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Eccentric spaces
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Like all of Robert Harbison's works, "Eccentric Spaces" is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination and the mysterious interplay between the (...)
Eccentric spaces
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Like all of Robert Harbison's works, "Eccentric Spaces" is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure. Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors, Renaissance sculpture gardens, factories, hill-towns, ruins, cities, even novels and paintings constructed around such environments: these are the spaces over which the author broods. Brilliantly learned, deliberately remote in form from conventional scholarship, "Eccentric Spaces" is a magical book, an intellectual adventure, a celebration. Originally published in 1977.
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April 2000, Cambridge, Mass.
Architectural Theory
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Disciple, ami et associé de le Corbusier, André Wogenscky a mis en pratique sa vision d'une architecture active, vivante, puisant ses formes dans la vie de l'homme et de son milieu physique à travers ses nombreuses constructions.
André Wogenscky : raisons profondes de la forme
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Disciple, ami et associé de le Corbusier, André Wogenscky a mis en pratique sa vision d'une architecture active, vivante, puisant ses formes dans la vie de l'homme et de son milieu physique à travers ses nombreuses constructions.
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October 2000, Paris
Architectural Theory
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The architect and theorist Walter Curt Behrendt (1884-1945) worked on public housing and urban development as a designer and administrator for the German government after World War I. From 1925 to 1926 he edited the journal "Die Form" for the German Werkbund (...)
The victory of the new building style
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The architect and theorist Walter Curt Behrendt (1884-1945) worked on public housing and urban development as a designer and administrator for the German government after World War I. From 1925 to 1926 he edited the journal "Die Form" for the German Werkbund and led an articulate and well-orchestrated campaign in support of the Modern Movement. A friend and colleague of Lewis Mumford, he immigrated in 1934 to the United States, where he taught courses on city planning and housing at Dartmouth College and the University of Buffalo. "The Victory of the New Building Style" (1927)—his principal theoretical work in German and the precursor to Modern Building, which he wrote in English—presents a revisionist conception of style that places equal emphasis on form and function. Behrendt calls for architects to return to basic geometries and to articulate explicitly the new social and economic realities. Now available in English for the first time, this incisive treatise boldly advocates international modernism to the general public. Introduction by Detlef Mertins and translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave
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January 2000, Los Angeles
Architectural Theory
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Although both are central to architecture, siting and construction are often treated as separate domains. In "Uncommon Ground", David Leatherbarrow illuminates their relationship, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960, when utopian ideas about the role of technology in (...)
Architectural Theory
October 2000, Cambridge, Mass.
Uncommon ground : architecture, technology, and topography
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Although both are central to architecture, siting and construction are often treated as separate domains. In "Uncommon Ground", David Leatherbarrow illuminates their relationship, focusing on the years between 1930 and 1960, when utopian ideas about the role of technology in building gave way to an awareness of its disruptive impact on cities and culture. He examines the work of three architects, Richard Neutra, Antonin Raymond, and Aris Konstantinidis, who practiced in the United States, Japan, and Greece respectively. Leatherbarrow rejects the assumption that buildings of the modern period, particularly those that used the latest technology, were designed without regard to their surroundings. Although the prefabricated elements used in the buildings were designed independent of siting considerations, architects used these elements to modulate the environment. Leatherbarrow shows how the role of walls, the traditional element of architectural definition and platform partition, became less significant than that of the platforms themselves, the floors, ceilings, and intermediate levels. He shows how frontality was replaced by the building's four-sided extension into its surroundings, resulting in frontal configurations previously characteristic of the back. Arguing that the boundary between inside and outside was radically redefined, Leatherbarrow challenges cherished notions about the autonomy of the architectural object and about regional coherence. Modern architectural topography, he suggests, is an interplay of buildings, landscapes, and cities, as well as the humans who use them. The conflict between technological progress and cultural continuity, Leatherbarrow claims, exists only in theory, not in the real world of architecture. He argues that the act of building is not a matter of restoring regional identity by re-creating familiar signs, but of incorporating construction into the process of topography's perpetual becoming.
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October 2000, Cambridge, Mass.
Architectural Theory
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A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author’s memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader’s experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration(...)
An Alliterative lexicon of architectural memories: Volume 2
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A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author’s memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader’s experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration and a display of philological origins, often enriched with sub-entries of first-person narratives, based on an auto-ethnographic practice with a post-secular framework. While organized in a standard alphabetical order, the contents reflect the author’s life experience, his early years in Mexico, his travels and sojourns in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia, and his life in Canada as an academic teaching the history of Western architectural theory and philosophy: a life with its inherent limitations and subjectivities, yielding definitions that are both particular and universal.
Architectural Theory
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A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author’s memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader’s experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration(...)
An Alliterative lexicon of architectural memories: Volume 1
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A lexicon of selected architectural terms, supplemented by examples drawn from the author’s memories, this compendious compendium offers new and exciting ways to engage with architecture, enriching the reader’s experience of the built environment. Entries include traditional and modern architectural terminology, rendered with an intriguing, rhythmic play of alliteration and a display of philological origins, often enriched with sub-entries of first-person narratives, based on an auto-ethnographic practice with a post-secular framework. While organized in a standard alphabetical order, the contents reflect the author’s life experience, his early years in Mexico, his travels and sojourns in Europe, Asia, North Africa, and Australia, and his life in Canada as an academic teaching the history of Western architectural theory and philosophy: a life with its inherent limitations and subjectivities, yielding definitions that are both particular and universal.
Architectural Theory
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"Suspensions of Perception" is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to(...)
Suspensions of perception : attention, spectacle, and modern culture
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"Suspensions of Perception" is a major historical study of human attention and its volatile role in modern Western culture. It argues that the ways in which we intently look at or listen to anything result from crucial changes in the nature of perception that can be traced back to the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the period from about 1880 to 1905, Jonathan Crary examines the connections between the modernization of subjectivity and the dramatic expansion and industrialization of visual/auditory culture. At the core of his project is the paradoxical nature of modern attention, which was both a fundamental condition of individual freedom, creativity, and experience and a central element in the efficient functioning of economic and disciplinary institutions as well as the emerging spaces of mass consumption and spectacle. Crary approaches these issues through multiple analyses of single works by three key modernist painters--Manet, Seurat, and Cézanne--who each engaged in a singular confrontation with the disruptions, vacancies, and rifts within a perceptual field. Each in his own way discovered that sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence, and each used this discovery as the basis for a reinvention of representational practices. Suspensions of Perception decisively relocates the problem of aesthetic contemplation within a broader collective encounter with the unstable nature of perception--in psychology, philosophy, neurology, early cinema, and photography. In doing so, it provides a historical framework for understanding the current social crisis of attention amid the accelerating metamorphoses of our contemporary technological culture.
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October 1999, Cambridge
Architectural Theory
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In this book, Richard Hill examines the many-faceted relationship between aesthetic theory and architecture. Grounding his arguments in the practical issues related to building - the demands of site, materials, labor force, the nature of the commission - Hill expands our understanding and enjoyment of architecture. The book opens with an analysis of the relationship(...)
Designs and their consequences
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In this book, Richard Hill examines the many-faceted relationship between aesthetic theory and architecture. Grounding his arguments in the practical issues related to building - the demands of site, materials, labor force, the nature of the commission - Hill expands our understanding and enjoyment of architecture. The book opens with an analysis of the relationship between buildings, drawings, and designs. Hill suggests that architectural drawings are essentially pictures of physical objects, although initially they may be imagined ones, and he considers the implications of this for architects and builders. He discusses the notion of "architectural experience" that has been important in the development of modern architecture, and the notion of "seeing as" that has been developed for other visual arts and that illuminates a range of architectural meaning. Asking how architecture can be expressive of a range of human states and qualities, Hill tests the idea that our ability to see the expressive aspects of buildings relates to our ability to see meaning in the faces and demeanor of other people. In the final section of the book, the author focuses on modern architecture's central aim to deepen the connection between usefulness and design, explores recent intense criticism of this outlook, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this body of criticism.
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August 1999, New Haven
Architectural Theory
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The arcades project
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Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, "Das Passagen-Werk") is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin(...)
The arcades project
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Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, "The Arcades Project" (in German, "Das Passagen-Werk") is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas." Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism, Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress." His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things, a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. "The Arcades Project" is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed "true history" that underlay the ideological mask.
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November 1999, Cambridge, Mass.
Architectural Theory
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Grace and architecture
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Through a constructive way of looking at the timing of architecture, this reference explores the myths of a critical history. The featured ideas are made more concrete and specific by focusing the enquiry on a forgotten building outside Helsinki — Espoonlahti Church — designed by the architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen.
Grace and architecture
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Through a constructive way of looking at the timing of architecture, this reference explores the myths of a critical history. The featured ideas are made more concrete and specific by focusing the enquiry on a forgotten building outside Helsinki — Espoonlahti Church — designed by the architects Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen.
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February 1998, Helsinki
Architectural Theory