The story of the decade long, billion-dollar building boom at MIT
and how it produced major works of architecture by Charles Correa,
Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Fumihiko Maki, and Kevin Roche. In the
1990s, MIT began a billion-dollar building program that transformed
its outdated, run-down campus into an architectural showplace.
Funded by the high-tech boom of the 1990s and and driven by a
pent-up demand for new space, MIT's ambitious rebuilding produced
five major works of architecture: Kevin Roche's Zesiger Sports and
Fitness Center, Steven Holl's Simmons Hall, Frank Gehry's Stata
Center, Charles Correa's Brain and Cognitive Science Complex, and
Fumihiko Maki's still-unrealized project for the Media Laboratory.
In Imagining MIT, William Mitchell (who served as architectural
adviser to MIT president Charles Vest) offers a critical,
behind-the-scenes view of MIT's new buildings and the complex
processes that produced them. The story is not simply one of
commissions, projects, CAD, and hardhats; it is about all the
forces that come into play-including money, politics, institutional
dynamics, and ideology-when a major university campus is imagined,
designed, and built. Lavishly illustrated with architectural
photographs, drawings, plans, and models, with color images
throughout, Imagining MIT shows both the opportunities and the
obstacles facing architectural production and city building at the
dawn of a new millennium. Mitchell challenges and subverts the
standard form of architectural narrative-the mythic tale of heroic
designers and enlightened patrons who overcome adversity to realize
their visions. Instead, he offers a Rashomon-like construction of
multiple voices and viewpoints. He sets the scene by recounting the
history of MIT campus architecture, from its early synthesis of
classicism and pragmatism to the daring mid-twentieth-century
modernism of Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen. The descriptions and
illustrations of the new projects show not only the evolution of
each building, but the relationship of the techniques of
architectural representation-themselves evolving, from sketching
and modeling to three-dimensional computer modeling and
rendering-to the conception and development of architectural ideas.
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
