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 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 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 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.

Download or read book Brunelleschi Lacan Le Corbusier written by Lorens Holm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-25 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This well-argued, analytic text provides a greater understanding of spatial issues in the field of architecture. Re-interpreting the fifteenth century demonstration of perspective, Lorens Holm puts it in relation to today’s theories of subjectivity and elaborates for the first time the theoretical link between architecture and psychoanalysis. Divided into three sections, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier argues that perspective remains the primary and most satisfying way of representing form, because it is the paradigmatic form of spatial consciousness. Well-illustrated with over 100 images, this compelling book is a valuable study of this key aspect of architectural study and practice, making it an essential read for architects in their first year or their fiftieth.

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 Impossible and Hyper Real Elements of Architecture written by Carl Lostritto and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture addresses how and why architects, artists, and designers manipulate reality. Front and center in this discourse is the role of rendering. Most often, to render is to engage a thick software interface, to accept a photographic framework of variables and effects, and to assume an unquestioned posture of articulating material, mass, and color. But like drawing, rendering is an interdisciplinary, algorithmic, historically rooted cultural practice as much as it is a digital vocation. The elements explored in this book are labeled "impossible" because they avoid a fixed relationship to a singular built reality. Digital bonsai trees, pixels, video game levels, grids, and dioramas extend like skewers through multiple media and formats. Through work that looks very real and can't possibly exist, representation becomes the territory of speculation, ambiguity, and curiosity.

Download or read book Intentions in Architecture written by Christian Norberg-Schulz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1968-09-15 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art. Norberg-Schulz is a practicing architect; his buildings stand in several countries; and he elucidates the nature of architectural reality with a practiced eye and from a practical viewpoint. Although the methods and theory that his book develops are uncompromisingly rigorous and tightly formed, they are everywhere related to actual building, through specific examples and through the use of over 100 photographs. The structure that Norberg-Schulz has fashioned is surely one of the most impressive intellectual edifices that any architect has ever produced. The materials that are organically worked into it include Gestalt psychology, the mechanics of perception, information theory, modern analytic philosophy, and in particular, linguistic analysis, and the general theory of signs and symbols. The result, however, is not an eclectic hodge-podge; all these materials have their place and purpose; none is applied extraneously for "show" or purely decorative effect. And all this divergent material had to be joined according to plan within formal bounds in order to produce a theory with equally divergent applications: one that can treat not only of the aesthetics of architecture but equally well of its social, psychological, and cultural effects. The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art.

Download or read book The Favored Circle written by Garry Stevens and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-02-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the field of architecture written by an outsider who demystifies the mechanics of fame and fortune. The popular view of architecture focuses on individual creative geniuses, those who have designed the most "significant" works. According to Garry Stevens, however, successful architects owe their success not so much to genius as to social background and a host of other factors that have very little to do with native talent. To concentrate only on the profession of architecture is to ignore the much larger field of architecture, which structures the entire social universe of the architect and of which architects are only one part. This book critically surveys that field, exposing many myths and debunking a number of heroes in the process. Using the conceptual apparatus of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, Stevens describes the field of architecture on two levels. First, he provides a detailed account of the field as it is at any given point in time, describing the different components and their relationships. Second, he analyzes the dynamics of the field through time, from the Renaissance to the present. He discusses the system of architectural education, as well as everyday aspects such as the competition for reputation. He concludes that throughout history, the most eminent architects have been connected to each other by master-pupil and collegiate relations. These networks, which still exist, provide a mechanism for architectural influence that runs parallel to that of the university-based schools.

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 The Strip written by Stefan Al and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-03-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.

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 The Architect written by Francesca Hughes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of womento the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction ofthe orders that pervade architectural production and consumption. At a moment when the architectural profession is beginning to shift from its traditionally male domination, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of women to the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction of the orders that pervade architectural production and consumption. In a collection of autobiographical essays in which practice is both the site and the vehicle for change, twelve American and European architects reflect on the nature of critical practice and its relation to architecture. The contributors were chosen not only for the distinguished quality of their work, but also for the range of architectural practices they collectively encompass--from the intersection of theory and philosophy to the intersection of building process and industry. Together, they present a compelling and provocative critique of architectural culture. All show a willingness to transgress the various mediums and territories of architecture, to recover and reopen certain discussions lost in the architectural discourse they have inherited.

Download or read book Differences written by Ignasi De Sola-Morales and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997-01-07 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Differences brings together ten essays written over the past decade by the distinguished Spanish architect and theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales. Differences brings together ten essays written over the past decade by the distinguished Spanish architect and theorist Ignasi de Sola-Morales. Many of the essays have never previously been translated, and the author has provided a new introduction especially for this English edition. Contemplating the panorama of contemporary art and architecture, de Sola-Morales posits that there is no one way to describe today's practice; instead he concentrates on elucidating the present dynamic of contrast, diversity, and tension. In an unorthodox pairing, de Sola-Morales derives his inspiration from both phenomenology and Deleuzean poststructuralism. Combining these philosophical inheritances allows him to reinvoke the human subject without referring to classical humanism or announcing the death of the object. His retrospective review of the disciplines of art and architecture, particularly as they have developed since World War II, provokes him to design, draft, and ultimately build a description of Modernism¹s lineage of subjectivity. The result is a provocative construction of fluid "topographies" that articulate, rather than depict, the shaky ground on which our current artistic and architectural production rests. The essays: Sado-masochism: Criticism and Architectural Practice. Topographies of Contemporary Architecture. Mies van der Rohe and Minimalism. Architecture and Existentialism. Weak Architecture. From Autonomy to Untimeliness. Place: Permanence or Production. Difference and Limit: Individualism in Contemporary Architecture. High-Tech: Functionalism or Rhetoric. The Work of Architecture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Download or read book Lateness written by Peter Eisenman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative case for historical ambiguity in architecture by one of the field's leading theorists Conceptions of modernity in architecture are often expressed in the idea of the zeitgeist, or "spirit of the age," an attitude toward architectural form that is embedded in a belief in progressive time. Lateness explores how architecture can work against these linear currents in startling and compelling ways. In this incisive book, internationally renowned architect Peter Eisenman, with Elisa Iturbe, proposes a different perspective on form and time in architecture, one that circumvents the temporal constraints on style that require it to be "of the times"—lateness. He focuses on three twentieth-century architects who exhibited the qualities of lateness in their designs: Adolf Loos, Aldo Rossi, and John Hejduk. Drawing on the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and his study of Beethoven's final works, Eisenman shows how the architecture of these canonical figures was temporally out of sync with conventions and expectations, and how lateness can serve as a form of release from the restraints of the moment. Bringing together architecture, music, and philosophy, and drawing on illuminating examples from the Renaissance and Baroque periods, Lateness demonstrates how today's architecture can use the concept of lateness to break free of stylistic limitations, expand architecture's critical capacity, and provide a new mode of analysis.

Download or read book Stories from Architecture written by Philippa Lewis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues. Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page: architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers, philanthropists—working, observing, admiring, arguing. In Stories from Architecture, Philippa Lewis captures some of these personalities through reminiscences, anecdotes, conversations, letters, and monologues that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings. Some of these untold stories are factual, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s correspondence with a Wisconsin librarian regarding her $5,000 dream home, or letters written by the English architect John Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional, if credible, scenario by placing these drawings—and with them their characters—into their immediate social context. For instance, the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa; a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg’s Rolls-Royce so that the director’s beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by his architect; a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine; even a policeman recording the ground plans of the house of a murder scene. The drawings, reproduced in color, are all sourced from the Drawing Matter collection in Somerset, UK, and are fascinating objects in themselves; but Lewis shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger, invisible, beyond the page, and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the writing of architectural history.

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.