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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
Acculturating the Shopping Centre examines whether the shopping centre should be qualified as a global architectural type that effortlessly moves across national and cultural borders in the slipstream of neo-liberal globalization, or should instead be understood as a geographically and temporally bound expression of negotiations between mall developers (representatives of a global logic of capitalist accumulation) on the one hand, and local actors (architects/governments/citizens) on the other. It explores how the shopping centre adapts to new cultural contexts, and questions whether this commercial type has the capacity to disrupt or even amend the conditions that it encounters. Including more than 50 illustrations, this book considers the evolving architecture of shopping centres. It would be beneficial to academics and students across a number of areas such as architecture, urban design, cultural geography and sociology.
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.
In 1859, Dubliners strolling along country roads witnessed something new emerging from the green fields. The Victorian house had arrived: wide red brick structures stood back behind manicured front lawns. Over the next forty years, an estimated 35,000 of these homes were constructed in the fields surrounding the city. The most elaborate were built for Dublin's upper middle classes, distinguished by their granite staircases and decorative entrances. Today, they are some of the Irish capital's most highly valued structures, and are protected under strict conservation laws. Dublin's Bourgeois Homes is the first in-depth analysis of the city's upper middle-class houses. Focusing on the work of three entrepreneurial developers, Susan Galavan follows in their footsteps as they speculated in house building: signing leases, acquiring plots and sourcing bricks and mortar. She analyses a select range of homes in three different districts: Ballsbridge, Rathgar and Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), exploring their architectural characteristics: from external form to plan type, and detailing of materials. Using measured surveys, photographs, and contemporary drawings and maps, she shows how house design evolved over time, as bay windows pushed through facades and new lines of coloured brick were introduced. Taking the reader behind the facades into the interiors, she shows how domestic space reflected the lifestyle and aspirations of the Victorian middle classes. This analysis of the planning, design and execution of Dublin's bourgeois homes is an original contribution to the history of an important city in the British Empire.
Rethinking Basic Design in Architectural Education provides historical and computational insights into beginning design education for architecture. Inviting the readers to briefly forget what is commonly known as basic design, it delivers the account of two educators, Denman W. Ross and Arthur W. Dow, from the turn of the twentieth century in Northeast America, interpreting key aspects of their methodology for teaching foundations for design and art. This alternate intellectual context for the origins of basic design as a precursor to computational design complements the more haptic, more customized, and more open-source design and fabrication technologies today. Basic design described and illustrated here as a form of low-tech computation offers a setting for the beginning designer to consciously experience what it means to design. Individualized dealings with materials, tools, and analytical techniques foster skills and attitudes relevant to creative and technologically adept designers. The book is a timely contribution to the theory and methods of beginning design education when fast-changing design and production technology demands change in architecture schools' foundations curricula.
Architectures of Transversality investigates the relationship between modernity, space, power, and culture in Iran. Focusing on Paul Klee's Persian-inspired miniature series and Louis Kahn's unbuilt blueprint for a democratic public space in Tehran, it traces the architectonics of the present as a way of moving beyond universalist and nationalist accounts of modernism. Transversality is a form of spatial production and practice that addresses the three important questions of the self, objects, and power. Using Deleuzian and Heideggerian theory, the book introduces the practices of Klee and Kahn as transversal spatial responses to the dialectical tension between existential and political territories and, in doing so, situates the history of the silent, unrepresented and the unbuilt - constructed from the works of Klee and Kahn - as a possible solution to the crisis of modernity and identity-based politics in Iran.
This collection unravels the stereotypical images of gender and
space and presents a series of new explorations into both lived and
imagined spaces. Through a range of international examples,
including discussions of Jamaican Ragga music and female
performance, lesbian identity and community in San Francisco, and
portraits of a Los Angeles neighborhood seen through the eyes of
young girls, this book forges new parameters for debates of gender
and space, leaving behind the simple focus on women-as-victim in
the public arena.
This collection unravels the stereotypical images of gender and
space and presents a series of new explorations into both lived and
imagined spaces. Through a range of international examples,
including discussions of Jamaican Ragga music and female
performance, lesbian identity and community in San Francisco, and
portraits of a Los Angeles neighborhood seen through the eyes of
young girls, this book forges new parameters for debates of gender
and space, leaving behind the simple focus on women-as-victim in
the public arena.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First published in 2007, this book examines the designs of seventeen architecture and design schools and answers questions such as: How has architectural education evolved and what is its future? Are architectural schools discernible types of designs and what are their effects on those who experience them? What lessons can be learned from evaluations of recently completed school buildings and what guidance do they provide for the design of future ones? Included in the multiple approaches to evaluation are examinations of the history of architectural education and building form; typologies of school for architecture; and the systematic user evaluations of the aesthetics, function, and technology which reveal the strengths to encourage and weaknesses to avoid in future designs. While offering specific guidelines for schools of design, it also includes findings that extend beyond the walls of design schools and can be applied to everything from the interiors of educational and campus buildings to planning offices and gathering places to build communities. This book will make readers more aware of problems in architectural interiors and suggest ways to make interiors work better for the building occupants.
As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by Utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become 'Smart' because we want them to. This book opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smartphones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveals them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a 'spatial turn' of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, this book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed.
This text brings together a collection of writing by a leading researcher and critic which outlines the evolution of the environmental dimension of architectural theory and practice since the 1970s. It deals with the transformation of the environmental design field which was brought about by the growth of energy awareness in the 1970s and 1980s, and places environmental issues in the broader theoretical and historical context in architecture. This book should be of interest to architects, engineers and architectural historians.
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.
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.
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.
Demand from building control officials for structural calculations - even for very simple projects - means that today's architects must have a thorough understanding of everyday structural concepts. Structures for Architects satisfies the need for a basic introduction to the structural problems encountered by the architect, surveyor and builder. This third edition reflects advances in recent techniques and refers to current Building Regulations and Codes of Practice. Students of architecture, building and surveying at degree, diploma or professional (RIBA, RICS, CIOB) examination level will find this book a valuable course text. Professionals in these fields who must perform structural calculations to satisfy building control authorities will also find it a useful handbook. |
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