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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism explores the possible and potential relevance of Giorgio Agamben's political thoughts and writings for the theory and the practice of architecture and urban design. It sketches out the potentiality of Agamben's politics, which can affect change in current architectural and design discourses. The book investigates the possibility of an inoperative architecture, as an ethical shift for a different practice, just a little bit different, but able to deactivate the sociospatial dispositive and mobilize a new theory and a new project for the urban now to come. This particular reading from Agamben's oeuvre suggests a destituent mode of both thinking and practicing of architecture and urbanism that could possibly redeem them from their social emptiness, cultural irrelevance, economic reductionism and proto-avant-garde extravagance, contributing to a renewed critical 'encounter' with architecture's aesthetic-political function.
Every city has its unique and valuable identity, this identity is revealed through its physical and visual form, it is seen through the eyes of its residents and users. The city develops over time, and its identity evolves with it. Reflecting the rapid and constant changes the city is subjected to, Architecture and Arts, is the embodiment of the cultural, historical, and economical characteristics of the city. This conference was dedicated to the investigation of the different new approaches developed in Architecture and Contemporary arts. It has focused on the basis of urban life and identities. This volume provides discussions on the examples and tendencies in dealing with urban identities as well as the transformation of cities and urban cultures mentioned in terms of their form, identity, and their current art. Contemporary art, when subjected to experiments, continues to be produced in various directions, to be consumed and to put forward new ideas. Art continuously renews itself, from new materials to different means of communication, from interactive works to computer games, from new approaches to perceptional paradigms and problems of city and nature of the millennium. This is an Open Access ebook, and can be found on www.taylorfrancis.com.
As the commercialization of sport grows, the need for proper regulation increases. In legal terms, sport is part of the entertainment and media industries which are subject to rapid change. This work brings together experts in many fields to analyze these changes and to discuss the implications of issues such as the BSkyB-Manchester United case, civil and criminal actions on the playing field, the "Bosman" ruling, drugs in sport, the legality of boxing and the validity of decisions made by governing bodies. This collection should appeal to students of both sports history and sports sociology.
First published in 1988, this book argues that discussions of urban development often neglect to consider that much of the urban environment is designed by architects and planners, and that the particular world-view of architects and planners is crucial for the way proposals are taken up, modified and carried out. The author explores the world-view of architects and planners, considering their approach to design and the factors which influence this - work patterns, career paths and the firms in which they operate. The author also studies their place in the political decision-making process as it affects urban questions and then explores how architects and planners roles are changing.
While we all live our lives in designed landscapes of various types, only on occasion do we consider what these landscapes mean to us and how they have acquired that significance. Can a landscape architect or garden designer imbue new settings with meaning, or does meaning evolve over time, created by those who perceive and use these landscapes? What role does the selection and arrangement of plants and hard materials play in this process and just where does the passage of time enter the equation? These questions collectively provide the core material for Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, a compendium of four landmark essays written over a period of twenty years by leading scholars in the field of landscape architecture. New commentaries by the authors accompany each of the essays and reflect on the thinking behind them as well as the evolution of the author's thoughts since their original publication. Although the central theme of these writings is landscape architecture broadly taken, the principal subject of several essays and commentaries is the garden, a subject historically plentiful in allusions and metaphors. Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens offers the general reader as well as the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape and the ways by which we perceive, consider, react, and dwell within them - and what they mean to us. The essays have been perennial favorites in landscape courses since their original publication in Landscape Journal. Bringing them together - bolstered by the new commentaries - creates a book valuable to all those creating gardens and landscapes, as well as those teaching and studying these subjects.
Part-Architecture presents a detailed and original study of Pierre Chareau's Maison de Verre through another seminal modernist artwork, Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass. Aligning the two works materially, historically and conceptually, the book challenges the accepted architectural descriptions of the Maison de Verre, makes original spatial and social accounts of its inhabitation in 1930s Paris, and presents new architectural readings of the Large Glass. Through a rich analysis, which incorporates creative projects into history and theory research, the book establishes new ways of writing about architecture. Designed for politically progressive gynaecologist Dr Jean Dalsace and his avant-garde wife, Annie Dalsace, the Maison de Verre combines a family home with a gynaecology clinic into a 'free-plan' layout. Screened only by glass walls, the presence of the clinic in the home suggests an untold dialogue on 1930s sexuality. The text explores the Maison de Verre through another radical glass construction, the Large Glass, where Duchamp's complex depiction of unconsummated sexual relations across the glass planes reveals his resistance to the marital conventions of 1920s Paris. This and other analyses of the Large Glass are used as a framework to examine the Maison de Verre as a register of the changing history of women's domestic and maternal choices, reclaiming the building as a piece of female social architectural history. The process used to uncover and write the accounts in the book is termed 'part-architecture'. Derived from psychoanalytic theory, part-architecture fuses analytical, descriptive and creative processes, to produce a unique social and architectural critique. Identifying three essential materials to the Large Glass, the book has three main chapters: 'Glass', 'Dust' and 'Air'. Combining theory text, creative writing and drawing, each traces the history and meaning of the material and its contribution to the spaces and sexuality of the Large Glass and the Maison de Verre. As a whole, the book contributes important and unique spatial readings to existing scholarship and expands definitions of architectural design and history.
The introduction of iron - and later steel - construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart - for the first time - the global reach of iron's architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture's traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism's supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.
Geographical Aesthetics places the terms 'aesthetics' and 'geography' under critical question together, responding both to the increasing calls from within geography to develop a 'geographical aesthetics', and a resurgence of interdisciplinary interest in conceptual and empirical questions around geoaesthetics, environmental aesthetics, as well as the spatialities of the aesthetic. Despite taking up an identifiable role within the geographical imagination and sensibilities for centuries, and having what is arguably a key place in the making of the modern discipline, aesthetics remains a relatively under-theorized field within geography. Across 15 chapters Geographical Aesthetics brings together timely commentaries by international, interdisciplinary scholars to rework historical relations between geography and aesthetics, and reconsider how it is we might understand aesthetics. In renewing aesthetics as a site of investigation, but also an analytic object through which we can think about worldly encounters, Geographical Aesthetics presents a reworking of our geographical imaginary of the aesthetic.
Providing a critique of the concepts attached to the representation of urban space, this ground-breaking book formulates a new theory of space, which understands the dynamic interrelations between physical and social spaces while tracing the wider urban context. It offers a new tool to approach the reading of these interrelations through reflexive reading strategies that identify singular reading fragments of the different spaces through multiple reader-time-space relations. The strategies proposed in the volume seek to develop an integrative reading of urban space through recognition of the singular (influenced by discourse, institution, etc.); and temporal (influenced by reading perspective in space and time), thereby providing a relational perspective that goes beyond the paradox of place in between social and physical space, identifying each in terms of relationships oscillating between the conceptual, the physical and social content, and the context. In conclusion, the book suggests that space/place can be read through sequential fragments of people, place, context, mind, and author/reader. Operating at different scales between conceptual space and reality, the sequential reading helps the recognition of multiplicity and the dynamics of place as a transformational process without hierarchy or classification.
First published in 1991, this book is about applications and issues relating to the visual environment. The content pertains to the understanding of human behaviour in the environment by recording behaviour and actions or by direct interaction with people. The author examines research and planning methods that primarily stress the visual features of the physical environment. Traditionally, environmental research has relied on verbal descriptions and perceptions of the physical environment, virtually ignoring the visual component and the potential application of the social sciences for gathering this data. Various strategies that can expand the visual information base have been explored here: diagramming, photo-interviewing, photo-sorting, mapping, notation, simulation, videotaping, and CADD.
This collection focuses on how architectural material is transformed, revised, swallowed whole, plagiarized, or in any other way appropriated. It charts new territory within this still unexplored yet highly topical area of study by establishing a shared vocabulary with which to discuss, or contest, the workings of appropriation as a vital and progressive aspect of architectural discourse. Written by a group of rising scholars in the field of architectural history and criticism, the chapters cover a range of architectural subjects that are linked in their investigations of how architects engage with their predecessors.
First published in 1977, this volume was intended as a sourcebook for designers and attempts to specify the ingredients necessary to develop a design program rather than postulate a model program for which no consensus exists. As such it filled a void in the existing literature which seldom covered programming with much depth and provides technical aids to guide designers. The author attempts to integrate the pioneering contributions from others in order to identify the substance of programming for designers and represents a culling of the strategies and techniques from the social, behavioural and management sciences - building on the developing efforts of other disciplines.
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
Phenomenologies of the City: Studies in the History and Philosophy of Architecture brings architecture and urbanism into dialogue with phenomenology. Phenomenology has informed debate about the city from social sciences to cultural studies. Within architecture, however, phenomenological inquiry has been neglecting the question of the city. Addressing this lacuna, this book suggests that the city presents not only the richest, but also the politically most urgent horizon of reference for philosophical reflection on the cultural and ethical dimensions of architecture. The contributors to this volume are architects and scholars of urbanism. Some have backgrounds in literature, history, religious studies, and art history. The book features 16 chapters by younger scholars as well as established thinkers including Peter Carl, David Leatherbarrow, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Wendy Pullan and Dalibor Vesely. Rather than developing a single theoretical statement, the book addresses architecture's relationship with the city in a wide range of historical and contemporary contexts. The chapters trace hidden genealogies, and explore the ruptures as much as the persistence of recurrent cultural motifs. Together, these interconnected phenomenologies of the city raise simple but fundamental questions: What is the city for, how is it ordered, and how can it be understood? The book does not advocate a return to a naive sense of 'unity' or 'order'. Rather, it investigates how architecture can generate meaning and forge as well as contest social and cultural representations. |
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