Download or read book Re Reading Perspecta written by Robert A. M. Stern and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-04-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best selections from America's oldest and most respected student-edited architectural journal, accompanied by historical and critical commentary. Perspecta, the oldest and most respected student-edited architectural journal in the United States, marks its fiftieth anniversary with this selection of influential and provocative pieces published in its pages from the 1950s through the 1990s. The essays and portfolios in Re-Reading Perspecta trace the development of architectural culture and discourse over the past fifty years and bear witness to the influential role played by Perspecta in a time of crucial debate about the function and future of architecture.This monumental collection (with over 700 pages and 900 images) presents the most engaging and stimulating essays published in Perspecta, written by such well-known historians, theorists, and architects as Vincent Scully, Colin Rowe, Roland Barthes, Karsten Harries, K. Michael Hays, Allan Greenberg, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, John Hejduk, Francesco Dal Co, Bernard Tschumi, and Mark Wigley. Re-Reading Perspecta also assembles the best examples of the richly-illustrated portfolios of projects published over the years, including work by Paul Rudolph, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Eero Saarinen, Charles Moore, Philip Johnson, Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Steven Holl, Thomas Leeser, Hani Rashid, and others.The editors introduce each section with essays that offer historical context and critical commentary. Re-Reading Perspecta also includes essays by Kenneth Frampton, K. Michael Hays, Joan Ockman, and Sandy Isenstadt on the history of Perspecta and its role in architectural discourse. This selection of the best of Perspecta covers a broad and lively spectrum of American architectural design, history, theory, and criticism.

Download or read book The Real Perspecta written by Matthew Roman and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the tricks and trompe l'oeils of contemporary practices, architecture is now, more than ever, in pursuit of the real. It is often suggested that architecture is more "real" than the other arts, more grounded and definitive. Yet even the most fundamental and concrete elements of architecture are often designed to conceal. This issue of Perspecta--the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America--embraces the paradoxical nature of the real, presenting it as a lens that magnifies the strategies and tactics of architecture, past, present, and future. How does architecture create real effects, change our built environment, and respond to crises? What are the tricks and trompe l'oeils of contemporary practice? Amid fake Europes, shape-shifting materials, and underwater asylums, Perspecta 42 navigates architecture's disciplinary boundaries to locate the real in the most unlikely of places. The real has been central to our understanding of architecture for the last hundred years, even if the discussion has been couched in other terms. While architecture anxiously situates itself between building and discourse, it never fully capitulates to either side. Through historical inquiry, theoretical writing, and contemporary projects, Perspecta 42 asserts that now, more than ever, architecture is in search of the real. The issue revolves around three encounters with the real. First, the physical: texts, projects, and conversations that relate to issues of material properties and our bodily surroundings--thoughts on such topics as sensory environments, smart materials, and the floor as a landscape of logistics. Second, authenticity: explorations of representation and hybrid realities, including the digital and the surreal. And, finally, institutional failures and man-made or natural crises: considerations of war, the current economic calamity, and racial politics. Contributors Michelle Addington, Lucia Allais, Alejandro Aravena, Mario Ballesteros, BIG, Andrew Blauvelt, Keller Easterling, Olafur Eliasson and Kurt Forster, Hal Foster, Lorens Holm, Jiang Jun, L.E.FT., Armin Linke, Metahaven, Spyros Papapetros, Emmanuel Petit, Antoine Picon, Bill Rankin, Damon Rich, Francois Roche, Matthew Stadler, Albena Yaneva, Yoon+Howeler, Andrew Zago, Mirko Zardini

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 Perspecta 29 written by William Deresiewicz and published by Perspecta. This book was released on 1998 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This architectural journal examines the legacy of the academic and professional confrontations of the 1960s. Using documents from the Architect's Resistance and from the University, it presents contemporary American projects that represent a generation of

Download or read book Privacy and Publicity written by Beatriz Colomina and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996-02-28 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

Download or read book Mining Autonomy written by Michael Osman and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays exploring the legacy of architectural autonomy and its relationship to architecture's potential as a critical agent. Founded in 1950, Perspecta is the oldest and most distinguished of the student-edited American architectural journals. Perspecta 33 explores the concept of architectural autonomy and its relationship to the discipline's potential as a critical agent.The journal revisits the debate of the past thirty years over architectural autonomy--the belief that architecture is a self-contained field with its own legible, meaningful forms. It addresses the twentieth-century lineage of autonomy from its origins in the fine arts and art history to its architectural manifestation in the 1970s--a time when the functionalist, utilitarian nature of the modernist era led to a perceived dissolution of the discipline's professional boundaries. From this historical understanding, the journal investigates current practice, asking whether autonomy is still essential to the critical project. Perspecta 33 notes a shift in critical attention from the center of the discipline to its periphery, where architecture is able to translate intelligence from other disciplines into its own conventions and language, as well as pass ideas and speculation into the world. New methods of architectural production (digital design, imaging, and fabrication), growing environmental concerns, and changing ideas about domesticity and urban space suggest alternative directions for criticality.The essays are organized in two parts: those that explicitly engage the history of architectural autonomy and those that offer alternatives or counterexamples. In addition to the articles, there is a portfolio of contemporary projects that draw their criticality from disciplines outside architecture. Perspecta 33 also includes a work by the artist Ann Hamilton. Articles are by Stanford Anderson, Carol Burns, Bernard Cache, Diane Ghirardo, Elizabeth Grosz, K. Michael Hays and Lauren Kogod, Neil Leach, Hashim Sarkis, Robert Somol, Michael Stanton, Anthony Vidler, Sara Whiting, and Christopher Wood. The editors of Perspecta 33 are graduates of The Yale School of Architecture and practicing architects.

Download or read book Perspecta 46 written by Joseph Clarke and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays and projects illuminate the nature of error and its creative possibilities for architecture. Architecture never goes entirely according to plan. Every project deviates from its designers' expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, and sometimes celebrate the errors along the way. Perspecta 46 argues that error is part of architecture's essence: mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, and wicked problems pervade our systems of design and building, almost always yielding surprising aberrations. Today, with increasingly complex projects underpinned by layers of computer code, small errors can proliferate rapidly, and the dream of errorless architecture seems more utopian than ever. This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—considers the challenge of defining error, the difficulty of diagnosing and managing it, and the promise (and peril) of following its lead. Essays and projects illuminate error's ambiguous agency both in reality and in the architectural imagination, covering topics that range from Dante's cosmos of divine justice and Michelangelo's architectural “abuses” to Dada urbanism and the warped skyscrapers of Google Earth.

Download or read book On the Art of Building in Ten Books written by Leon Battista Alberti and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1991-07-01 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: De Re Aedificatoria, by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), was the first modern treatise on the theory and practice of architecture. Its importance for the subsequent history of architecture is incalculable, yet this is the first English translation based on the original, exceptionally eloquent Latin text on which Alberti's reputation as a theorist is founded.

Download or read book Surface Architecture written by David Leatherbarrow and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005-02-11 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the building surface, architecture's primary instrument of identity and engagement with its surroundings. Visually, many contemporary buildings either reflect their systems of production or recollect earlier styles and motifs. This division between production and representation is in some ways an extension of that between modernity and tradition. In this book, David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi explore ways that design can take advantage of production methods such that architecture is neither independent of nor dominated by technology. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi begin with the theoretical and practical isolation of the building surface as the subject of architectural design. The autonomy of the surface, the "free facade," presumes a distinction between the structural and nonstructural elements of the building, between the frame and the cladding. Once the skin of the building became independent of its structure, it could just as well hang like a curtain, or like clothing. The focus of the relationship between structure and skin is the architectural surface. In tracing the handling of this surface, the authors examine both contemporary buildings and those of the recent past. Architects discussed include Albert Kahn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alejandro de la Sota, Robert Venturi, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron. The properties of a building's surface—whether it is made of concrete, metal, glass, or other materials—are not merely superficial; they construct the spatial effects by which architecture communicates. Through its surfaces a building declares both its autonomy and its participation in its surroundings.

Download or read book Domain written by James Herbert and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-05-11 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic survival at its most terrifying. The third in the Rats trilogy, international bestseller James Herbert's Domain pits man against mutant rats, who are back with a vengeance. The long-dreaded nuclear conflict. The city torn apart, shattered, its people destroyed or mutilated beyond hope. For just a few, survival is possible only beneath the wrecked streets – if there is time to avoid the slow-descending poisonous ashes. But below, the rats, demonic offspring of their irradiated forebears, are waiting. They know that Man is weakened, become frail. Has become their prey . . . Start the Master of Horror's chilling series from the beginning with The Rats and Lair.

Download or read book I Am a Monument written by Aron Vinegar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Learning from Las Vegas, originally published by the MIT Press in 1972, was one of the most influential and controversial architectural books of its era. Thirty-five years later, it remains a perennial bestseller and a definitive theoretical text. Its authorsاarchitects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenourاfamously used the Las Vegas Strip to argue the virtues of the "ordinary and ugly" above the "heroic and original" qualities of architectural modernism. Learning from Las Vegas not only moved architecture to the center of cultural debates, it changed our ideas about what architecture was and could be. In this provocative rereading of an iconic text, Aron Vinegar argues that Learning from Las Vegas is not only of historical interest but of absolute relevance to current critical debates in architectural and visual culture. Vinegar argues that to read Learning from Las Vegas only as an exemplary postmodernist textاto understand it, for example, as a call for pastiche or as ironic provocationاis to underestimate its deeper critical and ethical meaning, and to miss the underlying dialectic between skepticism and the ordinary, expression and the deadpan, that runs through the text. Vinegar's close attention to the graphic design of Learning from Las Vegas, and his fresh interpretations of now canonical images from the book such as the Duck, the Decorated Shed, and the "recommendation for a monument," make his book unique. Perhaps most revealing is his close analysis of the differences between the first 1972 edition, designed for the MIT Press by Muriel Cooper, and the "revised" edition of 1977, which was radically stripped down and largely redesigned by Denise Scott Brown. The dialogue between the two editions continues with this book, where for the first time the two versions of Learning from Las Vegas are read comparatively."--Publisher's website.

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 The Staircase written by John Templer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1995-03 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first theoretical, historical, and scientific analysis of one of the most basic and universal building elements: the stair.

Download or read book Perspecta 41 Grand Tour written by Gabrielle Brainard and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architectural travel, from the Eternal City to the generic city. The Grand Tour was once the culmination of an architect's education. As a journey to the cultural sites of Europe, the Tour's agenda was clearly defined: to study ancient monuments in order to reproduce them at home. Architects returned from their Grand Tours with rolls of measured drawings and less tangible spoils: patronage, commissions, and cultural cachet. Although no longer carried out under the same name, the practices inscribed by the Grand Tour have continued relevance for contemporary architects. This edition of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—uses the Grand Tour, broadly conceived, as a model for understanding the history, current incarnation, and future of architectural travel. Perspecta 41 asks: where do we go, how do we record what we see, what do we bring back, and how does it change us? Contributions include explorations of architects' travels in times of war; Peter Eisenman's account of his career-defining 1962 trip with Colin Rowe around Europe in a Volkswagen; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's discussion of their traveling and its effect on their collecting, teaching, and design work; drawings documenting the monolithic churches of Lalibela, Ethiopia; an account of how James Gamble Rogers designed Yale's Sterling Library and residential colleges using his collection of postcards; and a proposed itinerary for a contemporary Grand Tour—in America. Contributors Esra Akcan, Aaron Betsky, Ljiljana Blagojevic,, Edward Burtynsky, Matthew Coolidge and CLUI, Gillian Darley, Brook Denison, Helen Dorey, Keller Easterling, Peter Eisenman, Dan Graham and Mark Wasiuta, Jeffery Inaba and C-Lab, Sam Jacob, Michael Meredith, Colin Montgomery, Dietrich Neumann, Enrique Ramirez, Mary-Ann Ray and Robert Mangurian, Kazys Varnelis, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Enrique Walker

Download or read book Architecture and Capitalism written by Peggy Deamer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architecture and Capitalism tells a story of the relationship between the economy and architectural design. Eleven historians each discuss in brand new essays the time period they know best, looking at cultural and economic issues, which in light of current economic crises you will find have dealt with diverse but surprisingly familiar economic issues. Told through case studies, the narrative begins in the mid-nineteenth century and ends with 2011, with introductions by Editor Peggy Deamer to pull the main themes together so that you can see how other architects in different times and in different countries have dealt with similar economic conditions. By focussing on what previous architects experienced, you have the opportunity to avoid repeating the past. With new essays by Pier Vittorio Aureli, Ellen Dunham-Jones, Keller Easterling, Lauren Kogod, Robert Hewison, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Robin Schuldenfrei, Deborah Gans, Simon Sadler, Nathan Rich, and Micahel Sorkin.

Download or read book Strange Details written by Mike Cadwell and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the work of four canonical architects who "made strange" with the most resistant aspect of architecture - construction. This title explores the strangeness in the material menagerie of Scarpa's Querini Stampalia, the wood light frame construction of Wright's Jacobs House, the welded steel frame of Mies' Farnsworth House, and more.

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.