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.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
