Download or read book Perspecta 52 written by Charlotte Algie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considering a redefinition of global space. As much as it is a neoclassical compositional principle, the ensemble today is shifting into a new critical focus: it is a central figure in nascent developments in probabilistic mathematics and a critical logic in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms. Statistical ensembles are a specific adaptation of Markov processes. They produce and are produced by a highly circumscribed definition of creativity—that of a predictive state inherently based on a chain of linked, given events, thus a computational intelligence predicated on the established patterns of the database. Are these mathematical ensembles different from those of neoclassical composition? How are the new ensembles characterized and materialized relative to their conceptual tradition? This fifty-second issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—is a projective art history of ensemble as form and politics. It uses theories of ensemble to propose both alternative extensive stagings of design objects, as well as other resistant assemblies of the corps of architects. Ensemble is posed a lens to theorize object-parts and states of motion at once, together: an architecture of the city. The volume includes a new photographic essay on the contemporary city of Bengali by American and Indian artists. A collection of essays by interdisciplinary contributors interweave this new creative work, pointing toward a compositional project for an architecture that is multiple, extensive, spontaneous, collective, durational, temporary. Contributors Charlotte Algie, Hayden Bassett, Anya Bokov, Kim Bowes, Alex Bremner, Matteo Burioni, Swati Chattopadhyay, Jean-Louis Cohen, Mark Crinson, Arko Datto, Samia Henni, Heyward Hart, Mark Jarzombek, Vladimir Kulić, Jimenez Lai, Hannah Le Roux, John Loring, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, Emily Mann, Christina Maranci, Edward Mitchell, Brian Norwood, Itohan Oyasimwese, Cristina Osswald, Curtis Roth, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Tursack, Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest

Download or read book Rethinking Global Modernism written by Vikramaditya Prakash and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology collects developing scholarship that outlines a new decentred history of global modernism in architecture using postcolonial and other related theoretical frameworks. By both revisiting the canons of modernism and seeking to decolonize and globalize those canons, the volume explores what a genuinely "global" history of architectural modernism might begin to look like. Its chapters explore the historiography and weaknesses of modernism's normative interpretations and propose alternatives to them. The collection offers essays that interrogate transnationalism in new ways, reconsiders the agency of the subaltern and the roles played by infrastructures, materials, and global institutions in propagating a diversity of modernisms internationally. Issues such as colonial modernism, architectural pedagogy, cultural imperialism, and spirituality are engaged. With essays from both established scholars and up-and-coming researchers, this is an important reference for a new understanding of this crucial and developing topic.

Download or read book Perspecta 38 Architecture After All written by Marcus Carter and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2006-04-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The practice of architecture after the breakdown of consensus: designers, theoreticians, and scholars consider architecture's divergent ideological landscape in this issue of America's oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal. The profession of architecture is increasingly characterized by divergent architectural ideas and divergent political, social, technological, and economic agendas. Much of current practice focuses on the process of architecture (its how) rather than its meaning, effect, or reason for being (its why). This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal—explores the practice of architecture after the breakdown of consensus. Designers, theoreticians, and scholars investigate an architectural landscape devoid of a dominant ideology or ethos. Their essays take specific points of departure—globalization, urbanism, pedagogy, irony, as well as form, theory, and ideology—to address broader questions about the social, economic, and political fallout from these modes of practice, considering whether the lack of an overriding ethos in architecture is liberating or limiting for the profession. And, after all, is it conceivable, or desirable, to return to an architecture derived from a single, dominant mode of operation? Contributors Authors: Roger Connah, Winka Dubbeldam, Dawn Finley + Mark Wamble, Christopher Hight + Chris Perry, Sam Jacob, Emmanuel Petit, Michael Speaks, Ashley Schafer, Noriyuki Tajima, Tom Wiscombe, Lebbeus Woods, Stanley Tigerman Roundtable participants: Michael Speaks (moderator), Hernan Diaz Alonso, Winka Dubbeldam, Mark Goulthorpe, Gregg Pasquarelli, David Serero

Download or read book Thirteen Ways written by Robert Harbison and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Harbison offers a novel interpretation of what architectural theory might look like. The title is based on Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", and like the poem, Harbison's work is a composite structure built of oblique meanings and shifts that give a portrait of architecture in which symbol and metaphor coexist. 10 illustrations.

Download or read book Perspecta 54 written by Melinda Agron and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged. A literal no-place, atopia represents the spatial end-product of a society seemingly flattened by supra-territorial flows of information and material. It expresses both a physical artifact and condition of mass culture, and like the global systems of production and consumption from which it is conceived, atopia is both nowhere and everywhere at once. For the contributors of Perspecta 54, the ephemeral conditions of atopia are also an invitation to an equally unconstrained critical practice. Blurred boundaries—geopolitical, virtual, technical, disciplinary—offer sites for transgressive speculation and critique from beyond the limits of traditional design agency. What results is a form of design practice that ambiguously straddles impossibility and hyperreality. Atopia rejects both the escapist fantasy of utopia and the nihilism of dystopia, favoring instead a conceptual middle ground from which real-world conditions can be productively engaged and challenged. Architecture’s traditional objectives of critical inquiry—particularly the location of modes of complicity, agency, and resistance within larger structures—are mediated and reframed through nontraditional strategies of speculative design and fiction. For a profession that is routinely asked to navigate extreme complexity with limited tools, this approach suggests an expanded operational domain and possibilities for reinvigorated creative thought. From urban crises and climate emergencies to border disputes and geopolitics, Perspecta 54 examines atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged.

Download or read book Curating Post Socialist Environments written by Philipp Schorch and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In which ways are environments (post-)socialist and how do they come about? How is the relationship between the built environment, memory, and debates on identity enacted? What are the spatial, material, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of these (post-)socialist enactments or interventions? And how do such (post-)socialist interventions in environments become (re)curated? By addressing these questions, this volume releases ›curation‹ from its usual museological framing and carries it into urban environments and private life-worlds, from predominantly state-sponsored institutional settings with often normative orientations into spheres of subjectification, social creativity, and material commemorative culture.

Download or read book Informality and the City written by Gregory Marinic and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-10-03 with total page 647 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advances the agenda of informality as a transnational phenomenon, recognizing that contemporary urban and regional challenges need to be addressed at both local and global levels. This project may be considered a call for action. Its urgency derives from the impact of the pandemic combined with the effects of climate change in informal settlements around the world. While the notion of “the informal” is usually associated with the analysis and interventions in informal settlements, this book expands the concept of informality to acknowledge its interdisciplinary parameters. The book is geographically organized into five sections. The first part provides a conceptual overview of the notion of “the informal,” serving as an introduction and reflection on the subject. The following sections are dedicated to the principal regions of the Global South—Latin America, US–Mexico Borderlands, Asia, and Africa—while considering the interconnections and correspondences between urbanism in the Global South and the Global North. This book offers a critical introduction to groundbreaking theories and design practices of informality in the built environment. It provides essential reading for scholars, professionals, and students in urban studies, architecture, city planning, urban geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, economics, and the arts. As a critical survey of informality, the book examines history, theory, and production across a range of informal practices and phenomena in urbanism, architecture, activism, and participatory design. Authored by a diverse and international cohort of leading educators, theorists, and practitioners, 45 chapters refine and expand the discourse surrounding informal cities.

Download or read book Making Stereo Fit written by Eric Dienstfrey and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-01-16 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surround sound is often mistaken as a relatively new phenomenon in cinemas, one that emerged in the 1970s with the arrival of Dolby. Making Stereo Fit reveals that, in fact, filmmakers have been creating stereo and surround-sound effects for nearly a century, since the advent of talking pictures, and argues that their endurance owes primarily to the longstanding battles between stereo and mono technologies. Throughout the book, Eric Dienstfrey analyzes newly discovered archival materials and myriad stereo releases, from Hell’s Angels (1930) to Get Out (2017), to show how Hollywood’s financial dependence on mono prevented filmmakers from seeing surround sound’s full aesthetic potential. Though studios initially explored stereo’s unique capabilities, Dienstfrey details how filmmakers eventually codified a conservative set of surround-sound techniques that prevail today, despite the arrival of more immersive formats.

Download or read book The Cultivated Wilderness written by Paul Shepheard and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997-01-22 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world—landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness is about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them.In the author's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental—he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our current strategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce that covers up a multitude of other possibilities, many other ways to treat the surface of the globe—some of which are the landscapes revealed in this book.In a series of first-person narratives, reminiscent of his last book, the author pairs six landscapes, in order of descending scale from global to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of World War I's Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through these landscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in which the appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turning the land to profit is under review—and offers this book as his contribution to that review. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Download or read book Such Places as Memory written by John Hejduk and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998-04-28 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poems of an architect whose affection for urban reality and imagined space is as evident in his writing as in his buildings and drawings. The poems of John Hejduk are almost nonpoetic: still lives of memory, sites of possessed places. They give a physical existence to the words themselves and an autobiographical dimension to the architect. Architect Peter Eisenman likens them to "secret agents in an enemy camp."Writing about Hejduk's poems in 1980, Eisenman observed, "Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire's writings on Paris were often more real than the experience of Paris itself. Both drawing and writing contain a compaction of themes which in their conceptual density deny reduction and exfoliation for a reality of another kind: together they reveal an essence of architecture itself." This is the first comprehensive collection of Hejduks poems to be published outside an architectural setting.

Download or read book Profile written by Susan Yelavich and published by Phaidon. This book was released on 2004-07 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book on the legendary design firm, Pentagram.

Download or read book Welcome to the Hotel Architecture written by Roger Connah and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Departing from conventional genres of architectural writing, Roger Connah presents an original and wry reflection on the fickle but exciting role that language, semantics, and philosophy have played this century in relation to architecture. Welcome to The Hotel Architecture is a five-part "anti-epic" poem on the culture of architecture - its tribes and inventions, the spectacular and vernacular, and the processes through which names and movements are secured, erased, forgotten, and manipulated.

Download or read book Construction Risk Management Decision Making written by Alex C. Arthur and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONSTRUCTION RISK MANAGEMENT DECISION MAKING Explores the relevance of systems thinking and behavioral science in construction risk management Effective risk management is a vital component of all successful construction projects. Although quantitative tools for evaluating data and minimizing risk are readily available, construction managers commonly adopt a more innate, experience-based approach. In Construction Risk Management Decision Making, project manager and senior consultant Alex C. Arthur provides step-by-step advice on assessing and prioritizing risk using qualitative decision-making systems in the construction industry. Incorporating key theories and concepts from systems thinking and behavioral science, this highly practical guide focuses on the behavior patterns of real people in the industry, rather than complex quantitative techniques and data. Concise, easy-to-understand chapters highlight the current practices of construction risk management while helping readers view risk and decision making from a broader perspective. Throughout the book, the author presents invaluable insights into the ways construction professionals think and behave in the real world. Addresses the actual risk management practices of construction professionals Applies human behavioral theories to the study of construction risk management decision making Illustrates the highly intuitive approaches prevalent in various construction projects Features real-life case studies and practical examples throughout Construction Risk Management Decision Making is an excellent textbook for advanced students in project management, engineering, construction, and surveying courses, and a must-have guide for practitioners of construction management, surveying, and architecture.

Download or read book Oblique Drawing written by Massimo Scolari and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates "anti-perspective" visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life. Scolari's generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history; parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of one-point perspective. Scolari analyzes the use of nonperspectival representations in pre-Renaissance images of machines and military hardware, architectural models and drawings, and illustrations of geometrical solids. He challenges Panofsky's theory of Pompeiian perspective and explains the difficulties encountered by the Chinese when they viewed Jesuit missionaries' perspectival religious images. Scolari vividly demonstrates the diversity of representational forms devised through the centuries, and shows how each one reveals something that is lacking in the others.

Download or read book Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity written by Fikret K. Yegül and published by MIT Press (MA). This book was released on 1995 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text reviews and analyzes the structure, function and design of baths, seeking to integrate their architecture with the wider social and cultural custom of bathing, and examining in particular the changes this custom underwent in Late Antiquity and in Byzantine and Islamic cultures.

Download or read book The Springboard in the Pond written by Thomas A. P. Van Leeuwen and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 2000-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although others have written eloquently on the relationship of water to built form, until now no one has investigated the swimming, pool as a quintessentially modern and American space, reflecting America's infatuation with hygiene, skin, and recreation. In The Springboard in the Pond, Thomas van Leeuwen looks at a familiar hole - the domestic swimming pool - and discovers an icon indispensable to the reading of twentieth-century modernism. At one level, the book is a rereading of modern architecture that will leave that story permanently altered. At another level, it is the story of the origin and evolution of the private swimming pool as a building type and cultural artifact. And at still another level, it is a material philosophy of water. Van Leeuwen explores the human relationship to water from a variety of viewpoints: social, religious, artistic, sexual, psychological, technical, and above all architectural.

Download or read book Noah s Ark written by Hubert Damisch and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Noah's Ark to Diller + Scofidio's “Blur” Building, a distinguished art historian maps new ways to think about architecture's origin and development. Trained as an art historian but viewing architecture from the perspective of a “displaced philosopher,” Hubert Damisch in these essays offers a meticulous parsing of language and structure to “think architecture in a different key,” as Anthony Vidler puts it in his introduction. Drawn to architecture because it provides “an open series of structural models,” Damisch examines the origin of architecture and then its structural development from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. He leads the reader from Jean-François Blondel to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to Mies van der Rohe to Diller + Scofidio, with stops along the way at the Temple of Jerusalem, Vitruvius's De Architectura, and the Louvre. In the title essay, Damisch moves easily from Diderot's Encylopédie to Noah's Ark (discussing the provisioning, access, floor plan) to the Pan American Building to Le Corbusier to Ground Zero. Noah's Ark marks the origin of construction, and thus of architecture itself. Diderot's Encylopédie entry on architecture followed his entry on Noah's Ark; architecture could only find its way after the Flood. In these thirteen essays, written over a span of forty years, Damisch takes on other histories and theories of architecture to trace a unique trajectory of architectural structure and thought. The essays are, as Vidler says, “a set of exercises” in thinking about architecture.