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The publication Arts for Living takes a close look at the Abrons Arts Center, a community-art facility on the Lower East Side of New York, as a case study for architecture designed to address issues of public space and community life. The Center was built during the 1970's fiscal crisis and designed by Prentice, Chan and Ohlhausen as a cultural institution with new(...)
Arts for living: public architecture and architectural education
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The publication Arts for Living takes a close look at the Abrons Arts Center, a community-art facility on the Lower East Side of New York, as a case study for architecture designed to address issues of public space and community life. The Center was built during the 1970's fiscal crisis and designed by Prentice, Chan and Ohlhausen as a cultural institution with new educational facilities intended to enable, foster, and serve the everyday activities of the local low-income population. The notions of public architecture and architecture education will be framed through three topics: the architecture and urban space of the Abrons Arts Center itself; the programming and activities at the Abrons Arts Center within the context of architectural education; and a larger survey of the environment of the Lower East Side, in terms of its cultural, social, and political context.
Architectural Theory
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"Vitruvius’s De architectura" is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless(...)
Architectural Theory
October 2002, Cambridge, Mass.
Vitruvius: Writing the body of architecture
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"Vitruvius’s De architectura" is the only major work on architecture to survive from classical antiquity, and until the eighteenth century it was the text to which all other architectural treatises referred. While European classicists have focused on the factual truth of the text itself, English-speaking architects and architectural theorists have viewed it as a timeless source of valuable metaphors. Departing from both perspectives, Indra Kagis McEwen examines the work’s meaning and significance in its own time. Vitruvius dedicated De architectura to his patron Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, whose rise to power inspired its composition near the end of the first century B.C. McEwen argues that the imperial project of world dominion shaped Vitruvius’s purpose in writing what he calls "the whole body of architecture." Specifically, Vitruvius’s aim was to present his discipline as the means for making the emperor’s body congruent with the imagined body of the world he would rule.
Architectural Theory
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The making of shadows is an act as old as architecture itself. From the gloom of the medieval hearth through to the masterworks of modernism, shadows have been an essential yet neglected presence in architectural history. "Shadow-Makers" tells for the first time the history of shadows in architecture. It weaves together a rich narrative – combining close readings of(...)
Shadow-makers: a cultural history of shadows in architecture
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The making of shadows is an act as old as architecture itself. From the gloom of the medieval hearth through to the masterworks of modernism, shadows have been an essential yet neglected presence in architectural history. "Shadow-Makers" tells for the first time the history of shadows in architecture. It weaves together a rich narrative – combining close readings of significant buildings both ancient and modern with architectural theory and art history – to reveal the key places and moments where shadows shaped architecture in distinctive and dynamic ways. It shows how shadows are used as an architectural instrument of form, composition, and visual effect, while also exploring the deeper cultural context – tracing differing conceptions of their meaning and symbolism, whether as places of refuge, devotion, terror, occult practice, sublime experience or as metaphors of the unconscious.
Architectural Theory
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Architecture on Display is a research initiative that consists of interviews with each of the living directors of the Venice Biennale for Architecture. The origins of the architecture biennale are generally traced to the 1970s, when it emerged from under the umbrella of the larger Venice Biennale, which was itself established in 1895. Since then it has become one of the(...)
Architecture on display: On the history of the Venice Biennale of Architecture
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Architecture on Display is a research initiative that consists of interviews with each of the living directors of the Venice Biennale for Architecture. The origins of the architecture biennale are generally traced to the 1970s, when it emerged from under the umbrella of the larger Venice Biennale, which was itself established in 1895. Since then it has become one of the most prestigious forums for architectural discourse today, and has served as a model for a range of international exhibitions. The book explores the biennale through the directors who established its particular discourse, including Vittorio Gregotti, Paolo Portoghesi, Francesco Dal Co, Kurt W Forster, Massimiliano Fuksas, Hans Hollein, Richard Burdett, Deyan Sudjic, Aaron Betsky and Kazuyo Sejima, as well as the current president of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Barrata. These conversations do not seek to recapitulate the exhibitions themselves but rather explore the questions that these exhibitions raise, with the hope of offering a model for future curatorial endeavours.
Museology
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More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its intended role as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of Bilbao and its ability to attract tourist dollars, regardless of its architectural merits. A(...)
Architectural Theory
November 2005, Minneapolis, London
Commodification and spectacle in architecture
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More than ever, architectural design is seen as a means to promote commercial goals rather than as an end in itself. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, simply cannot be considered apart from its intended role as a catalyst for the economic revitalization of Bilbao and its ability to attract tourist dollars, regardless of its architectural merits. A built environment intended to seduce consumers is more likely to offer instant gratification than to invite independent thought and reflection. But how harmful, if at all, is this unprecedented commercialization of architecture? Framed with an introduction by Kenneth Frampton, the contributions to "Commodification and spectacle in architecture" stake out a variety of positions in the debate over the extent to which it is possible—or desirable—to escape from, resist, or suggest plausible alternatives to the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. Rejecting any dreamy nostalgia for an idealized present or past in which design is completely divorced from commerce—and, in some cases, celebrating the pleasures of spectacle—the individual essays range from indictments of particular architects and critiques of the profession to broader concerns about what the phenomenon of commodification means for the practice of democracy and the health of society. Bringing together an impressive and varied group of critics and practitioners, "Commodification and spectacle in architecture" will help to sharpen the discussion of how design can respond to our hypercommodified culture.
Architectural Theory
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Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the(...)
Privacy and publicity : modern architecture as mass media
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Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. "Privacy and Publicity" questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture -- the mass media -- as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right.
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April 1996, Cambridge
Architectural Theory
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In "Chicago Architecture", Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray revise and offer alternatives to the archetypal story of modern architecture in Chicago. They and an esteemed group of contributors assert that the mythic status of Chicago architecture has distorted our understanding of the historical circumstances in which it was realized. This searching volume(...)
Urban Theory
January 2005, Chicago
Chicago architecture : histories, revisions, alternatives
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In "Chicago Architecture", Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray revise and offer alternatives to the archetypal story of modern architecture in Chicago. They and an esteemed group of contributors assert that the mythic status of Chicago architecture has distorted our understanding of the historical circumstances in which it was realized. This searching volume illuminates the importance of photographs, books, magazines, and other media in the cultivation of an international audience for Chicago architecture; it explores the pivotal role of real estate developers, finance and insurance sectors, and speculative capital markets in the development of the city itself; and, perhaps most notably, it examines a wide variety of overlooked architectural works and their creators - individuals who did not fit into the dominant modernist narrative.
Urban Theory
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This book is both a call to reassess the architecture profession and its education, and a toolkit for graduates and working architects to untangle their skills, passions, and value from traditional architectural practice and consider alternate pathways. Written by design professionals and expert career consultants, it is informed by numerous client accounts as well as the(...)
Out of architecture: the value of architects beyond traditional practice
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This book is both a call to reassess the architecture profession and its education, and a toolkit for graduates and working architects to untangle their skills, passions, and value from traditional architectural practice and consider alternate pathways. Written by design professionals and expert career consultants, it is informed by numerous client accounts as well as the authors’ own stories and routes out of architecture. A wide range of architecture students, graduates, educators, and professionals will recognize themselves within the pages of this book and find prompts to reassess their working practices, teaching styles, and the profession itself. It will be of particular value to those students skeptical of joining the architecture workforce, as well as those further along and considering a career change.
Architectural Theory
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In 1923, the Bauhaus introduced itself to the public via an exhibition staged at an astonishing site: the Haus Am Horn, designed specifically for the show. Today, the house is the only surviving example of Bauhaus architecture in Weimar. In ''Haus Am Horn,'' editors Anke Blümm and Martina Ullrich present the at times tumultuous history of this architectural landmark.
Haus am Horn: Bauhaus architecture in Weimar
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In 1923, the Bauhaus introduced itself to the public via an exhibition staged at an astonishing site: the Haus Am Horn, designed specifically for the show. Today, the house is the only surviving example of Bauhaus architecture in Weimar. In ''Haus Am Horn,'' editors Anke Blümm and Martina Ullrich present the at times tumultuous history of this architectural landmark.
Modernism
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Wittgenstein's House reads Wittgenstein's his two main philosophical texts, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, in relation to an experience that intervened between them: his design and construction of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house in Vienna. Arguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between(...)
Wittgenstein's house: language, space, & architecture
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Wittgenstein's House reads Wittgenstein's his two main philosophical texts, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations, in relation to an experience that intervened between them: his design and construction of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house in Vienna. Arguing that the practice of architecture occupies not just a historical position between Wittgenstein's early and late philosophy, but a conceptual position as well, the book demonstrates that Wittgenstein's practice of architecture constitutes a fundamental component in the development of his philosophy of language from its early to late phases. The book advances the radical proposition that the field in which architecture and philosophy operate includes linguistic and spatial practices. It develops innovative forms of interdisciplinary analyses to demonstrate that the philosophical positions put forth by Wittgenstein's two main works are literally unthinkable outside of their respective conceptions of space: the view from above in the early work and the view from within constructed by the late work. To examine the manner in which Wittgenstein's practice of architecture insinuated itself into his philosophy, the author interweaves in-depth analyses of the spatial constructs underpinning the early and late philosophies with conceptual, formal and operative discussions of the design of the Stonborough-Wittgenstein house. Together these discussions reveal how Wittgenstein's practice of architecture engaged philosophical concepts, through which it influenced Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. At the heart of this approach is the finding that the philosophical concepts at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy areindeed spatial ones, including his concerns with the limits of language, the boundary between showing and saying, the intricate textual numbering systems he devises, the relationship between the interiority of the subject and the publicness of language, and the formative principle of family resemblance.
Architectural Theory