The Optimum Imperative examines architecture's multiple entanglements within the problematics of Socialist lifestyle in postwar Czechoslovakia. Situated in the period loosely bracketed by the signing of the Munich accords in 1938, which affected Czechoslovakia's entrance into World War II, and the Warsaw Pact troops' occupation of Prague in 1968, the book investigates three decades of Czech architecture, highlighting a diverse cast of protagonists. Key among them are the theorist and architect Karel Honzik and a small group of his colleagues in the Club for the Study of Consumption; the award-winning Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1958 World Expo in Brussels; and SIAL, a group of architects from Liberec that emerged from the national network of Stavoprojekt offices during the reform years, only to be subsumed back into it in the wake of Czechoslovak normalization. This episodic approach enables a long view of the way that the project of constructing Socialism was made disciplinarily specific for architecture, through the constant interpretation of Socialist lifestyle, both as a narrative framework and as a historical goal. Without sanitizing history of its absurd contortions in discourse and in daily life, the book takes as its subject the complex and dynamic relationships between Cold War politics, state power, disciplinary legitimating narratives, and Czech architects' optimism for Socialism. It proposes that these key dimensions of practicing architecture and building Socialism were intertwined, and even commensurate at times, through the framework of Socialist lifestyle.

This collection is inspired by the transdisciplinary possibilities posed by the connections between space and justice. Drawing on a variety of theoretical influences that include Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Antonio Negri and Yan Thomas, the contributors to this book conduct a series of jurisprudential, aesthetic and political inquiries into 'just' modes of occupying space, and the ways in which space comes under the signs of law and justice. Bringing together leading critical legal scholars with theorists and practitioners from other disciplines within the humanities, Spaces of Justice investigates unexplored associations between law and architectural theory, the visual arts, geography and cultural studies. The book contributes to the ongoing destabilisation of the boundaries between law and the broader humanities and will be of considerable interest to scholars and students with an interest in the normative dimensions of law's 'spatial turn'.

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century - NATO (Narrative Architecture Today) - who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group's work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATO's identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATO has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATO), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATO's place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATO, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group's ethos and development.

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century - NATO (Narrative Architecture Today) - who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group's work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATO's identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATO has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATO), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATO's place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATO, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group's ethos and development.

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.

"High-Tech Fantasies" goes beyond the normal "policy evaluation" to examine the underlying assumptions which science parks embody about science and society and their relation to space and geographical uneven development. It is argued that science parks are founded on a notion of scientific production and industrial innovation which is not only technically inappropriate but also intrinsically socially divisive. Moreover, the spatial form and symbolic spatial content of science parks - near to academe, far from physical production and with specific design characteristics - further increases their tendency to promote (and depend upon) social polarization. This polarization takes a precise geographical form, exemplified in the clustering of "high-tech" in the semi-rural regions of the south and east of England. The book focuses on the tight and mutual relation between the forms of scientific production, social structures and geographical inequality, dismantling the popular concept of science parks to present an alternative conceptualization from which the real implications of science-park developments can be drawn. This book should be of interest to university students of geography, so

Glenn Murcutt is an internationally acclaimed Australian architect who for five years taught a series of master studios for graduate architecture students at the University of Washington. This book combines examples of the students' studio work with edited transcripts of Murcutt's public lectures and sessions with students, professionals, and Finnish architect Juhanni Pallasamaa. Essays set the studios into the context of an inquiry about the local practice of a global architecture. The studio work shows an application, in the Northwest environment, of Murcutt's fundamental principles. These projects often make evident architecture that has a precise engagement with local conditions and the natural environment. Structures and material details take their measure from an industrial craft of making. The collected studio work shows a full progression from site sketches through detail development, in drawings and models. Jim Nicholls is a senior lecturer in the Department of Architecture, College of Built Environments, University of Washington.

Over the last forty years, graffiti and street-art have become a global phenomenon within the visual arts. Whilst they have increasingly been taken seriously by the art establishment (or perhaps the art market), their academic and popular examination still remains within old debates which argue over whether these acts are vandalism or art, and which examine the role of graffiti in gang culture and in terms of visual pollution. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study working with some of the world's most influential Independent Public Artists, this book takes a completely new approach. Placing these illicit aesthetic practices within a broader historical, political, and aesthetic context, it argues that they are in fact both intrinsically ornamental (working within a classic architectonic framework), as well as innately ordered (within a highly ritualized, performative structure). Rather than disharmonic, destructive forms, rather than ones solely working within the dynamics of the market, these insurgent images are seen to reface rather than deface the city, operating within a modality of contemporary civic ritual. The book is divided into two main sections, Ornament and Order. Ornament focuses upon the physical artifacts themselves, the various meanings these public artists ascribe to their images as well as the tensions and communicative schemata emerging out of their material form. Using two very different understandings of political action, it places these illicit icons within the wider theoretical debate over the public sphere that they materially re-present. Order is focused more closely on the ephemeral trace of these spatial acts, the explicitly performative, practice-based elements of their aesthetic production. Exploring thematics such as carnival and play, risk and creativity, it tracks how the very residue of this cultural production structures and shapes the socio-ethico guidelines of these artists' lifeworlds.

A Primer on Theory in Architecture discusses how theory is defined in architecture, how it is identified, its location in larger perspectives or worldviews, its relationships to other areas in architecture, and how it can be constructed. The book explores the definition, elements and characteristics of theory along with subjects associated with theory and how these associations are recognized. In addition, case studies tackle both individual theorists and common approaches to the topic. Aimed at the new student of architectural theory, if you are just beginning to tackle this subject, begin with this book.

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction framing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory and practice of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.

Times of Creative Destruction is about the years that followed the end of WWII, one of the most seminal and dramatic epochs in human history, during which extraordinary star-buildings were born, cities exploded, and an unprecedented world of a 'Third Ecology' emerged. Never before was there such a flurry of daring mega-constructions, such daring spatial acrobatics, 'star' buildings by star architects attained by star developers, mega-constructions, technological feats, and flourishing spatial acrobatics. But, for all its exhilarating creativity, this was also an era of unanticipated, intractable, irreversible destruction reducing the uniqueness and diversity of cultural, social and ecological peaks and valleys of our world, to a 'desert flatland', environmental inequality and unhappiness. This book critically discusses and revaluates these contradictory events, bringing together and commenting on a selection of shorter key texts by Tzonis and Lefaivre, the product of a rare research and writing partnership. The texts, published between the early 1960s and the present, are significant as documents that inform about the period. They are also important and timely because of their critical and influential role in the debates of this era, both creative and destructive.

A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture: Past, Present, Future examines the impact of Chinese philosophy on China's historic structures, as well as on modern Chinese urban aesthetics and architectural forms. For architecture in China moving forward, author David Wang posits a theory, the New Virtualism, which links current trends in computational design with long-standing Chinese philosophical themes. The book also assesses twentieth-century Chinese architecture through the lenses of positivism, consciousness (phenomenology), and linguistics (structuralism and poststructuralism). Illustrated with over 70 black-and-white images, this book establishes philosophical baselines for assessing architectural developments in China, past, present and future.

Design Intervention: Toward a More Humane Architecture, first published in 1991, intends to demonstrate that interest in social issues is alive and well in architecture, that there is a small but effective cadre of dedicated professionals who continue to commit themselves to solving social problems, and that architecture is being applied to the alleviation of the social ills of our time. The editors and contributors in this book have all grappled with their own definitions of design innovation, and express in practical and useful ways their ideas for contributing to a better and less needy world through the architecture they describe. This book will be of interest to students of architecture.

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the 'starchitecture' system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007-8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a 'disinterested' position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization. At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.

Few architectural styles evoke so strong a sense of place as Pueblo architecture. This book brings together experts from architecture and art, archaeology and anthropology, philosophy and history, considering Pueblo style not simply architecturally, but within its cultural, religious, economic, and climate contexts as well. The product of successive layers of Pueblo Indian, Spanish, and Anglo influences, contemporary Pueblo style is above all seen as a harmonious response to the magnificent landscape from which it emerged. Pueblo Style and Regional Architecture, first published in 1990, is a unique and thorough study of this enduring regional style, a sourcebook that will inform and inspire architects and designers, as well as fascinate those interested in the anthropology, culture, art, and history of the American Southwest.

A celebration of a unique culture and its experience of design, this sensitive text is a timely examination of Japanese design at the start of a new century. The country's economic boom in the 1980s produced a surge of interest in land and building, and consequently in design in all its forms. From restaurant interiors to products, from private housing to recreational spaces, design received an unprecedented degree of attention. However the bursting in the early 1990s of this so-called 'bubble' economy has prompted a re-examination of design and its role in urban society.

This collection of essays serves as an introduction to modern architectural heritage and the specific problems related to the conservation of modern structures. It covers policy, planning and construction. A selection of case studies elaborates on these issues and illustrates how problems have been addressed. This volume celebrates the first 5 years of DoCoMoMo's role and influence in this important area of building conservation.

Phenomenology, Materiality, Cybernetics, Palimpsest, Cyborgs, Landscape Urbanism, Typology, Semiotics, Deconstruction - the minefield of theoretical ideas that students must navigate today can be utterly confusing, and how do these theories translate to the design studio? Landscape Theory in Design introduces theoretical ideas to students without the use of jargon or an assumption of extensive knowledge in other fields, and in doing so, links these ideas to the processes of design. In five thematic chapters Susan Herrington explains: the theoretic groundings of the theory of philosophy, why it matters to design, an example of the theory in a work of landscape architecture from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, debates surrounding the theory (particularly as they elaborate modern and postmodern thought) and primary readings that can be read as companions to her text. An extensive glossary of theoretical terms also adds a vital contribution to students' comprehension of theories relevant to the design of landscapes and gardens. Covering the design of over 40 landscape architects, architects, and designers in 111 distinct projects from 20 different countries, Landscape Theory in Design is essential reading for any student of the landscape.

This book evaluates how we experience and understand buildings in different ways depending upon our academic and professional background. With reference to Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Central Library, the book illustrates a range of different methods available through its application to the building. By seeing such a variety of different research methods applied to one setting, it provides the opportunity for researchers to understand how tools can highlight various aspects of a building and how those different methods can augment, or complement, each other. Unique to this book are contributions from internationally renowned academics from fields including architecture, ethnography, architectural criticism, phenomenology, sociology, environmental psychology and cognitive science, all of which are united by a single, real-world application, the Seattle Central Library. This book will be of interest to architects and students of architecture as well as disciplines such as ethnography, sociology, environmental psychology, and cognitive science that have an interest in applying research methods to the built environment.

The Living Tradition of Architecture explores the depth of architecture as it takes flesh in the living tradition of building, dwelling and thinking. This is a timely appraisal of the field by some of its foremost contributors. Beyond modern misconceptions about tradition only relating to things past and conducive to a historicist vision, the essays in this volume reveal tradition as a living continuity and common ground of reference for architecture. This collection of essays brings together world-leading scholars, practicing architects and educators, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Christian Frost, Dagmar Weston, Daniel Libeskind, David Leatherbarrow, Eric Parry, Gabriele Bryant, Joseph Rykwert, Karsten Harries, Kenneth Frampton, Mari Hvattum, Patrick Lynch, Robin Middleton, Stephen Witherford, and Werner Oechslin, in a single celebratory publication edited by Jose de Paiva and dedicated to Dalibor Vesely. This book provides a unique initiative reflecting the group's understanding of the contemporary situation, revealing an ongoing debate of central relevance to architecture.

The Living Tradition of Architecture explores the depth of architecture as it takes flesh in the living tradition of building, dwelling and thinking. This is a timely appraisal of the field by some of its foremost contributors. Beyond modern misconceptions about tradition only relating to things past and conducive to a historicist vision, the essays in this volume reveal tradition as a living continuity and common ground of reference for architecture. This collection of essays brings together world-leading scholars, practicing architects and educators, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Christian Frost, Dagmar Weston, Daniel Libeskind, David Leatherbarrow, Eric Parry, Gabriele Bryant, Joseph Rykwert, Karsten Harries, Kenneth Frampton, Mari Hvattum, Patrick Lynch, Robin Middleton, Stephen Witherford, and Werner Oechslin, in a single celebratory publication edited by Jose de Paiva and dedicated to Dalibor Vesely. This book provides a unique initiative reflecting the group's understanding of the contemporary situation, revealing an ongoing debate of central relevance to architecture.

Defining a research question, describing why it needs to be answered and explaining how methods are selected and applied are challenging tasks for anyone embarking on academic research within the field of landscape architecture. Whether you are an early career researcher or a senior academic, it is essential to draw meaningful conclusions and robust answers to research questions. Research in Landscape Architecture provides guidance on the rationales needed for selecting methods and offers direction to help to frame and design academic research within the discipline. Over the last couple of decades the traditional orientation in landscape architecture as a field of professional practice has gradually been complemented by a growing focus on research. This book will help you to develop the connections between research, teaching and practice, to help you to build a common framework of theory and research methods. Bringing together contributions from landscape architects across the world, this book covers a broad range of research methodologies and examples to help you conduct research successfully. Also included is a study in which the editors discuss the most important priorities for the research within the discipline over the coming years. This book will provide a definitive path to developing research within landscape architecture.

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively 'mediated' city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' - a qualitatively new phase in the city's historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present 'tele-technological-capitalist' society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media - as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics - towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory explores current practices of architectural theory, their critical and productive role. The book is organized in sections which explore theory as an open issue in architecture, as it relates to and borrows from other disciplines, thus opening up architecture itself and showing how architecture is inextricably connected to other social and theoretical practices. The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought - its history, theory, and criticism - and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture's specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture's engagement and self-definition. The book's thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a 'risk' of architecture.

Examining discomfort's physical, emotional, conceptual, psychological and aesthetic dimensions, the contributors to this volume offer an alternate, cultural approach to the study of architecture and the built environment. By attending to a series of disparate instances in which architecture and discomfort intersect, On Discomfort offers a fresh reading of the negotiations that define architecture's position in modern culture. The essays do not chart comfort's triumph so much as discomfort's curious dispersal into practices that form 'modern life' - and what that dispersion reveals of both architecture and culture. The essays presented in this volume illuminate the material culture of discomfort as it accrues to architecture and its history. This episodic analysis speaks to a range of disciplinary fields and interdisciplinary subjects, extending our understanding of the domestication of interiors (and objects, cities and ideas); and the conditions under which - by intention or accident - they discomfort.