Download or read book Essays in Architectural Criticism written by Alan Colquhoun and published by Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface by Kenneth Frampton Winner of the 1985 Architectural Critics Award for the best book published on architectural criticism over the past three years. Since the early 1950s, Alan Colquhoun's criticism and theory have acted as a conscience to a generation of architects. His rigor and conceptual clarity have consistently stimulated debate and have served as an impetus for the pursuit of new directions in both theory and practice. This collection of 17 of his essays marks a watershed in the development of architectural thinking over the past three decades, comprising a virtual "theory of Modernism" in architecture. In his earliest essays, Colquhoun concentrated on themes that for him comprised the modernist attitude in architecture - language, typology, and the structure of form. His stance since then has consistently been to try to relate these issues to current practice and to analyze the nature of architectural expression in relation to culture. Alan Colquhoun divides his time between England, where is is a principal in the firm of Colquhoun & Miller, and the United States, where he is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University. An Oppositions Book.
Download or read book Critique of Architecture written by Douglas Spencer and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2021-01-18 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique of Architecture offers a renewed and radical theorization of the relations between capital and architecture. It explicates the theoretical gymnastics through which architecture legitimates its services to neoliberalism, examines the discipline’s production of platforms for happily compliant consumers, and challenges its entrepreneurial self-image. Critique of Architecture also addresses the discourse of autonomy, questioning its capacity to engage effectively with the terms and conditions of capitalism today, analyses the post-political turns of contemporary architecture theory, and reckons with the legacies and limitations of critical theory.
Download or read book Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism written by Alan Colquhoun and published by Black Dog Architecture. This book was released on 2009 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism is an indispensable anthology of writing by one of the most important voices in architectural theory of the last 50 years. Born in 1921, Colquhoun graduated from the Architectural Association in 1949. Currently Professor Emeritus of Architecture at Princeton University, he has taught at the AA, Cornell University and University College Dublin, among many other schools of architecture. He is the author of several books including the seminal Essays in Architectural Criticism, 1981, Modernity and the Classical Tradition, 1991, (both republished here in their entirety) and The Oxford History of Modern Architecture, 2002. This book includes essays from throughout Colquhoun's distinguished career. In his early writing Colquhoun subjects modern architecture to a far more thorough reading than was then customary. His meticulous evaluation of Modernism raised the standard of architectural historiography and has influenced new directions in theory and practice ever since. Collected Essays in Architectural Criticism encompasses the clarity of style and rigorous, erudite analysis that Colquhoun has brought to bear on a diverse range of subjects, including Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the Pompidou Centre, Postmodernism and the design of museums.
Download or read book Writing About Architecture written by Alexandra Lange and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Download or read book A Real Living Contact with the Things Themselves written by Irénée Scalbert and published by Park Publishing (WI). This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, by architectural writer Irénée Scalbert, bears witness to some of the more significant developments in architecture during the last 25 years. The essays alternate between detailed studies of major buildings, written while these were being designed or as they were being rediscovered after a period of oblivion, and broader historical surveys that seek out the origin of contemporary architectural ideas. More than their extent, however, what distinguishes these essays is that they draw from direct experience--from interviews with architects, clients, engineers and users, and from the pleasurable, at times rapturous, contemplation of architecture.
Download or read book The Duty and Power of Architectural C written by WANG and published by . This book was released on 2022-04-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rich collection of essays that offer essential, independent voices on architecture criticism in a highly challenging media environment. Should architectural criticism be enlightening? Should it help in the creation of a better built environment? Is there a factual basis to it? Does it have a duty to present evidence in the evaluation of a building? Or should it take on what architects say about their designs? In the context of a flat internet, should architectural criticism be able to define best practices? Does it wield the power over who is in and who is out? Architectural criticism is at a crucial juncture. While serious architecture struggles for recognition, much so-called architectural criticism is merely a poorly paid, decorative legitimation for hyperbolic practice. Incisive architectural criticism is rare, while the definition of criticism itself has become opaque. The 2021 International Conference on Architecture Criticism has gathered exceptional papers that define the purposes and methods of architectural criticism: What should be the ethical basis of architectural criticism? Can it be objective in the context of paid content? Should it outline ideal practices? Or what else should it do? All contributions in this book address either the duty or the power of architectural criticism. In both cases, the authors offer the outline of one analysis of an existing building. Incisive and thought-provoking, On the Duty and Power of Architectural Criticism provides concrete case studies for future generations of architectural critics.
Download or read book Architecture from the Outside written by Elizabeth Grosz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-06-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic.
Download or read book Critical Architecture written by Jane Rendell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-09-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.
Download or read book Building Up and Tearing Down written by Paul Goldberger and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PAUL GOLDBERGER ON THE AGE OF ARCHITECTURE The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry, the CCTV Headquarters by Rem Koolhaas, the Getty Center by Richard Meier, the Times Building by Renzo Piano: Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Paul Goldberger’s tenure atThe New Yorkerhas documented a captivating era in the world of architecture, one in which larger-than-life buildings, urban schemes, historic preservation battles, and personalities have commanded an international stage. Goldberger’s keen observations and sharp wit make him one of the most insightful and passionate architectural voices of our time. In this collection of fifty-seven essays, the critic Tracy Kidder called “America’s foremost interpreter of public architecture” ranges from Havana to Beijing, from Chicago to Las Vegas, dissecting everything from skyscrapers by Norman Foster and museums by Tadao Ando to airports, monuments, suburban shopping malls, and white-brick apartment houses. This is a comprehensive account of the best—and the worst—of the “age of architecture.” On Norman Foster: Norman Foster is the Mozart of modernism. He is nimble and prolific, and his buildings are marked by lightness and grace. He works very hard, but his designs don’t show the effort. He brings an air of unnerving aplomb to everything he creates—from skyscrapers to airports, research laboratories to art galleries, chairs to doorknobs. His ability to produce surprising work that doesn’t feel labored must drive his competitors crazy. On the Westin Hotel: The forty-five-story Westin is the most garish tall building that has gone up in New York in as long as I can remember. It is fascinating, if only because it makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky. It is not easy, these days, to go beyond the bounds of taste. If the architects, the Miami-based firm Arquitectonica, had been trying to allude to bad taste, one could perhaps respect what they came up with. But they simply wanted, like most architects today, to entertain us. On Mies van der Rohe: Mies’s buildings look like the simplest things you could imagine, yet they are among the richest works of architecture ever created. Modern architecture was supposed to remake the world, and Mies was at the center of the revolution, but he was also a counterrevolutionary who designed beautiful things. His spare, minimalist objects are exquisite. He is the only modernist who created a language that ranks with the architectural languages of the past, and while this has sometimes been troubling for his reputation . . . his architectural forms become more astonishing as time goes on.
Download or read book A Critic Writes written by Reyner Banham and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.
Download or read book Non Plan Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism written by Jonathan Hughes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Non-Plan explores ways of involving people in the design of their environments - a goal which transgresses political categories of 'right' and 'left'. Attempts to circumvent planning bureaucracy and architectural inertia have ranged from free-market enterprise zones, to self-build housing, and from squatting to sophisticated technologies of prefabrication. Yet all have shared in a desire to let people shape the built environment they want to live and work in. How can buildings better reflect the needs of their inhabitants? How can cities better facilitate the work and recreation of their many populaces? Modernism had promised a functionalist approach to resolving the architectural needs of the twentieth-century, yet the design of cities and buildings often appears to confound the needs of those who use them - their design and layout being highly regulated by restrictive legislation, planning controls and bureaucracy. Non-Plan considers the theoretical and conceptual frameworks within which architecture and urbanism have sought to challenge entrenched boundaries of control, focusing on the architectural history of the post-war period to the present day. This provocative book will be of interest to architects, planners and students of architecture, design, town-planning and architectural history. Its contributors include architects, critics and historians, including many whose work helped shape the Non-Plan debate during the period. List of contributors: Cedric Price, Benjamin Franks, Elizabeth Lebas, Eleonore Kofman, Ben Highmore, Yona Friedman, Paul Barker, Clara Greed, Barry Curtis, Colin Ward, Ian Horton, John Beck, Chinedu Umenyilora and Malcolm Miles.
Download or read book Labour Work and Architecture written by Kenneth Frampton and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2002-06-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an anthology of writings by the architectural critic Kenneth Frampton. It brings together 25 essays and writings from the 1970s to 2001, which focus on 20th-century architecture, dealing with themes and movements in architecture, built works and the architects responsible for these buildings.
Download or read book Kissing Architecture written by Sylvia Lavin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture's growing intimacy with new types of art Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of "kissing" to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today. Initiating readers into the guilty pleasures of architecture that abandons the narrow focus on function, Lavin looks at recent work by Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and others who choose instead to embrace the viewer in powerful affects and visual and sensory atmospheres. Kissing Architecture is the first book in a cutting-edge new series of short, focused arguments written by leading critics, historians, theorists, and practitioners from the world of urban development and contemporary architecture and design. These books are intended to spark vigorous debate. They stake out the positions that will help shape the architecture and urbanism of tomorrow. Addressing one of the most spectacular and significant developments in the current cultural scene, Kissing Architecture is an entertainingly irreverent and disarmingly incisive book that offers an entirely new way of seeing--and experiencing--architecture in the age after representation.
Download or read book Why Architecture Matters written by Blair Kamin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text collects the best of architecture critic Blair Kamin's columns. Using Chicago as a barometer of national design trends, the book sheds light on the state of American architecture during 'the Nervous Nineties'.
Download or read book Not Interesting written by Andrew Atwood and published by ORO Applied Research + Design. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not Interesting proposes another set of terms and structures to talk about architecture, without requiring that it be interesting. This book explores a set of alternatives to the interesting and imagines how architecture might be positioned more broadly in the world using other terms: boring, confusing, and comforting. Along with interesting, these three terms make up the four chapters of the book. Each chapter introduces its topic through an analysis of a different image, which serves to unpack the specific character of each term and its relationship to architecture. In addition to text, the book contains over 50 case studies using 100 drawings and images. These are presented in parallel to the text and show what architecture may look like through the lens of these other terms.
Download or read book The Architecture of Continuity written by Lars Spuybroek and published by V2_ publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "That buildings are made of elements doesn't mean that architecture should be based on elementarism; on the contrary, we should strive for an architecture of continuity that fuses tectonics with textile, abstraction with empathy, and matter with expressivity." This is the crux of the argument Lars Spuybroek makes in this book, the first fully theoretical account of his innovative work. The state of contemporary architecture is the product of a 150-year battle between the Polytechnique and Beaux-Arts schools of design, which has forced us into a stalemate between the radically opposed positions of high-tech and sculpturism. Spuybroek aims to do no less than mend this rift through rethinking technology as an extension of our feeling senses, materiality as the realm of activity and agency, and structure as the result of genesis. Building on Gottfried Semper's materialist theory of architecture, he takes us from a philosophy of technology to a surprisingly historical argumentation that constantly revives the words of John Ruskin, William Hogarth and Wilhelm Worringer. Alongside a number of essays, the book contains extensive conversations in which we witness him refining and sharpening his arguments ("We will see a merging of Art Nouveau and Bauhaus, where empathy has been liberated from manual labor and machines have been liberated from uniform repetition"). In a period of theoretical tranquility in architecture, this book takes a refreshing turn back to the basics, one in which tools, methodology and architectural aesthetics are recalibrated.
Download or read book After Art written by David Joselit and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How digital networks are transforming art and architecture Art as we know it is dramatically changing, but popular and critical responses lag behind. In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house. Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.
