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Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the great architectural historians of the twentieth century, publishing the influential works "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays" (1976) and "Collage City" (1978). While his written work was rigorous and authoritative, his lectures and letters were more casual, "carefully careless, " both witty and erudite. This(...)
Architectural Theory
December 2022
I almost forgot: Unpublished Colin Rowe
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Colin Rowe (1920–1999) was one of the great architectural historians of the twentieth century, publishing the influential works "The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays" (1976) and "Collage City" (1978). While his written work was rigorous and authoritative, his lectures and letters were more casual, "carefully careless, " both witty and erudite. This publication gathers twenty-three such writings—letters, essays, lectures, a postcard, and a eulogy. Both edifying and entertaining, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, occasionally scathing, they fill in personal details and clarify key concepts in Rowe's work. The author’s voice and opinions are strong in his discussions of architecture, current events, and his own life and work. The writings are illustrated by images of Rowe's drawings, letters, and postcards; photographs and drawings of Rowe's only built work; and illustrations chosen by Rowe for lectures.
Architectural Theory
Piranesi and the modern age
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The etchings of the Italian printmaker, architect, and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) have long mesmerized viewers. But, as Victor Plahte Tschudi shows, artists and writers of the modern era found in these works—Piranesi's visions of contradictory space, endless vistas, and self-perpetuating architecture—a formulation of the modern. In this volume,(...)
Piranesi and the modern age
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The etchings of the Italian printmaker, architect, and antiquarian Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) have long mesmerized viewers. But, as Victor Plahte Tschudi shows, artists and writers of the modern era found in these works—Piranesi's visions of contradictory space, endless vistas, and self-perpetuating architecture—a formulation of the modern. In this volume, Tschudi explores the complex appropriation and continual rediscoveries of Piranesi by modern literature, photography, art, film, and architecture. Tracing the ways that the modern age constructed itself and its origin through Piranesi across genres, he shows, for example, how Piranesi's work formulates the ideas of “contrast” in photography, “abstraction” in painting and “montage” in cinema. Tschudi's exploration of Piranesi's influence on modern architectural discourse includes interviews with such distinguished architects as Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Steven Holl, and Rem Koolhaas.
Architectural Theory
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In this book, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy's architectural habitat and(...)
Some reasons for traveling to Italy
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In this book, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy's architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson's narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect's scrutiny of certain Italian tropes.
Architectural Theory
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The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate—a "concrete(...)
Brutalism as found: Housing, form and crisis at Robin Hood Gardens
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The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate—a "concrete monstrosity" or a "modernist masterpiece"—have marginalized the estate's residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate's lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture's sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present. Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint.
Architectural Theory
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The Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928, is an icon of architectural modernism and a UNESCO World Heritage site. This book tells the true story of the large family connected to it, who rose to prominence through industrial textile manufacturing. It traces the transformations in the life of the family, from their roots in a Jewish ghetto to part of the(...)
Behind the glass: The Villa Tugendhat and its family
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The Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928, is an icon of architectural modernism and a UNESCO World Heritage site. This book tells the true story of the large family connected to it, who rose to prominence through industrial textile manufacturing. It traces the transformations in the life of the family, from their roots in a Jewish ghetto to part of the wealthy bourgeoisie in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to adaptation in interwar independent Czechoslovakia and flight in the face of Nazi invasion. Michael Lambek examines the generation born in the first decade of the twentieth century, especially Grete Tugendhat – Lambek’s maternal grandmother – who commissioned, inhabited, championed, and relinquished the distinctive modern house.The book also provides unpublished correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Ernst Tugendhat, Grete’s son, as well as a description of the impact of a 2017 family reunion.
Architectural Theory
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A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In this volume scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. The volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors(...)
Place matters: critical topographies in word and image
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A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In this volume scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. The volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography’s tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here?
Architectural Theory
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Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but this publication calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for "the construction of disability," this book fundamentally reconsiders how we(...)
The architecture of disability: Buildings, cities, and landscapes beyond access
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Disability critiques of architecture usually emphasize the need for modification and increased access, but this publication calls for a radical reorientation of this perspective by situating experiences of impairment as a new foundation for the built environment. With its provocative proposal for "the construction of disability," this book fundamentally reconsiders how we conceive of and experience disability in our world. Stressing the connection between architectural form and the capacities of the human body, David Gissen demonstrates how disability haunts the history and practice of architecture. Examining various historic sites, landscape designs, and urban spaces, he deconstructs the prevailing functionalist approach to accommodating disabled people in architecture and instead asserts that physical capacity is essential to the conception of all designed space.
Architectural Theory
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With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Josef Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn(...)
Joseph Albers, late modernism, and pedagogic form
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With this book, Jeffrey Saletnik explores the origins of Josef Albers’s teaching practices and their significance in conveying attitudes about form, material, and sensory understanding to artists Eva Hesse and Richard Serra. He demonstrates how pedagogy is a framework that establishes the possibility for artistic discourse and how the methods through which artists learn are manifested in their individual practices. Tracing through lines from Albers’s training in German educational traditions to his influence on American postwar art, this volume positions Albers’s pedagogy as central to the life of modernism.
Architectural Theory
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A contemporary reminder of the importance of the carpenter and wood in Japanese architecture. When Japanese architecture is mentioned today, images of temples or pagodas generally come to mind. Others may think of more contemporary works: massive modular walls of rough concrete poured in place and bearing imprints of their formwork in the manner of Ando Tadao, the(...)
Architectural Theory
April 2022
The carpenter and the architect
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A contemporary reminder of the importance of the carpenter and wood in Japanese architecture. When Japanese architecture is mentioned today, images of temples or pagodas generally come to mind. Others may think of more contemporary works: massive modular walls of rough concrete poured in place and bearing imprints of their formwork in the manner of Ando Tadao, the lighter structures of Ito Toyo and Sejima Kazuyo, or the finely wrought facades of Kuma Kengo. A generational chasm and, rather surprisingly, even a historical one seems to have opened up between the emblematic images of traditional Japanese architecture, in which wood is the material of choice, and more current and innovative work, in which its use has been reduced. Even though the carpenter has long been the lead builder, contemporary architectural culture appears to have forgotten this reservoir of construction experience accumulated over centuries.
Architectural Theory
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Homosexuality is still a taboo subject in architectural history. When historical architectural personalities have lived outside the heterosexual norm, their private lives are readily shrouded in obscurity. As long as penal laws endured, social existence was constantly threatened, and hiding was a necessity. Defensive strategies were needed to protect themselves. To track(...)
Gay architects: Silent biographies from 18th to 20th century
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Homosexuality is still a taboo subject in architectural history. When historical architectural personalities have lived outside the heterosexual norm, their private lives are readily shrouded in obscurity. As long as penal laws endured, social existence was constantly threatened, and hiding was a necessity. Defensive strategies were needed to protect themselves. To track down these outsiders of the past, historical sources must be read queerly. This volume brings together 35 portraits of gay architects from the Baroque era to the modern age in North America, Europe and Palestine, presenting surprising biographies, admirable houses and, not infrequently, intelligently designed refuges with which the protagonists protected their private lives. Featured architects include: Stanford White, Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Bruce Goff, Charles Moor, Lionel Pries, Barry Dierks, William Alexander Levy, Paul Rudolph, Horace Gifford, Luis Barragán, Geoffrey Bawa, Horace Walpole and more.
Architectural Theory