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Books > Arts & Architecture > Architecture > Theory of architecture
A cast of leading writers and practitioners tackle the ethical questions that architects are increasingly facing in their work, from practical considerations in construction to the wider social context of buildings, their appearance, use and place in the narrative of the environment. This book gives an account of these ethical questions from the perspectives of historical architectural practice, philosophy, and business, and examines the implications of such dilemmas. Taking the current discussion of ethics in architecture on to a new stage, this volume provides an accumulation of diverse opinions, focusing on architects' actions and products that materially affect the lives of people in all urbanized societies.
This book examines the ways in which a historic, and so-called
"traditional" city quietly mutated into one that was modern in its
own terms not only in form but also in its use and meaning. Through
a study of Delhi, the author challenges some prevalent dichotomies
and myths in architecture and urbanism and identifies an
interpretation of modernism that expands upon conventional
understandings of it. Conventional discourse in the West defines
modern as the antithesis of that which is 'not-modern' or is
'traditional.' Many scholars have debated the significance of the
words and most agree that the very word 'tradition' was a modernist
creation that variously implied threatened by change, backwardness,
resistance to innovation.
Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy,literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.
How do we think about architecture historically and theoretically? Forty Ways to Think about Architecture provides an introduction to some of the wide-ranging ways in which architectural history and theory are being approached today. The inspiration for this project is the work of Adrian Forty, Professor of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL), who has been internationally renowned as the UK s leading academic in the discipline for 40 years. Forty s many publications, notably Objects of Desire (1986), Words and Buildings (2000) and Concrete and Culture (2012), have been crucial to opening up new approaches to architectural history and theory and have helped to establish entirely new areas of study. His teaching at The Bartlett has enthused a new generation about the exciting possibilities of architectural history and theory as a field. This collection takes in a total of 40 essays covering key subjects, ranging from memory and heritage to everyday life, building materials and city spaces. As well as critical theory, philosophy, literature and experimental design, it refers to more immediate and topical issues in the built environment, such as globalisation, localism, regeneration and ecologies. Concise and engaging entries reflect on architecture from a range of perspectives. Contributors include eminent historians and theorists from elsewhere such as Jean-Louis Cohen, Briony Fer, Hilde Heynen, Mary McLeod, Griselda Pollock, Penny Sparke and Anthony Vidler as well as Forty s colleagues from the Bartlett School of Architecture including Iain Borden, Murray Fraser, Peter Hall, Barbara Penner, Jane Rendell and Andrew Saint. Forty Ways to Think about Architecture also features contributions from distinguished architects, such as Tony Fretton, Jeremy Till and Sarah Wigglesworth, and well-known critics and architectural writers, such as Tom Dyckhoff, William Menking and Thomas Weaver. Many of the contributors are former students of Adrian Forty. Through these diverse essays, readers are encouraged to think about how architectural history and theory relates to their own research and design practices, thus using the work of Adrian Forty as a catalyst for fresh and innovative thinking about architecture as a subject.
Theories of the domestic stemming from the 19th century have focused on the home as a refuge and place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children and a safe place for visitors. Under this conception, domestic space is positioned as nurturing and private, a refuge and place of retreat which gave rise to theories of 'home as haven'. While, arguably, some social conditions might suggest this is the case, Domesticity Under Siege exposes a different world, one in which the boundaries of nurturing domesticity collide with both outside and inside agents. Whether these agents are external military forces, psychological trauma or familial violence, they re-position meta-narratives of domesticity, not through identity politics or specialized subgroup experience, but relative to the actions of the world around an inhabited domain. That is, when home is constituted as a private realm, a place where individuals or groups can reside in 'safety and comfort', it is argued as a place in which the individual exercises control or power. However, there are many occasions when forces act upon the home and threaten aspects of safety and comfort, often through such things as ruination, violence, mortality, and infestation. Organised around four thematic sections, 'Microbes, Animals and Insects', 'Human Agents', Wars and Disasters as Agents' and 'Hauntings, Eeriness and the Uncanny', chapters provide a range of approaches to the home which challenge notions of 'haven' and reflect major causes that have played an important role in undermining the modern home. Examples and case studies explore the domestic screen, hoarding, hauntings, violence and imprisonment in the home, wartime interior art, the Hanover Merzbau and Wolfgang Staudte's 1946 film Die Moerder sind unter uns ('The Murderers are Among Us').
Uniquely bridges the aesthetics of imperfection with areas of philosophy, music, literature, urban environment, architecture, art theory, and cultural studies. Divided into seven thematic sections to offer a comprehensive study of how imperfectionist aesthetics connect to art and everyday life. As an interdisciplinary study, this book will appeal to a broad range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophical aesthetics, cultural studies, and across the humanities.
Colour is architecture’s sharpest tool in the box. It has indexed everything from the feminine, cosmetic and vulgar to the pure, intrinsic and embodied. Attitudes to colour are constantly shifting. They have played a central role in the history of architecture: from the polychromy of the ancients to the great white interiors of high modernism; the figurative flourishes of postmodernism to the embodied sublime of contemporary building systems and facades. In contemporary architecture, colour has emerged as a powerful mode of working and an impactful political proposition. The second digital age has ushered paradigmatic shifts in how architects engage it. Employing the full spectrum of colour requires a projective mode of action – one that anticipates nascent futures. It aids in the democratisation of visual culture, opening the field to enable a multiplicity of identities by introducing new references and embracing new voices. This book explores the operative role of colour in current practice by proffering visions not of idealised other worlds, but rather radical reimaginings of our present one. Features: 100 Architects, Maya Alam, David Batchelor, Galo Canizares, Courtney Coffman, Fala Atelier, Marcelyn Gow, Louisa Hutton, Sam Jacob, Carolyn Kane, Guto Requena, Javier González Rivero, Paulette Singley, Amanda Williams and Mimi Zeiger.
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America's leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the "smart city," Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal-one generation's utopia forming the next one's nightmare-and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney's EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger's compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.
Marginalized due to the deployment of both a highly specialized jargon and a novel stylistic approach meant to upset established norms and conventions, Baudrillard's thought has suffered from the lack of an accessible, consistent and comprehensive exposition able to make it relevant to diverse contemporary disciplines. As a result, its impact on architecture has always been confined to academia. By presenting an introductory but in-depth formalization of Baudrillard's interest in architecture and related fields, this book makes intelligible his philosophical premises thus showing, through the prism of architecture, their relevance and persuasiveness today. Key concepts such as the object system, the code, simulation, hyperreality and precession, to name a few, are addressed in the light of the specially reconceptualized key construct of ambience, thus emphasizing how the mutual concerns of architecture, urban studies and cultural studies provide a fertile ground for debate. Such an approach, which focuses on the contradictions inherent in contemporary society from the vantage point of Baudrillard's original involvement in architectural analysis, philosophy and criticism, is one which students, practitioners and scholars alike from as diverse disciplines as architecture, interior design and urban studies - but also fine art, anthropology, sociology, economics, human geography, social psychology and cultural studies to start with - will benefit from immensely.
- Unites the three most distinct dimensions of the architectural discipline in one volume: research, pedagogy and professional practice - Includes 18 diverse contributions from geographically diverse locations, including Chile, Japan, Peru, Iran, and South Africa - Relevant for students, instructors and practitioners alike - Opens the design conversation to further advance architectural studies, architectural teaching, and professional practice
"Architects today are rethinking their tools to address the complex problems at hand. They are also enlarging their table to include around it other professionals and citizens." - Hashim Sarkis Expansions, edited by Hashim Sarkis and Ala Tannir, gathers over 80 responses to the question posed by the Biennale Architettura 2021's theme - How will we live together? These contributions act as an extension to the different thematics presented by participants in the galleries in Venice. Assembling the voices and views of authors from various fields associated with architecture - academics, curators, journalists, students, and more - this volume includes a collection of short essays that reveal recurring themes that are currently of interest to different architecture and design communities around the world. These include multispecies worlding, social and economic justice, the history of twentieth-century modern spatial practices, environmental concerns, public modes of transportation, as well as examinations and contestations of the digital/analog binary, among others. The graphic design and the layout of the volume are by Omnivore, Inc. Also available: Cohabitats ISBN 9788836648603
This book will be of interest to everyone involved in the repair, maintenance and refurbishment of traditional buildings. Its purpose is to promote the successful structural repair of masonry, timber and unfired earth. The book begins by explaining how traditional structures work and how they are affected by the behaviour of the soil that supports them. It goes on to explain how the structural design of buildings has to cope with uncertainty. Techniques for doing so are well established for new buildings, but the viewpoint changes when existing buildings need to be repaired or refurbished. The most common sources of structural damage are listed. The more serious and progressive ones are described in detail, as an aid to diagnosis and prognosis. An understanding of prognosis enables repairers to decide whether urgent intervention is necessary or whether the problem can be allowed to run its course. A straightforward method is proposed for arriving at the most suitable remedy. Several typical repairs are illustrated. The book covers many allied topics, including the principles of conservation, health and safety and preventative maintenance. A chapter is devoted to the special needs of insured perils.
Providing hard data for trends that many perceive only vaguely and
some deny altogether, "Designing for Diversity" reveals a
profession rife with gender and racial discrimination and examines
the aspects of architectural practice that hinder or support the
full participation of women and persons of color.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture. Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monument and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a 'physical novelist' as well as a 'physical historian'. Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin's incomplete and broken forms expand architecture's allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the creativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing climate change. |
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