$56.95
(available in store)
Summary:
With its emphasis on permanence and stability, architecture at first resists an easy pairing with live performance, usually considered ephemeral and elusive. But architecture and performance share a core concern: the interplay of bodies and space. 'Bodybuilding' examines the use of live performance by architects. Looking past the unbuilt, utopian projects of the early(...)
Architectural Theory
January 2019
Bodybuilding: architecture and performance
Actions:
Price:
$56.95
(available in store)
Summary:
With its emphasis on permanence and stability, architecture at first resists an easy pairing with live performance, usually considered ephemeral and elusive. But architecture and performance share a core concern: the interplay of bodies and space. 'Bodybuilding' examines the use of live performance by architects. Looking past the unbuilt, utopian projects of the early modernists or the postwar avant-garde, the authors unearth an alternative canon of architects who actually employ performance to fortify the process of building, or else to explore architecture’s enmeshment with labor, security, race, migration, the environment, gentrification, and public assembly. For these architects, performance can be a tool, a method, or a heuristic device; in every case, performance is a blade that cuts into the matter of architecture. With rates of construction plummeting after the financial crisis of 2007–08, newly minted architects have had to find alternative ways to continue working within the field. 'Bodybuilding' grounds these new practices within a century of precedents, and insists that performance is a critical tool to rethink architecture’s agency, goals, and aesthetics.
Architectural Theory
books
$47.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens(...)
Builders, housewives, and the construction of modern Athens
Actions:
Price:
$47.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens reassesses the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type, the polykatoikía, and its different connotations through the decades: from a monotonous and ugly element of the city to the role it might play in the urban sustainability. Sprawling beneath the Acropolis, modern Athens is commonly viewed in negative terms: congested, ugly and monotonous. Builders, Housewives and the Construction of Modern Athens questions this stereotype, reassessing the explosive growth of postwar Athens through its most distinctive building type: the polykatoikía (a small-scale multistory apartment block). Theocharopoulou re-evaluates the polykatoikía as a low-tech, easily constructible innovation that stimulated the postwar urban economy, triggering the city's social mid-twentieth-century transformation. The interiors of the polykatoikía apartments reflect a desire for modernity as marketed to housewives through film and magazines. Regular builders became unlikely allies in designing these polykatoikía interiors, enabling inhabitants to exert agency over their daily lives and the shape of the postwar city. This revised edition of Theocharopoulou's study draws on popular media as well as urban and regional planning theory, cultural studies and anthropology to examine the evolution of this phenomenon. Written in the light of Greece's recent financial crisis, the book's updated Postscript considers the role polykatoikía might play in building an equitable and sustainable twenty-first-century city.
books
September 2022
Urban Theory