre-established disciplinary canons, these artifacts are extremely relevant. They are relevant not for their formal or historic qualities, but for what they represent - for the implicit system of values they embed. They express specific power relations, exacerbate issues of labor, and generate processes of subjectivity. Most importantly, these architectures, despite their formal and typological diversity, share a common ground. They depict a sort of inner and extended paradigm: the EXTERIORLESS. How can an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS be defined? How does it differentiate from examples and manifestations of the past? How do notions of legibility, form vs. function, typological articulation, come into play? In situating the architectures of contemporary capitalism within the larger debate on Anthropocene, Post- Anthropocene and Capitalocene, this book attempts to answer those questions by delineating three main characteristics for an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS: its physical and symbolic role as interface; its ambiguous condition of being at the same time local and global, isolated and connected, compressed and expanded; and, lastly, its contribution to new forms of urbanity in absence of the traditional city. These three aspects-Interface, Expanded Domains, and New Forms of Urbanity-constitute the three main sections of the book. Each section includes two chapters and examines one specific aspect of the EXTERIORLESS paradigm. Defining its three main characteristics, this book covers a wide spectrum of themes and examples. It describes the influence that the experimental architecture of the 1960s has exerted on late-capitalist spatial products; it analyzes the impact of logistics on the redesign of the territory; it introduces new forms of global urbanity generated by the EXTERIORLESS. Written for students and scholars of architectural history, theory and criticism, Stefano Corbo contextualizes the concept of EXTERIORLESS and its role in contemporary architecture, its obedience to macro-economic dynamics, and its possible future. |
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