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.

Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect's role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later theories from the 1960s, which focused more on the architect's theorization of his/her own design strategies, seem increasingly irrelevant. In an age of digital reproduction and commodification, these theoretical approaches need to be reassessed. Bringing together essays and interviews from leading scholars such as Kenneth Frampton, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Tschumi, Donald Kunze and Marco Biraghi, this volume investigates and critically addresses various dimensions of the present crisis of architecture. It poses questions such as: Is architecture a conservative cultural product servicing a given producer/consumer system? Should architecture's affiliative ties with capitalism be subjected to a measure of criticism that can be expanded to the entirety of the cultural realm? Is architecture's infusion into the cultural the reason for the visibility of architecture today? What room does the city leave for architecture beyond the present delirium of spectacle? Should the thematic of various New Left criticisms of capitalism be taken as the premise of architectural criticism? Or alternatively, putting the notion of criticality aside is it enough to confine criticism to the production of insightful and pleasurable texts?

The focus of this book is on understanding and explaining the way that our increasingly networked world impacts on the legibility of cities; that is how we experience and inhabit urban space. It reflects on the nature of the spatial effects of the networked and mediated world; from mobile phones and satnavs to data centres and wifi nodes and discusses how these change the very nature of urban space. It proposes that netspaces are the spaces that emerge at the interchange between the built world and the space of the network. It aims to be a timely volume for both architectural, urban design and media practitioners in understanding and working with the fundamental changes in built space due to the ubiquity of networks and media. This book argues that there needs to be a much better understanding of how networks affect the way we inhabit urban space. The volume defines five characteristics of netspaces and defines in detail the way that the spatial form of the city is affected by changing practices of networked world. It draws on theoretical approaches and contextualises the discussion with empirical case studies to illustrate the changes taking place in urban space. This readable and engaging text will be a valuable resource for architects, urban designers, planners and sociologists for understanding how of networks and media are creating significant changes to urban space and the resulting implications for the design of cities.

This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London's South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture's involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture's ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practice, the material imagination is employed when the architect 'thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary.' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses and everyday experience. Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect's imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

Cinematic Aided Design: An Everyday Life Approach to Architecture provides architects, planners, designer practitioners, politicians and decision makers with a new awareness of the practice of everyday life through the medium of film. This novel approach will also appeal to film scholars and film practitioners with an interest in spatial and architectural issues, as well as researchers from cultural studies in the field of everyday life. The everyday life is one of the hardest things to uncover since by its very nature it remains overlooked and ignored. However, cinema has over the last 120 years represented, interpreted and portrayed hundreds of thousands of everyday life situations taking place in a wide range of dwellings, streets and cities. Film constitutes the most comprehensive lived in building data in existence. Cinema created a comprehensive encyclopedia of architectural spaces and building elements. It has exposed large fragments of our everyday life and everyday environment that this book is aiming to reveal and restitute.

Written over four decades, Critiquing the Modern in Architecture is a collection of essays exploring the ideological and metaphysical core of modern architecture. Author Jaimini Mehta moves architectural modernism from its primarily Eurocentric definition, interrogating the subject from the perspective on a non-western thought-world. Mehta groups his essays under three key themes: "Rethinking Modernity" explores the ideological underpinnings of the modernity/modernism binary; "The Idea of Architecture" looks at a number of issues that constitute the timeless and the invariable aspects of architecture against which the prevalent modernist discourse can be critically evaluated; and "On Praxis" looks at three contemporary architects' work and the Vienna Secessionist movement between 1890 and 1918 to articulate a critique of the underpinnings of the modern movement. Providing a new view of the modern in architecture, this book is critical reading for architectural theorists and scholars of modernism.

Self-Regulated Design Learning: A Foundation and Framework for Teaching and Learning Design reframes how educators in architecture, landscape architecture, and other design disciplines think about teaching and learning design. The book weaves together concepts of constructivism, social cognitive theory, and self-regulated learning into a solid theoretical foundation for innovative teaching that emphasizes meaning, memory, problem solving, and mastery. The central goal of self-regulated design learning is making design learnable so that students are encouraged to become active, engaged participants in the design learning process. Key features of the book include: examining the issues, values, and challenges of teaching and learning in design, exploring select educational theories and concepts relevant to design pedagogy, illustrating the pivotal relationships between design learning and self-regulation, and discussing pedagogic techniques that support self-regulated design learning and lead to greater student achievement and performance. Self-Regulated Design Learning: A Foundation and Framework for Teaching and Learning Design provides numerous examples and applications to help design educators understand how to implement the self-regulated design learning methodology in their studios. Through this book, design educators will discover new ways of encouraging meaningful design learning through an advanced approach that is empowering, inspiring, and vital.

Written over four decades, Critiquing the Modern in Architecture is a collection of essays exploring the ideological and metaphysical core of modern architecture. Author Jaimini Mehta moves architectural modernism from its primarily Eurocentric definition, interrogating the subject from the perspective on a non-western thought-world. Mehta groups his essays under three key themes: "Rethinking Modernity" explores the ideological underpinnings of the modernity/modernism binary; "The Idea of Architecture" looks at a number of issues that constitute the timeless and the invariable aspects of architecture against which the prevalent modernist discourse can be critically evaluated; and "On Praxis" looks at three contemporary architects' work and the Vienna Secessionist movement between 1890 and 1918 to articulate a critique of the underpinnings of the modern movement. Providing a new view of the modern in architecture, this book is critical reading for architectural theorists and scholars of modernism.

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.

The second edition of this much-admired book offers an accessible and coherent selection of readings illustrating for students the depth and contours of how American politics has developed over time. Grounded in foundational debates, classic political science scholarship, and the best contemporary analysis of American political development, this reader invites students to probe the historical dynamics that brought the United States to where it is today and how those dynamics are likely to affect its future course. This well-designed and up-to-date reader is an invitation to instructors to draw your students into a deeper conversation on the key themes and topics in each section of your course. The second edition features: Revised introductions and selections 33 new readings Expanded sections on civil rights and civil liberties. Jillson and Robertson have carefully edited each selection to ensure readability and fidelity to the original arguments. Their insightful editorial introductions frame the context in which these topics are studied and understood. Several key pedagogical tools help students along the way: An introductory essay provides an overview of American political development and current examples of why history matters Chapter introductions to provide necessary context situating the readings in broader debates Head notes at the start of each reading to contextualize that selection Questions for Discussion at the end of each chapter, prompting students to draw out the implications and connections across readings Further Reading lists at the end of each chapter to guide student research The broad readings in this volume take seriously the effort to present materials that help students

What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city's specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society's needs and desires, and the city's history and fabric. Inspired by pragmatist-relational philosophies, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. It studies a series of critical actions and tools, which occurred in Brussels' architectural and urban culture after 1968. Weaved together, Brussels architectural production emerges from a variety of actors, including architects, urban policy makers, activists, social workers, and citizens, but also architectural movements and ideologies, urban renewal programs, urban traumas, plans and projects, and mundane everyday practices and constructions. This book contributes to the study of Brussels and offers a timely contribution to recent scholarship on the critical reappraisal of architectural debates from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In addition, by showing how pragmatist-relational philosophies can be made relevant for architectural theory, the book opens hopeful potentials for how architectural theory can better contribute to the formulation of a critical agenda for architecture.

The material and cultural world in which we now live perhaps represents the end of a process created out of the Enlightenment and the Industial Revolution. The battles fought over class, ideology and language are represented most clearly in the explosion of new building types during the Century of Revolutions.
Lavishly illustrated with photographs, drawings, maps and plans, Buildings and Power analyses architectural form, function and space to explore the reproduction and the subversion of power in the modern city.

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.

First published in 1999, this book presents a fresh and diverse set of perspectives representing key directions of research and practice in the field of environmental design research. Leading researchers in various areas of person-environment research, such as privacy, children's environment, post-occupancy evaluation, environmental cognition, environmental aesthetics, crime prevention, housing and environmental protection and environmental design present what they consider their best work. The book argues for the value of a multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving and outlines many important directions for methods, research and practice.

For the past 30 years, The Chinese journal Time + Architecture (Shidai Jianzhu) has focused on publishing innovative and exploratory work by emerging architects based in private design firms who were committed to new material, theoretical and pedagogical practices. In doing so, this book argues that the journal has engaged in the presentation and production of a particular form of critical architecture - described as an 'intermediate criticality' - as a response to the particular constraints of the Chinese cultural and political context. The journal's publications displayed a 'dual critique' - a resistant attitude to the dominant modes of commercial building practice, characterised by rapid and large-scale urban expansion, and an alternative publishing practice focusing on emerging, independent architectural practitioners through the active integration of theoretical debates, architectural projects, and criticisms. This dual critique is illustrated through a careful review and analysis of the history and programme of the journal. By showing how the work of emerging architects, including Yung Ho Chang, Wang Shu, Liu Jiakun and Urbanus, are situated within the context of the journal's special thematic editions on experimental architecture, exhibition, group design, new urban space and professional system, the book assesses the contribution the journal has made to the emergence of a critical architecture in China, in the context of how it was articulated, debated, presented and perhaps even 'produced' within the pages of the publication itself. The protagonists of critical architecture have endeavoured to construct an alternative mode of form and space with strong aesthetic and socio-political implications to the predominant production of architecture under the current Chinese socialist market economy. To rebel against certain forms of domination and suppression by capital and power is by no means to completely reject them; rather, it is to use thos

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

Health and happiness are fundamental to human quality of life. The United Nations World Happiness Report 2012 reflects a new worldwide call for governments to include happiness as a criterion to their policies. The Healthy Cities or Happy Cities movement has been endorsed by the WHO since 1986, and a Healthy House or Happy Home is a critical constituent of a healthy city or a happy city. Nevertheless, the concept has not been fully explored. Existing literature on the healthy house has often focused on the technical, economic, environmental, or biochemical aspects, while current scholarship on the happy home commonly centers on interior decoration. Few studies have addressed the importance of social and cultural factors that affect the health and happiness of the occupants. Identifying four key themes in Chinese philosophy to promote health and happiness at home, this book links architecture with Chinese philosophy, social sciences, and the humanities, and in doing so, argues that Architectural Multiculturalism is a vital ideology to guide housing design in North America. Using both qualitative and quantitative evidence gathered from ethnic Chinese and non-Chinese living in the USA and Canada, the study proposes that the Courtyard is a central component to promote social and cultural health and happiness of residents. It further details courtyard garden house design strategies that combine a sense of privacy with a feeling of community as represented in courtyard housing. The schemes may have universal implications.

Why was it that, across Scotland over the last two and a half centuries, architectural monuments were raised to national heroes? Were hero buildings commissioned as manifestations of certain social beliefs, or as a built environmental form of social advocacy? And if so, then how and why were social aims and intentions translated into architectural form, and how effective were they? A tradition of building architectural monuments to commemorate national heroes developed as a distinctive feature of the Scottish built environment. As concrete manifestations of powerful social and political currents of thought and opinion, these hero buildings make important statements about identity, the nation and social history. The book examines this architectural culture by studying a prominent selection of buildings, such as the Burns monuments in Alloway, Edinburgh and Kilmarnock, the Edinburgh Scott Monument, the Glenfinnan Monument and the Wallace Monument in Stirling. They give testimony to how a variety of architectural forms and styles can be adapted through time to bear particular social messages of symbolic weight. This tradition, which literally allows us to dwell on important social issues of the past, has been somewhat neglected in serious architectural history and heritage, and indeed one of the main monuments has already been destroyed. By raising awareness of this rich architectural and social heritage, while analysing and interpreting the buildings in their historical context, this book makes an exciting and original scholarly contribution to the current debates on identity and nationality taking place in Scotland and the wider UK.

Colour and Light: Spatial Experience describes the coherent interaction of light and colour in the spatial context. It explains the nature of light to colour specialists, and the nature of colour to light specialists, simultaneously conveying an understanding that light and colour must be thought of together. In addition, it brings out the apparent contradictions between the practically based knowledge of craftsmen, engineers and designers, and the theoretically based knowledge of academics in various disciplines. Including background context, facts and possible approaches, the book provides a basic understanding of light and colour, and their significance for humans in the spatial context.

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.

"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

This book is unique in its attempt to explore the many ways we have of thinking about buildings. In particular it raises questions about the kinds of knowledge we have and will need in designing, making and enjoying our buildings. At the very least this book provides an overview of the fragmented construction industry, making it a vital purchase for all construction related students. However, the author has written for a wider audience making the book an essential guide for those interested in the form of buildings or the deliberate ways in which people build them.

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