Writing the Materialities of the Past offers a close analysis of how the materiality of the built environment has been repressed in historical thinking since the 1950s. Author Sam Griffiths argues that the social theory of cities in this period was characterised by the dominance of socio-economic and linguistic-cultural models, which served to impede our understanding of time-space relationality towards historical events and their narration. The book engages with studies of historical writing to discuss materiality in the built environment as a form of literary practice to express marginalised dimensions of social experience in a range of historical contexts. It then moves on to reflect on England's nineteenth-century industrialization from an architectural topographical perspective, challenging theories of space and architecture to examine the complex role of industrial cities in mediating social changes in the practice of everyday life. By demonstrating how the authenticity of historical accounts rests on materially emplaced narratives, Griffiths makes the case for the emancipatory possibilities of historical writing. He calls for a re-evaluation of historical epistemology as a primarily socio-scientific or literary enquiry and instead proposes a specifically architectural time-space figuration of historical events to rethink and refresh the relationship of the urban past to its present and future. Written for postgraduate students, researchers and academics in architectural theory and urban studies, Griffiths draws on the space syntax tradition of research to explore how contingencies of movement and encounter construct the historical imagination.

Literary texts and buildings have always represented space, narrated cultural and political values, and functioned as sites of personal and collective identity. In the twentieth century, new forms of narrative have represented cultural modernity, political idealism and architectural innovation. Writing the Modern City explores the diverse and fascinating relationships between literature, architecture and modernity and considers how they have shaped the world today.

This collection of thirteen original essays examines the ways in which literature and architecture have shaped a range of recognisably modern identities. It focuses on the cultural connections between prose narratives the novel, short stories, autobiography, crime and science fiction and a range of urban environments, from the city apartment and river to the colonial house and the utopian city. It explores how the themes of memory, nation and identity have been represented in both literary and architectural works in the aftermath of early twentieth-century conflict; how the cultural movements of modernism and postmodernism have affected notions of canonicity and genre in the creation of books and buildings; and how and why literary and architectural narratives are influenced by each other s formal properties and styles.

The book breaks new ground in its exclusive focus on modern narrative and urban space. The essays examine texts and spaces that have both unsettled traditional definitions of literature and architecture and reflected and shaped modern identities: sexual, domestic, professional and national. It is essential reading for students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, cultural geography, art history and architectural history.

Architecture for a Free Subjectivity reformulates the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's model of subjectivity for architecture, by surveying the prolific effects of architectural encounter, and the spaces that figure in them. For Deleuze and his Lacanian collaborator Felix Guattari, subjectivity does not refer to a person, but to the potential for and event of matter becoming subject, and the myriad ways for this to take place. By extension, this book theorizes architecture as a self-actuating or creative agency for the liberation of purely "impersonal effects." Imagine a chemical reaction, a riot in the banlieues, indeed a walk through a city. Simone Brott declares that the architectural object does not merely take part in the production of subjectivity, but that it constitutes its own. This book is to date the only attempt to develop Deleuze's philosophy of subjectivity in singularly architectural terms. Through a screening of modern and postmodern, American and European works, this provocative volume draws the reader into a close encounter with architectural interiors, film scenes, and other arrangements, while interrogating the discourses of subjectivity surrounding them, and the evacuation of the subject in the contemporary discussion. The impersonal effects of architecture radically changes the methodology, just as it reimagines architectural subjectivity for the twenty-first century.

Affect, Architecture, and Practice builds on and contributes to work in theories of affect that have risen within diverse disciplines, including geography, cultural studies, and media studies, challenging the nature of textual and representational-based research. Although numerous studies have examined how affect emerges in architectural spaces, little attention has been paid to the creative process of architectural design and the role that affect plays in the many contingencies and uncertainties that arise in the process. The book traces the critical, philosophic, and architectural theories to examine how affect, architecture, and practice are interlinked. Through a series of conversations and reflections, it examines three key contemporary architects, their practices and projects, all within a single coherent theme. Reiser + Umemoto (RUR Architecture DPC), USA, Kerstin Thompson Architects, Australia, and Shigeru Ban Architects, Japan, are critically studied through the lens of different aspects of practice, namely image-making, the design process, and the making of an everyday object/material. Through this investigation, author Akari Nakai Kidd demonstrates how affect theory allows a critical interrogation of the in-betweens of practice, its liminality and limits. It questions the stability of objects, the smooth temporality of practice, and its often under-conceptualised non-human dimensions. More significantly, the book demonstrates architectural practice's contribution to the reconceptualisation of theories of affect.

Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of Post-Structuralism and New Materialism. It investigates how their unique 'ontological regimes' can be mobilised to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture. Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three idealised concepts, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel DeLanda's model-based branch of New Materialism. This book reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural 'value'. It posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations. Written for academics and students in architectural theory, design and contemporary philosophical thought alike, this book should appeal to a wide audience.

This book studies six vaulting techniques employed in architecture outside of Rome and asks why they were invented where they were and how they were disseminated. Most of the techniques involve terracotta elements in various forms, such as regular flat bricks, hollow voussoirs, vaulting tubes, and armchair voussoirs. Each one is traced geographically via GIS mapping, the results of which are analysed in relation to chronology, geography, and historical context. The most common building type in which the techniques appear is the bath, demonstrating its importance as a catalyst for technological innovation. This book also explores trade networks, the pottery industry, and military movements in relation to building construction, revealing how architectural innovation was influenced by wide ranging cultural factors, many of which stemmed from local influences rather than imperial intervention. Additional resources including extensive searchable databases with bibliographical data and colour illustrations available at www.cambridge.org/vaulting.

Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.

Since its beginnings, tourism has inspired built environments that have suggested reinvented relationships with their original architectural inspirations. Copies, reinterpretations, and simulacra still constitute some of the most familiar and popular tourist attractions in the world. Some reinterpret archetypes such as the ancient palace, the Renaissance villa, or the Mediterranean village. Others duplicate the cities in which we lived in the past or we still live today. And others realise perceptions of utopias such as Shangri-La, Eden, or Paradise. Replicas - duplitecture - and simulacra can have symbolic meaning for tourists, as merely inspiring an atmosphere or as truly authentic, and their relationship to original functions, for worship, accommodation, leisure, or shopping. Tourism and Architectural Simulacra questions and rethinks the different environments constructed or adapted both for and by tourism exploring the relationship between the architectural inspiration and its reproduction within the tourist bubble. The wide range of geographical areas, eras, and subjects in this book show that the expositions of simulacra and hyper reality by Baudrillard, Deleuze, and Eco are surpassed by our complex world. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach they offer original insights of the complex relationship between tourism and architecture. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.

The 1960s and the 1970s marked a generational shift in architectural discourse at a time when the revolts inside universities condemned the academic institution as a major force behind the perpetuation of a controlling society. Focusing on the crisis and reform of higher education in Italy, The University as a Settlement Principle investigates how university design became a lens for architects to interpret a complex historical moment that was marked by the construction of an unprecedented number of new campuses worldwide. Implicitly drawing parallels with the contemporary condition of the university under a regime of knowledge commodification, it reviews the vision proposed by architects such as Vittorio Gregotti, Giuseppe Samona, Archizoom, Giancarlo De Carlo, and Guido Canella, among others, to challenge the university as a bureaucratic and self-contained entity, and defend, instead, the role of higher education as an agent for restructuring vast territories. Through their projects, the book discusses a most fertile and heroic moment of Italian architectural discourse and argues for a reconsideration of architecture's obligation to question the status quo. This work will be of interest to postgraduate researchers and academics in architectural theory and history, campus design, planning theory, and history.

Gordon Strachan, author of Jesus the Master Builder (Floris Books) explores the magnificent structure of Chartres Cathedral, and examines the influences on the medieval master builders. Using Chartres as a starting point, Dr Strachan suggests that the origins of the Gothic style may lie in Islamic architecture. He goes on to consider how the experience of a particular architectural space affects us, and how sacred geometry works. Beautifully illustrated, this is an inspiring and informative book for anyone interested in religious architecture and spirituality.

Looking afresh at the implications of Jacques Derrida 's thinking for architecture, this book simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. Derrida 's treatment of key philosophical texts has been labelled as "deconstruction," a term that resonates with architecture. Although his main focus is language, his thinking has been applied by architectural theorists widely.

As well as a review of Derrida 's interaction with architecture, this book is also a careful consideration of the implications of his thinking, particularly on the way architecture is practiced.

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.

The Semiotics of Movement in Space explores how people move through buildings and interact with objects in space. Focusing on visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, McMurtrie analyses and interprets movement and space relations to highlight new developments and applications of spatial semiotics as he proposes that people's movement options have the potential to transform the meaning of a particular space. He illustrates people's interaction with microcamera footage of people's movement through the museum from a first-person point of view, thereby providing an alternative, complementary perspective on how buildings are actually used. The book offers effective tools for practitioners to analyse people's actual and potential movement patterns to rethink spatial design options from a semiotic perspective. The applicability of the semiotic principles developed in this book is demonstrated by examining movement options in a restaurant and a cafe, with the hope that the principles can be developed and applied to other sites of displays such as shopping centres and transportation hubs. This book should appeal to scholars of visual communication, semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and visitor studies.

Walter Benjamin has become a decisive reference point for a whole range of critical disciplines, as he constructed a unique and provocative synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy.

Examining Benjamina (TM)s contributions to cultural criticism in relation to the works of Max Ernst, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, this book also situates Benjamina (TM)s work within more recent developments in architecture and urbanism.

This is a concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamina (TM)s writings to architects, locating Benjamina (TM)s critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as 'mass art', they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing 'mass art'. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture. Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an 'expert critic' who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as 'mass art' and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only 'artform' that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.

Walter Benjamin has become a decisive reference point for a whole range of critical disciplines, as he constructed a unique and provocative synthesis of aesthetics, politics and philosophy. Examining Benjamin's contributions to cultural criticism in relation to the works of Max Ernst, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion, this book also situates Benjamin's work within more recent developments in architecture and urbanism. This is a concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamin's writings to architects, locating Benjamin's critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

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

Architecture is a Verb outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice in several important ways. First, it acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment. Second, it understands human action in terms of radical embodiment-grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition: imagining, thinking, remembering-in the body. Third, it asks what a building does-that is, extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, how they shape thought and action. Finally, it is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human/building interactions. Written in engaging prose for students of architecture, interiors and urban design, as well as practicing professionals, Sarah Robinson offers richly illustrated practical examples for a new generation of designers.

Existentialism; Urbanism; Aporia; Deontic; Tabula Rasa; Hyperspace; Heterotopia; Metareality; Structuralisma ]

What does it all mean?

The unique language used in architectural theory, in either speech or writing, can appear daunting and confusing, particularly to new architectural students.

• Definitions of over 200 terms
• Clearly cross-referenced
• Illustrated throughout

Decoding Theoryspeak provides an accessible guide to the specialized language of contemporary design for the next generation of thinkers, architects and design leaders. An essential pocket-sized resource for students and practitioners alike.

Recently there has been a plethora of work published on the topic of sustainability, much of which is purely theoretical or technical in its approach. More often than not these books fail to introduce readers to the larger challenge of what thinking sustainably might entail. Combining a series of well know authors in contemporary philosophy with established practitioners of sustainable design, this book develops a coherent theoretical framework for how theories of sustainability might engage with the growing practice of design. This book: brings together new and emerging perspectives on sustainability provides cohesive and jargon-free reading articulates the specificity of both theory and practice, to develop a symbiotic relationship which allows the reader to understand what thinking sustainably entails This volume describes a variety of new ways to approach sustainable design and it equips the next generation of designers with necessary conceptual tools for thinking sustainably.

This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the architecture of the apartheid state in the period of rapid economic growth and political repression from 1957 to 1966 when buildings took on an ideological role that was never remote from the increasingly dominant administrative, legislative and policing mechanisms of the regime. It considers how this process reflected the usurpation of a regional modernism and looks to contribute to wider discourses on international postwar modernism in architecture. Buildings in Pretoria that came to embody ambitions of the apartheid state for industrialisation and progress serve as case studies. These were widely acclaimed projects that embodied for apartheid officials the pursuit of modernisation but carried latent apprehensions of Afrikaners about their growing economic prospects and cultural estrangement in Africa. It is a less known and marginal story due to the dearth of material and documents buried in archives and untranslated documents. Many of the documents, drawings and photographs in the book are unpublished and include classified material and photographs from the National Nuclear Research Centre, negatives of 1960s from Pretoria News and documents and pamphlets from Afrikaner Broederbond archives. State architecture became the most iconic public manifestation of an evolving expression of white cultural identity as a new generation of architects in Pretoria took up the challenge of finding form to their prospects and beliefs. It was an opportunistic faith in Afrikaners who urgently needed to entrench their vulnerable and contested position on the African continent. The shift from provincial town to apartheid capital was swift and relentless. Little was left to stand in the way of the ambitions and aim of the state as people were uprooted and forcibly relocated, structures torn down and block upon block of administration towers and slabs erected across Pretoria. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of architectural history as well as those with an interest in postcolonial studies, political science and social anthropology.

Pierre Bourdieu is arguably one of the twentieth century's greatest socio-philosophical thinkers and his writings have much to offer anyone interested in the ways that people value, consume and produce architecture. Bourdieu spent much of his life attempting to understand cultural consumption and production through detailed empirical research that included studies of dwellings, art, museums, photography and aesthetics. This book introduces the architectural reader to Bourdieu's key writings on culture and outlines the ways in which they offer powerful practical tools and novel conceptual frameworks for understanding architectural value, taste, and practice.

First published in 2009, Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism is a detailed round of pedagogical dialogue on architecture and urbanism that reset the stage for debating future visions of transformative pedagogy and its impact on design education. Structured in five chapters the book presents a wide range of innovative concepts and practical methodologies for teaching architectural and urban design. It traces the roots of architectural education and offers several contrasting ideas and strategies of design teaching practices. Transformative Pedagogy in Architecture and Urbanism will appeal to those with an interest in architectural and urban design, and architectural and design education.

Architecture's role is becoming increasingly limited to serving the all-pervasive system of globalised capitalism and becoming a constituent, complicit part of its mechanism. The Resistant Object of Architecture addresses this problem, and does so in a way that represents a marked departure from predominant responses which, as the book shows, do not address the core issue. The book addresses this problem by focusing on the question "what is architecture?," and responds to this question by developing the immanent structural logic of architecture that enables it to work not only as an instrumental thinking practice, but as a practice of creative thinking. This means that it alone determines its issues, problems, and priorities, and precisely because of that it has the capacity and cogency to destabilise, indeed pierce holes in the system in which it operates. The Resistant Object of Architecture draws on various theoretical sources, from the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the philosophy of Alain Badiou, to contemporary architectural theory. In contrast to the predominant view of today, it demonstrates that architecture has an affirmative, transformative capacity. This book is an ideal read for those interested in architectural theory and history, analysis of contemporary architecture, and philosophy of architecture.

This book examines the theoretical foundations of the processes of planning and design.

When peoplea "alone or in groupsa "want to solve problems or improve their situation, they make plans. Horst Rittel studied this process of making plans and he developed theoriesa "including his notion of "wicked problems"a "that are used in many fields today. From product design, architecture and planninga "where Rittela (TM)s work was originally developeda "to governmental agencies, business schools and software design, Rittela (TM)s ideas are being used. This book collects previously unavailable work of Rittela (TM)s within the framework of a discussion of Rittela (TM)s theories and philosophical influences.