Download or read book Architecture of the Absurd written by John Silber and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his twenty-five years as President of Boston University, Dr. Silber oversaw a building program totaling more than 13 million square feet. Here he constructs an unflinching case, beautifully illustrated, against the worst trends in contemporary architecture. He challenges architects to derive creative satisfaction from meeting the practical needs of clients and the public. He urges the directors of our universities, symphony orchestras, museums, and corporations to stop financing inefficient, overpriced architecture, and calls on clients and the public to tell the emperors of our skylines that their pretensions cannot hide the naked absurdity of their designs."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Allan Wexler written by Allan Wexler and published by . This book was released on 2017-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features projects, developed during the artist Allan Wexler's forty-five-year career, which mediate the gap between fine and applied art using the mediums of architecture, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. Wexler's production can be broadly described as tactile poetry composed by re-framing the ordinary with the intention of sustaining a narrative about landscape, nature, and the built environment that highlights the intriguing and surprising characteristics latent in the elements and rituals that pervade daily life. His work demonstrates a commitment to re-evaluating basic assumptions about our relationship to the built and natural environments. Organized thematically across four categories--abstraction, landscape, private space, and public places--this publication is a richly illustrated cross section of Wexler's multi-scale, multi-media work, featuring his own writings, narratives, and reflections.
Download or read book Hart Wood written by Don J. Hibbard and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lavishly illustrated book traces the life and work of Hart Wood (1880–1957), from his beginnings in architectural offices in Denver and San Francisco to his arrival in Hawaii in 1919 as a partner of C. W. Dickey and eventual solo career in the Islands. An outspoken leader in the development of a Hawaiian style of architecture, Wood incorporated local building traditions and materials in many of his projects and was the first in Hawaii to blend Eastern and Western architectural forms in a conscious manner. Enchanted by Hawaii’s vivid beauty and its benevolent climate, exotic flora, and cosmopolitan culture, Wood sought to capture the aura of the Islands in his architectural designs. Hart Wood’s magnificent and graceful buildings remain critical to Hawaii’s architectural legacy more than fifty years after his death: the First Church of Christ Scientist on Punahou Street, the First Chinese Church on King Street, the S & G Gump Building on Kalakaua Avenue, the Honolulu Board of Water Supply Administration Building on Beretania Street, and the Alexander & Baldwin Building on Bishop Street, as well as numerous Wood residences throughout the city.
Download or read book The Architecture of Bathing written by Christie Pearson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of communal bathing—swimming pools, saunas, beaches, ritual baths, sweat lodges, and more—viewed through the lens of architecture and landscape. We enter the public pool, the sauna, or the beach with a heightened awareness of our bodies and the bodies of others. The phenomenology of bathing opens all of our senses toward the physical world entwined with the social, while the history of bathing is one of shared space, in both natural and built environments. In The Architecture of Bathing, Christie Pearson offers a unique examination of communal bathing and its history from the perspective of architecture and landscape. Engagingly written and richly illustrated, with more than 260 illustrations, many in color, The Architecture of Bathing offers a celebration of spaces in which public and private, sacred and profane, ritual and habitual, pure and impure, nature and culture commingle. Pearson takes a wide-ranging view of her subject, drawing on architecture, art, and literary works. Each chapter is structured around an architectural typology and explores an accompanying theme—for example, tub, sensuality; river, flow; waterfall, rejuvenation; and banya, immersion. Offering examples, introducing relevant theory, and recounting personal experiences, Pearson effortlessly combines a practitioner's zest with astonishing erudition. As she examines these forms, we see that they are inextricable from landscapes, bodily practices, and cultural production. Looking more closely, we experience architecture itself as an immersive material and social space, embedded inthe interdependent environmental and cultural fabric of our world.
Download or read book Discrete written by Gilles Retsin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After two decades of experimentation with the digital, the prevalent paradigm of formal continuity is being revised and questioned by an emerging generation of architects and theorists. While the world struggles with a global housing crisis and the impact of accelerated automation on labour, digital designers’ narrow focus on mere style and continuous differentiation seems increasingly out of touch. This issue charts an emerging body of work that is based on a computational understanding of the discrete part or building block – elements that are as scalable, accessible and versatile as digital data. The discrete proposes that a new, digital understanding of assembly, based on parts, contains the greatest promise for a complex, open-ended, adaptable architecture. This approach capitalises on the digital economy and automation, with the potential of the digital to democratise production and increase access. The digital not only has deep implications for how we design and produce architecture; it is first and foremost a new system of production with economic, social and political consequences that need to be taken into account. This issue presents a diverse body of work focused on the notion of the discrete: from design experiments and aesthetics, to urban models, tectonics, distributed robots, new material organisations and post-capitalist scenarios engaging with automation. Contributors: Viola Ago, Mario Carpo, Emmanuelle Chiappone-Piriou, Mollie Claypool, Manuel Jimenez García, Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte, Immanuel Koh, Neil Leach, Ryan Manning, Philippe Morel, M Casey Rehm, Jose Sanchez, Marrikka Trotter, Manja van de Worp, Maria Yablonina and Lei Zheng. Featured Architects: Kengo Kuma, Lab-eds, Plethora Project, MadM, EZCT, Eragatory and Studio Kinch.
Download or read book Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do written by Joel Heng Hartse and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-02-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing about music, far from being the specialized domain of the rock critic with encyclopedic knowledge of micro-genres or the fancy-pants star journalist flying on private planes with Led Zeppelin, has become something almost any music lover can do—and does. It’s been said, however, that writing about music is a difficult, even pointless enterprise—an absurd impossibility, like “dancing about architecture.” But aside from the fact that dancing about architecture would be awesome, what is that ineffable something that drives people to write about music at all? In this short, insightful book, Joel Heng Hartse unpacks the rock writer Richard Meltzer’s assertion that writing about music should be a “parallel artistic effort” with music itself—and argues that music and the impulse to write about it is part of the eminently mysterious desire for meaning-making that makes us human. Touching on the close resonances between music, language, love, and belief, Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do is relevant to anyone who finds deep human and spiritual meaning in music, writing, and the mysterious connections between them.
Download or read book The Sky s the Limit written by Robert Klanten and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents spectacularly-formed buildings, facades and interiors all made possible by recent innovations in building materials, design technologies and construction tools. There are temporary projects and urban interventions by young and established architects and designers.
Download or read book American Architectural History written by Keith Eggener and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a collection of recent writings on architecture and urbanism in the United States, with topics ranging from colonial to contemporary times.
Download or read book Overgrown written by Julian Raxworthy and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.
Download or read book Bomboozled written by Susan Roy and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the questionable effort of the United States government during the nineteen fifties to convince its citizens that they could survive a nuclear attack in fallout shelters.
Download or read book Fantastic Architecture written by Dick Higgins and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published by Something Else Press, 1971.
Download or read book Occupation Boundary written by Cathy Simon and published by Oro Editions. This book was released on 2021-03-08 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the social, political, and cultural factors that have and continue to influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Reaching beyond the disciplines of architecture and urban design, Occupation: Boundary distills the dual roles art and culture have played in relation to the urban waterfront, as mediums that have recorded and instigated change at the threshold between the city and the sea. At the moment in time that demands innovative approaches to the transformation of urban waterfronts, and strategies to foster of resilient boundaries, architect Cathy Simon recounts her career building at and around the water's edge and in service of the public realm. In so doing, the work of contemporary architects is presented, while the origins and principles of a guiding design philosophy are located in meditations on art and observations on coastal cities around the world. The port cities of New York and San Francisco emerge as case studies that structure the reflections and mediate a narrative that is at once a professional and personal memoir, richly illustrated with images and drawings. Comprising three parts, the first two corresponding parts of Occupation: Boundary draw connections between the past and present by tracing the rise and fall of urban, industrial ports and providing context--in the forms of textual and visual media--for their recent transformations. Such reinterpretations, achieved via design, often serve the public through environmentally conscious strategies realized through inventive approaches to cultural and recreational programs. The work of visual artists, both historical and contemporary, appears alongside architecture, poetry, and literary references that illustrate and draw connections between each of these sections. The third section features select architectural work by the author, framed by critic John King and the architect and urbanist Justine Shapiro-Kline. Introduced with a foreword by the prominent landscape architect Laurie Olin, Occupation: Boundary draws on artistic and cultural intuitions and the experience of an architect whose practice negotiates the boundary between urban contexts and the bodies of water that sustain them. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.
Download or read book The Wrong House written by Steven Jacobs and published by 010 Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture plays an important role In the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Steven Jacobs devotes lengthy discussion to a series of domestic buildings with the help of a number of reconstructed floor plans made specially for this book.
Download or read book The Architecture of Community written by Leon Krier and published by Island Press. This book was released on 2009-05-08 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leon Krier is one of the best-known—and most provocative—architects and urban theoreticians in the world. Until now, however, his ideas have circulated mostly among a professional audience of architects, city planners, and academics. In The Architecture of Community, Krier has reconsidered and expanded writing from his 1998 book Architecture: Choice or Fate. Here he refines and updates his thinking on the making of sustainable, humane, and attractive villages, towns, and cities. The book includes drawings, diagrams, and photographs of his built works, which have not been widely seen until now. With three new chapters, The Architecture of Community provides a contemporary road map for designing or completing today’s fragmented communities. Illustrated throughout with Krier’s original drawings, The Architecture of Community explains his theories on classical and vernacular urbanism and architecture, while providing practical design guidelines for creating livable towns. The book contains descriptions and images of the author’s built and unbuilt projects, including the Krier House and Tower in Seaside, Florida, as well as the town of Poundbury in England. Commissioned by the Prince of Wales in 1988, Krier’s design for Poundbury in Dorset has become a reference model for ecological planning and building that can meet contemporary needs.
Download or read book Archigram written by Archigram (Group) and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme - hence, "archi(tecture)-gram."".
Download or read book From Bauhaus to Our House written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.
Download or read book Architecture Depends written by Jeremy Till and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-08 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polemics and reflections on how to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Architecture depends—on what? On people, time, politics, ethics, mess: the real world. Architecture, Jeremy Till argues with conviction in this engaging, sometimes pugnacious book, cannot help itself; it is dependent for its very existence on things outside itself. Despite the claims of autonomy, purity, and control that architects like to make about their practice, architecture is buffeted by uncertainty and contingency. Circumstances invariably intervene to upset the architect's best-laid plans—at every stage in the process, from design through construction to occupancy. Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection. With Architecture Depends, architect and critic Jeremy Till offers a proposal for rescuing architects from themselves: a way to bridge the gap between what architecture actually is and what architects want it to be. Mixing anecdote, design, social theory, and personal experience, Till's writing is always accessible, moving freely between high and low registers, much like his suggestions for architecture itself.
