Download or read book An Architecture of Parts Architects Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940 1970 written by Christine Wall and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-04 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is unique in describing the history of post war reconstruction from an entirely new perspective by focusing on the changing relationship between architects and building workers. It considers individual, as well as collective, interactions with technical change and in doing so brings together, for the first time, an extraordinary range of sources including technical archives, oral history and visual material to describe the construction process both during and in the decades after the war. It focuses on the social aspects of production and the changes in working life for architects and building workers with increasing industrialization, in particular analysing the effect on the building process of introducing dimensionally co-ordinated components. Both architects and building workers have been accused of creating a built environment now popularly discredited: architects responsible for poor design and building workers for poor workmanship. However, many of the structures and ideas underpinning this period of rapid change were revolutionary in their commitment to a complete transformation of the building process. An Architecture of Parts adds to the growing literature on changes in the building world during and immediately after the Second World War. It is significant, both empirically and historically, in its examination of the ideas, technology and relationships that fired industrialization of the building process in mid-century Britain.
Download or read book Industries of Architecture written by Katie Lloyd Thomas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the technologies and techniques of producing the built environment are undergoing significant change, this book makes central architecture’s relationship to industry. Contributors turn to historical and theoretical questions, as well as to key contemporary developments, taking a humanities approach to the Industries of Architecture that will be of interest to practitioners and industry professionals, as much as to academic researchers, teachers and students. How has modern architecture responded to mass production? How do we understand the necessarily social nature of production in the architectural office and on the building site? And how is architecture entwined within wider fields of production and reproduction—finance capital, the spaces of regulation, and management techniques? What are the particular effects of techniques and technologies (and above all their inter-relations) on those who labour in architecture, the buildings they produce, and the discursive frameworks we mobilise to understand them?
Download or read book Speaking of Buildings written by Naomi Stead and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By and large, architectural historians use texts, drawings, and photographs to craft their narratives. Oral testimony from those who actually occupy or construct buildings is rarely taken as seriously. Speaking of Buildings offers a rebuttal, theorizing the radical potential of a methodology that has historically been cast as unreliable. Essays by an international group of scholars look at varied topics, from the role of gossip in undermining masculine narratives in architecture to workers' accounts of building with cement in midcentury London to a sound art piece created by oral testimonies from Los Angeles public housing residents. In sum, the authors call for a renewed form of listening to enrich our understanding of what buildings are, what they do, and what they mean to people.
Download or read book Building Materials written by Katie Lloyd Thomas and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – 'naming' through timber, 'process-based' through concrete, and 'performance specification' through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or 'Preliminary Operations' as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.
Download or read book Designing the British Post War Home written by Fiona Fisher and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Designing the British Post-War Home Fiona Fisher explores the development of modern domestic architecture in Britain through a detailed study of the work of the successful Surrey-based architectural practice of Kenneth Wood. Wood’s firm is representative of a geographically distinct category of post-war architectural and design practice - that of the small private practice that flourished in Britain’s expanding suburbs after the removal of wartime building restrictions. Such firms, which played an important role in the development of British domestic design, are currently under-represented within architectural histories of the period. The private house represents an important site in which new spatial, material and aesthetic parameters for modern living were defined after the Second World War. Within a British context, the architect-designed private house remained an important ‘vehicle for the investigation of architectural ideas’ by second generation modernist architects and designers. Through a series of case study houses, designed by Wood’s firm, the book reconsiders the progress of modern domestic architecture in Britain and demonstrates the ways in which architectural discourse and practice intersected with the experience, performance and representation of domestic modernity in post-war Britain.
Download or read book Architectural System Structures written by Kasper Sánchez Vibæk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-20 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book proposes a system structure in architectural design that conceptualises a systemic level in architecture and construction that lies between general construction techniques and specific architectural results. In order to make such a system structure operational, the elaboration of a model seeks on the one hand to analytically grasp and on the other hand to make it possible to actively work with system structures as part of architectural design. Kasper Sanchez Vibaek's ambition is to bridge an apparent and increasing gap between architectural ideation and the way these ideas are brought to life as real physical manifestations of our built environment. In line with the so-called systems sciences the book rejects the prevalent scientific view that the degree of detail ‘automatically’ enhances understanding and explanative power of complex phenomena. It establishes the idea of a systems view on buildings and architectural design that through the use of flexible constituent elements facilitates discussion and decision making about how architectural wholes are appropriately put together as assemblages of what the current and future building industry is capable of producing. Based on several years of detailed research into the architectural consequences of construction when exposed to industrialised production techniques and systems, Architectural System Structures represents a new way to look at what is already there and is useful for all those interested in the processes of architectural creation and realisation specifically attached to time, place and cultural context.
Download or read book Architectural Temperance written by Victor Deupi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architectural Temperance examines relations between Bourbon Spain and papal Rome (1700-1759) through the lens of cultural politics. With a focus on key Spanish architects sent to study in Rome by the Bourbon Kings, the book also discusses the establishment of a program of architectural education at the newly founded Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. Victor Deupi explores why a powerful nation like Spain would temper its own building traditions with the more cosmopolitan trends associated with Rome; often at the expense of its own national and regional traditions. Through the inclusion of previously unpublished documents and images that shed light on the theoretical debates which shaped eighteenth-century architecture in Rome and Madrid, Architectural Temperance provides readers with new insights into the cultural history of early modern Spain.
Download or read book Under Construction written by Eike-Christian Heine and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2015 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On construction sites the world is altered in a very solid, material way. This is not the whole story, of course: if someone builds a house, a railroad or any other thing, there is more under construction that the mere object itself. With spade and excavator contemporary imaginations, visions and historical concepts are equally reshaped or renewed. Interventions into the physical landscape are always accompanied by interventions into the imaginary landscape. Here, eleven authors from seven European countries examine the discursive alongside the performative construction of reality when things are being built.
Download or read book Wooden Church Architecture of the Russian North written by Evgeny Khodakovsky and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents a broad panoramic overview of church architecture in the Russian North between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. While it is inevitably overshadowed by the imperial splendour of the country’s capital cities, this unique phenomenon is regarded as the most distinctive national expression of traditional Russian artistic culture and at the same time as a significant part of humanity’s worldwide architectural heritage. The chief intention of the book is to present the regionally specific features of the wooden churches of the Russian North, which vary from area to area for local natural or historical reasons. This approach touches upon the very important questions of the typology and classification of the multiplicity of architectural forms. The "regional view" entails giving clear definitions of the ambiguous terms "architectural school" and "tradition", explaining the origins and shaping impulses for the different regional clusters of objects. Structurally the book presents a history of the development of wooden church architecture in the Russian North and then follows the key points of the mediaeval Russian expansion along the waterways from Novgorod into the North – he Svir’ River, Lake Onego, the town of Kargopol’ and the River Onega, the White Sea, the Rivers Dvina, Pinega and Mezen’ – those areas that still retain the most splendid pieces of Russian regional wooden church architecture. The study is based on field research and provides an up-to-date, multi-faceted view of Russian wooden architecture.
Download or read book Architecture for the Commons written by Jose Sanchez and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture for the Commons dives into an analysis of how the tectonics of a building is fundamentally linked to the economic organizations that allow them to exist. By tracing the origins and promises of current technological practices in design, the book provides an alternative path, one that reconsiders the means of achieving complexity through combinatorial strategies. This move requires reconsidering serial production with crowdsourcing and user content in mind. The ideas presented will be explored through the design research developed within Plethora Project, a design practice that explores the use of video game interfaces as a mechanism for participation and user design. The research work presented throughout the book seeks to align with a larger project that is currently taking place in many different fields: The Construction of the Commons. By developing both the ideological and physical infrastructure, the project of the Commons has become an antidote to current economic practices that perpetuate inequality. The mechanisms of the production and governance of the Commons are discussed, inviting the reader to get involved and participate in the discussion. The current political and economic landscape calls for a reformulation of our current economic practices and alternative value systems that challenge the current market monopolies. This book will be of great interest not only to architects and designers studying the impact of digital technologies in the field of design but also to researchers studying novel techniques for social participation and cooperating of communities through digital networks. The book connects principles of architecture, economics and social sciences to provide alternatives to the current production trends.
Download or read book Architecture as Cultural and Political Discourse written by Daniel Grinceri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is concerned with cultural and political discourses that affect the production of architecture. It examines how these discursive mechanisms and technologies combine to normalise and aestheticise everyday practices. It queries the means by which buildings are appropriated to give shape and form to political aspirations and values. Architecture is not overtly political. It does not coerce people to behave in certain ways. However, architecture is constructed within the same rules and practices whereby people and communities self-govern and regulate themselves to think and act in certain ways. This book seeks to examine these rules through various case studies including: the reconstructed Notre Dame Cathedral, the Nazi era Munich Konigsplatz, Auschwitz concentration camp and the Prora resort, Sydney’s suburban race riots, and the Australian Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island.
Download or read book Bruno Taut s Design Inspiration for the Glashaus written by David Nielsen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a formative exemplar of early architectural modernism, Bruno Taut’s seminal exhibition pavilion the Glashaus (literally translated Glasshouse) is logically part of the important debate of rethinking the origins of modernism. However, the historical record of Bruno Taut’s Glashaus has been primarily established by one art historian and critic. As a result the historical record of the Glashaus is significantly skewed toward a singlular notion of Expressionism and surprisingly excludes Taut’s diverse motives for the design of the building. In an effort to clarify the problematic historical record of the Glashaus, this book exposes Bruno Taut’s motives and inspirations for its design. The result is that Taut’s motives can be found in yet unacknowledged precedents like the botanical inspiration of the Victoria regia lily; the commercial interests of Frederick Keppler as the Director of the Deutche Luxfer Prismen Syndikat; and imitation that derived openly from the Gothic. The outcome is a substantial contribution to the re-evaluation of the generally accepted histories of the modern movement in architecture.
Download or read book Drawing the Unbuildable written by Nerma Cridge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-12 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture is conventionally seen as being synonymous with building. In contrast, this book introduces and defines a new category - the unbuildable. The unbuildable involves projects that are not just unbuilt, but cannot be built. This distinct form of architectural project has an important and often surprising role in architectural discourse, working not in opposition to the buildable, but frequently complementing it. Using well-known examples of early Soviet architecture – Tatlin’s Tower in particular – Nerma Cridge demonstrates the relevance of the unbuildable, how it relates to current notions of seriality, copying and reproduction, and its implications for contemporary practice and discourse in the computational age. At the same time it offers a fresh view of our preconceptions and expectations of early Soviet architecture and the Constructivist Movement.
Download or read book Ars et Ingenium The Embodiment of Imagination in Francesco di Giorgio Martini s Drawings written by Pari Riahi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When did drawing become an integral part of architecture? Among several architects and artists who brought about this change during the Renaissance, Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s ideas on drawing recorded in his Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (1475-1490) are significant. Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect’s imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco’s written work and steadily penetrating into the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco’s work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.
Download or read book Cut and Paste Urban Landscape written by Mira Engler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen. Despite Cullen’s wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen’s drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today’s design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still used today.
Download or read book Assembling the Centre Architecture for Indigenous Cultures written by Janet McGaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Metropolitan Indigenous Cultural Centres have become a focal point for making Indigenous histories and contemporary cultures public in settler-colonial societies over the past three decades. While there are extraordinary success stories, there are equally stories that cause concern: award-winning architecturally designed Indigenous cultural centres that have been abandoned; centres that serve the interests of tourists but fail to nourish the cultural interests of Indigenous stakeholders; and places for vibrant community gathering that fail to garner the economic and politic support to remain viable. Indigenous cultural centres are rarely static. They are places of ‘emergence’, assembled and re-assembled along a range of vectors that usually lie beyond the gaze of architecture. How might the traditional concerns of architecture – site, space, form, function, materialities, tectonics – be reconfigured to express the complex and varied social identities of contemporary Indigenous peoples in colonised nations? This book, documents a range of Indigenous Cultural Centres across the globe and the processes that led to their development. It explores the possibilities for the social and political project of the Cultural Centre that architecture both inhibits and affords. Whose idea of architecture counts when designing Indigenous Cultural Centres? How does architectural history and contemporary practice territorialise spaces of Indigenous occupation? What is architecture for Indigenous cultures and how is it recognised? This ambitious and provocative study pursues a new architecture for colonised Indigenous cultures that takes the politics of recognition to its heart. It advocates an ethics of mutual engagement as a crucial condition for architectural projects that design across cultural difference. The book’s structure, method, and arguments are dialogically assembled around narratives told by Indigenous people of their pursuit of public recognition, spatial justice, and architectural presence in settler dominated societies. Possibilities for decolonising architecture emerge through these accounts.
Download or read book Sacred Architecture in a Secular Age written by Marie Clausén and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having won more than one recent poll as Britain’s best-loved building, the appeal of Durham Cathedral appears abiding, which begs the question whether an iconic sacred building can retain meaning and affective pertinence for contemporary, secular visitors. Using the example of Durham Cathedral, this book sets out to explore wherein the appeal of historic churches lies today and considers questions of how and why their preservation into a post-Christian era should be secured. By including feedback from visitors to the cathedral, and the author’s own very personal account of the cathedral in the form of an ekphrasis, this work seeks to privilege an interpretation of architecture that is based on the individual experience rather than on more conventional narratives of architecture history and cultural heritage policy. Recognising the implication of our choice of narrative on the perceived value of historic churches is crucial when deliberating their future role. This book puts forth a compelling case for historical sacred architecture, suggesting that its loss - through imperceptive conservation practices as much as through neglect or demolition - would diminish us all, secularists, atheists and agnostics included.
