Architecture - Criticism

Examining the complex social and material relationships between architecture and ecology which constitute modern cultures, this collection responds to the need to extend architectural thinking about ecology beyond current design literatures. This book shows how the 'habitats', 'natural milieus', 'places' or 'shelters' that construct...

This innovative edited collection charts the rise, fall and possible futures of the word primitive. The word primitive is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the west, providing a convenient starting point for the many myths of architecture's origins. Since the almost legendary...

In Behind the Postcolonial Abidin Kusno shows how colonial representations have been revived and rearticulated in postcolonial Indonesia. The book shows how architecture and urban space can be seen, both historically and theoretically, as representations of political and cultural tendencies that characterize an emerging...

Brought together for the first time - the seminal writing on architecture by key philosophers and cultural theorist of the twentieth century.Issues around the built environment are increasingly central to the study of the social sciences and humanities. The essays offer a refreshing take...

A classic of architectural history and theory, Heavenly Mansions interprets architecture as a reflection of the age in which it flowers, and traces the alternating themes of fantasy and functionalism as exemplified in various styles and in the works of a number of influential...

Brings to life the masters of twentieth-century architecture and art, sharing anecdotes and memories of Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, Jackson Pollock, and others.Author: Peter BlakeISBN-10: 0393315037ISBN-13: 9780393315035Publisher: W. W. Norton & CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1996Pages: 372Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.46lbsSize: 9.25h x 6.79w x...

The U.S. Capitol, the building that houses the legislative branch of our government and a landmark that attracts 3-5 million visitors each year, has its origins in an architectural competition devised by George Washington. The winning design, submitted by William Thornton, combined "grandeur, simplicity,...

What is style in architecture? "Style is like a feather in a woman's hat, nothing more," said Le Corbusier, expressing most modern architects' low regard for the subject. But Witold Rybczynski disagrees, and in The Look of Architecture, he makes a compelling case for...

Saints and Spectacle examines the origins and reception of the Middle Byzantine program of mosaic decoration. This complex and colorful system of images covers the walls and vaults of churches with figures and compositions seen against a dazzling gold ground. The surviving eleventh-century churches...

Covering all regions of France--from Avignon's Palace of the Popes to Versailles' Petit Trianon--and all periods of French architecture--from the Roman theater at Orange to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris--this volume examines more than 60 of France's most important architectural landmarks. Writing in...

A revelatory account of the complex and evolving relationship of Renaissance architects to classical antiquity Focusing on the work of architects such as Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo, this extensively illustrated volume explores how the understanding of the antique changed over the course of...

The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum,...

In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects--cups, saucers, chairs, and tables--began to receive critical attention. Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing...

A critical look at the life, work, and influence of the important and award-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo The Spanish architect Rafael Moneo (b. 1937) has won numerous awards (including the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize), yet this publication is the first to offer a...

Sebastiano Serlio introduced the principles of classical design to northern Europe and was the most important architectural writer and theorist of the sixteenth century. However, his writings have been inaccessible to English language readers until now. This distinguished translation of Serlio's treatise, complete with...

Once too numerous to attract attention, the log buildings of Texas now stand out for their rustic beauty. This book preserves a record of the log houses, stores, inns, churches, schools, jails, and barns that have already become all too few in the Texas...

In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to...

A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are....

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War.The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and...

This ode to the spirit of place consists of an exchange of letters in which one author recalls and the other responds to the elements considered essential to the art of successful place-making. Each of the book's chapters forms a chamber, and each chamber...

Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form.Anyone reviewing the history of architectural theory, Robin Evans observes, would have to conclude...

Over the course of this century, nature has increasingly been relegated to the province of environmentalists while cities and towns have been turned over to developers and planners. Norman Crowe seeks to overcome this division into the respective realms of specialists by recognizing the...

Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective.While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general...

The meaning and function of camps, from Scout Jamborees and RV Clubs to FEMA trailers and GTMO.What is a camp? In August 2005, television news showed viewers an estimated 20,000 Katrina evacuees camped out in the Superdome, Cindy Sheehan protesting the Iraq War on...

A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time--that the billboards...

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in...

In Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images, Edward Dimendberg offers the first comprehensive treatment of one of the most imaginative contemporary design studios. Since founding their practice in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have integrated architecture, urban design, media art, and the...

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an...

In Dubai, a luxury apartment block is built in the shape of a giant iPod. In China, President Xi Jinping denounces the trend of constructing "bizarre" new buildings in wacky shapes and colors. In Cincinnati, celebrity architect Zaha Hadid is paid millions to design...

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents...

What makes the places we inhabit extraordinary? Why are some urban spaces more vital and restorative? Wonderful landscapes, inspiring works of architecture and urban design, and the numinous experiences that accompany them have been an integral dimension of our culture. Up-lifting spaces, dramatic use...

Prompts for creative and embodied engagement with the urban environment Conceived as a sequel to Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places, this volume offers a set of methods and assignments intended to stimulate creative, often embodied, approaches to architecture, urban studies and...

Offers a framework for rethinking what "normal" architectural practice means. This book brings together five transformative architectural practices from around the globe to critique the assumptions, working methods, and embedded social and political biases within "normal" architectural practice. Their changing ethics of practice, and...

A crash course in designing and constructing buildings Too often, textbooks turn the noteworthy details of architecture into tedious discourse that would put even Frank Gehry to sleep. Architecture 101 cuts out the boring explanations, and instead provides a hands-on lesson that keeps you...

This book brings together a diverse group of theoreticians to explore architectural theory as a discipline, assessing its condition and relevance to contemporary practice. Offering critical assessment in the face of major social and environmental issues of today, 17 original contributions address the relevance...

An Architectural Travel Guide to Utah invites visitors and other explorers of Utah to see the state's history, material culture, settlement, and natural landscape through the lens of its buildings. With more than 600 buildings as examples, this guide takes readers through Utah's cities...

Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and al黎heia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and...

Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and al黎heia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and...

With a career spanning across continents and over six decades, the work of the renowned architect Norman Foster is nothing short of extraordinary. His creative innovation and holistic approach have made him one of the world's most influential and well-known architects. From the Apple...

Architects build in and for a system that is not only pathological, but toxic. It is ruining the only planet we have, and we are clearly at the end of what is still possible within this ecology. The architecture presented in this book is...

Attempting to explore untapped potential in urban planning, Architecture in Context debates such topics as strategies for user-financed urban construction, transport in Copenhagen and urban planning in Africa. Contributors include architects, planners and theorists such as Christoph Laimer, Klaus Overmeyer, Andreas Denk, Oliver Bormann...

There is an urgent need to emphasize inclusivity in architecture and the built environment. Innovative technologies within the field of architecture are being developed to enhance inclusivity in architectural approaches and development processes. It is essential to research inclusivity in architecture and the built...

The story of how the country house, historically a site of violent disruption, came to symbolize English stability during the eighteenth century. Country houses are quintessentially English, not only architecturally but also in that they embody national values of continuity and insularity. The English...

An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects.Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the...

Bucky Inc. offers a deep exploration of Richard Buckminster Fuller's work and thought to shed new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world. It shows that Fuller's entire career was a multi-dimensional reflection on the architecture of radio. He always insisted...

As suggested in the title, Slicing Spaces: Performance of Architecture in Cinema, this project slices through the multifaceted layers of film space. The text investigates how architecture performs as an altruist, proving that environed space is not merely a backdrop in film scenes, but...

Since the publication of the first edition of Architectural Technology, in 2002, there have been significant developments in the number of courses, the profile of the discipline as well as significant changes in the Construction sector. The Second edition of Architectural Technology addresses these...

Concrete is ubiquitous but contentious: culturally, environmentally, and often politically. Yet, the architecture it produces across fields of practices remains pertinent to the architectural discipline and its history. Having been incessantly normalized, misused and abused by different stakeholders and agendas, some of its material...

Departing from a discussion on what it would be a mannerist attitude in the architecture of today, and theorizing around it, this book analyzes some works of contemporary European practices including Lutjens Padmanabhan, architekten de vylder vinck taillieu, TEd'A, Maio, 6a architects and AOffice...

How aesthetics--understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity--might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics--one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing...