The Place of Silence explores the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Bringing together contributions by internationally recognized scholars in architecture and the humanities, it explores the diverse practices, affects, politics and cultural meanings of silence, silent places and silent buildings in historical and contemporary contexts. What counts as silence in specific situations is highly relative, and the term itself carries complex and varied significations which make it a revealing field of study. Chapters explore a range of themes, from the apparent 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world; through designed silent spaces; to the forced silences of oppression, catastrophe, or technological breakdown. The book unfolds a rich and complementary array of perspectives which address - through the lens of architecture and place - questions of sound, atmosphere, and attunement, together building a volume which will form the key scholarly resource on architecture and silence.

From sixteenth-century Roman maps, to the Luftwaffe's aerial survey of Warsaw, the London Eye to Google Earth, visual culture is saturated with aerial imagery. The aerial view - the image of everywhere- has become natural, desirable, omnipresent, yet its rise to pre-eminence as a 'way of seeing' raises pressing questions about its effects and meanings that have not yet been explored. More immediately than any other visual modality, aerial imagery gives us- and supports our idea of- a totalizing overview, a world-view, and thus in turn requires that its implications be explored as the 'symbolic form' of the global era. However this 'view of the world' keeps undergoing transformations as technologies continue to be invented and refined. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this text examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism, and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Using examples of specific cultural moments to elucidate the wider theory, this is the only book to provide a cultural history of the aerial imagination and its centrality to visual culture.

Ranging from an examination of the politically-laden spectacle of George IV's visit to Edinburgh in 1822, as stage-managed by the celebrated novelist Sir Walter Scott, to an analysis of Google Earth's role in the construction of a new kind of political map, one no longer structured by boundary lines and coloured territories but instead through a politics of image resolution, the remarkable essays in this book present innovative ways of understanding visual phenomena in historical and contemporary culture. Writing on the Image brings together a series of Mark Dorrian's celebrated critical writings. Focusing on issues of elevated vision, spectacle, atmosphere, and the limits of aesthetic experience, Dorrian explores the politics of representation through a series of close readings of the ideological effects of images in their specific contexts. Seamlessly traversing sources from architecture, art, literature, history, geography and film, the essays gathered here exemplify Mark Dorrian's pioneering 'post-disciplinary' approach to architecture and visual culture. Featuring a foreword by Paul Carter, and an afterword by Ella Chmielewska, Writing on the Image opens with a sequence of four historically-oriented chapters that then lead on to considerations of key events in architectural, urban and visual culture over the past decade. Whether it be an eighteenth-century engraving that depicts a magnified drop of tap water as an alien planet swarming with monstrous creatures, an artwork showing a car with the silhouette of a building mounted on its roof, the covering up of a tapestry in the UN before a televised news conference, or a large-scale satellite image that is affixed to the basement floor of a public building, Dorrian shows how each artefact or event he examines is eloquent in its ability to problematise a larger set of relations beyond itself.

Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts.

With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.

Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.

This book explores, debates and exhibits practices of contemporary architectural drawing, taking at its basis a series of meetings between a cohort of architects, critics and curators who discussed contemporary drawing practices and production in their own work and research. The participants - Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Peter Cook, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Adrian Hawker, Perry Kulper, CJ Lim, Shaun Murray, Mark Smout, Neil Spiller, Natalija Subotincic, Michael Webb, Mark West and Michael Young - focused on drawings or drawing-related artefacts, around which dialogues took place. Beyond the usual representational imperatives of architecture drawing, the group considered and discussed its agency as a site of emergence and imagination. Organised in relation to specific topics and framed by contextual essays by Nat Chard, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Michael Young, Thomas-Bernard Kenniff and Carole Levesque, the book includes a selection of exquisite and fascinating key drawings by the various contributors, together with edited transcripts of discussions around drawing which developed at the symposia. The drawings presented in the book are in dialogue with one another, while their authors are themselves in extended conversation. This double aspect will make the book a distinctive publication and an enduringly important document and resource for thinking about architectural drawing.

The view from above, or the 'bird's-eye' view, has become so ingrained in contemporary visual culture that it is now hard to imagine our world without it. It has risen to pre-eminence as a way of seeing, but important questions about its effects and meanings remain unexplored. More powerfully than any other visual modality, this image of 'everywhere' supports our idea of a world-view, yet it is one that continues to be transformed as technologies are invented and refined. This innovative volume, edited by Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, offers an unprecedented range of discussions on the aerial view, covering topics from sixteenth-century Roman maps to the Luftwaffe's aerial survey of Warsaw to Google Earth. Underpinned by a cross-disciplinary approach that draws together diverse and previously isolated material, this volume examines the politics and poetics of the aerial view in relation to architecture, art, film, literature, photography and urbanism and explores its role in areas such as aesthetics and epistemology. Structured through a series of detailed case studies, this book builds into a cultural history of the aerial imagination.