Download or read book Italo Calvino s Architecture of Lightness written by Letizia Modena and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-05-09 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.
Download or read book The Architecture of Light written by Mary Ann Steane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reviewing the use of natural light by architects in the era of electricity, this book aims to show that natural light not only remains a potential source of order in architecture, but that natural lighting strategies impose a usefully creative discipline on design. Considering an approach to environmental context that sees light as a critical aspect of place, this book explores current attitudes to natural light by offering a series of in-depth studies of recent projects and the particular lighting issues they have addressed. It gives a more nuanced appraisal of these lighting strategies by setting them within their broader topographic, climatic and cultural contexts.
Download or read book The Architecture of Natural Light written by Henry Plummer and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new paperback, is the first publication to consider the many effects of natural illumination in contemporary buildings. This comprehensive and thoughtful survey begins with a brief introduction to the history of architecture, seen through the advances and experimentation put forward by architects over the centuries.
Download or read book Light Revealing Architecture written by Marietta S. Millet and published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. This book was released on 1996 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking book, Millet bridges gaps that currently exist between how architecture is taught in schools and what methods are practiced in the profession. She deftly examines the relationships among qualitative and quantitative aspects of lighting, the complementary use of daylighting and electric lighting, and poetic and practical approaches to lighting.
Download or read book Architectural Lighting written by Hervé Descottes and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architectural Lighting, the latest addition to the Architecture Briefs series, provides both a critical approach to and a conceptual framework for understanding the application of lighting in the built environment. The key considerations of lighting design are illuminated through accessible texts and instructional diagrams. Six built projects provide readers with concrete examples of the ways in which these principles are applied. Short essays by architect Steven Holl, artist Sylvain Dubuisson, and landscape architect James Corner explore the role of lighting in defining spatial compositions.
Download or read book Electric Light written by Sandy Isenstadt and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How electric light created new spaces that transformed the built environment and the perception of modern architecture. In this book, Sandy Isenstadt examines electric light as a form of architecture—as a new, uniquely modern kind of building material. Electric light was more than just a novel way of brightening a room or illuminating a streetscape; it brought with it new ways of perceiving and experiencing space itself. If modernity can be characterized by rapid, incessant change, and modernism as the creative response to such change, Isenstadt argues, then electricity—instantaneous, malleable, ubiquitous, evanescent—is modernity's medium. Isenstadt shows how the introduction of electric lighting at the end of the nineteenth century created new architectural spaces that altered and sometimes eclipsed previously existing spaces. He constructs an architectural history of these new spaces through five examples, ranging from the tangible miracle of the light switch to the immaterial and borderless gloom of the wartime blackout. He describes what it means when an ordinary person can play God by flipping a switch; when the roving cone of automobile headlights places driver and passenger at the vertex of a luminous cavity; when lighting in factories is seen to enhance productivity; when Times Square became an emblem of illuminated commercial speech; and when the absence of electric light in a blackout produced a new type of space. In this book, the first sustained examination of the spatial effects of electric lighting, Isenstadt reconceives modernism in architecture to account for the new perceptual conditions and visual habits that followed widespread electrification.
Download or read book Thomas W Schaller Architect of Light written by Thomas Schaller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Powerful Paintings from a Watercolor Master "The most nearly 'perfect' paintings to me are rarely the ones simply characterized by technical expertise. More often, they are the ones in which you can sense the beating heart of the artist just below the surface--flaws included." Twenty years into a career as architect and architectural illustrator, Thomas Schaller embarked upon a bold new path as a fine artist. Today he is one of the world's most accomplished watercolor artists, celebrated for his poignant treatment of light and its dynamic interplay with the natural and manmade landscape. The first and only collection of work from this popular contemporary artist, Thomas W. Schaller: Architect of Light features 150 of his finest paintings--buildings, bridges, boats, people and other scenes from around the world. In a series of essays, Schaller ruminates on his journey as an artist, what drives him, and the "truths" he's discovered along the way. He offers not only sage insight on composition, color and other technical aspects of painting, but also provocative perspective on more fundamental struggles for the artist, such as overcoming self-doubt and honing one's own, unique voice. Schaller's essays, like his art, shine with passion, authenticity, and the epiphanies that comprise his artistic constellation: discovering the power of breathing...the secret to "finding the art" in any subject...and how the quest for perfection led him to worry less about the final result to take greater joy in the process itself. It's a pivoting read for collector, art-lover and practicing artist alike, full of views to savor and enlighten.
Download or read book Light in Architecture written by Chris van Uffelen and published by Braun Publish,Csi. This book was released on 2012 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light is a prerequisite for architecture, since it is the element that renders walls and spaces visible. With the right light, well-designed buildings and interiors are considerably enhanced. In recent years, supported by groundbreaking technological innovations, the use of light in architecture and interior design has become more creative, lively and colorful than ever. Not only have these developments allowed for more artistry in the field, but lighting design has also become part of energy-saving concepts. Light in Architecture presents 123 projects by architects and designers all around the world, where the use of natural and artificial light is the defining element: the C42 Showroom in Paris, the Air Traffic Control Tower in Vienna, the Supperclub in Singapore, the Greenpix Zero Energy Wall in Beijing, the Ave Maria Chapel in Naples, FL, the Koukjian Jewelry in Beirut and the Deloitte Headquarters in Copenhagen - this volume allows every imaginable use of light in every sector to shine.
Download or read book Daylighting written by Derek Phillips and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-05-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daylighting offers a general theory and introduction to the use of natural light in architecture. The fourth of Derek Phillip's lighting books draws on his experience to illustrate how best to bring natural light into building design. As sustainability becomes a core principal for designers, daylighting comes to the fore as an alternative to artificial, energy consuming, light. Here, Phillips makes a rational argument for considering daylight first, outlining the arguments in favour of a daylight approach, and goes on to show, through a series of beautifully illustrated case studies, how architects have created buildings in which natural light has been shown to play a major strategic role in the development of the design of a building.
Download or read book Spatial Transparency in Architecture written by Camilo Rosales and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-08-12 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the concept of "spatial transparency"; a form of spatial continuity that articulates depth through permeable, layered, or porous three-dimensional organizations where interstitial light is present. Although transparency is a concept largely associated with the modern movement, the use of glazed components, and twentieth-century architectural discourse, spatial transparency is a form of depth awareness through intermediate domains, takes place through the interstitial fabric of a structure, and occurs when several consecutive domains are spatially and visually connected. These immersive environments invite active participation, not as one-way communication but as a series of visual and experiential exchanges, interdependencies, and relationships. Divided into four parts, the book examines spatial transparency in massive opaque constructions, light constructions, glass assemblies, and hybrid systems. It analyzes both the phenomenon of visual connectivity and continuity through intermediate spaces, and spatial transparency’s capacity for promoting and enabling graded, interflowing environmental transactions. Using historical and contemporary examples, it catalogs some of the most common and recurring configurations that manifest these characteristics. Over 20 international case studies from the Americas to Japan are presented to argue that environments exist in porous mediums and that by studying the openings, voids, light, and materials of layered and/or permeable organizations, important insights about space making can be revealed. Written for students and academics, this book explores various expressions of spatial transparency in architecture and helps connect their abstract ideas with significant built works, analytical drawings, and comparison charts.
Download or read book Light in Engineering Architecture and the Environment written by Konrad Domke and published by WIT Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wessex Institute of Technology has for years been convening conferences on sustainable architecture and planning, design in nature, heritage architecture, and environmental health. With the growing importance of lighting in the creation of better, healthier environments, the enhancement of heritage architecture, and the recovery of urban areas, as well as new developments in more sustainable lighting it became clear that a conference focusing on lighting issues would be useful. This book contains the papers to be presented at the first International Conference on Lighting in Engineering, Architecture and the Environment, discussing the latest developments in a variety of topics related to light and illumination, from its engineering aspects to its use in art and architecture and the effect of light on living systems and human health. Ranging from discussions of technical issues regarding equipment design and light measurement to human perception of light and the effect of light on human health, the book will be of interest to architectures, planners, environmental health experts, and stage designers in academia, industry and government, as well as colleagues discussing the latest developments in a variety of topics related to light and illumination, from its engineering aspects to its use in art and architecture and the effect of light on living systems and human health.
Download or read book Light in Architecture written by Mireia Verges and published by Tectum. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Light is the element that reveals architecture. It renders texture and materials, illuminates surfaces and spaces, and creates atmospheres. This idea book is a useful guide filled with creative lighting suggestions in full color photographs for those who understand and appreciates the main role both natural light and artificial lighting play in architecture, landscape and interior design.
Download or read book Light Construction written by Terence Riley and published by The Museum of Modern Art. This book was released on 1995 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transparency and luminescence have reemerged in the vocabulary of architecture, and light and "lightness" have become key concepts for a significant number of contemporary architects, as well as artists who create installations. Recent work by these designers recalls the use of transparent materials in early modern structures, but they have introduced new ideas and technical solutions. In doing so, they have redefined the relationship between the observer and the structure by interposing elements that both veil and illuminate. In this architecture of lightness, buildings become intangible, structures shed their weight and facades become unstable, dissolving into an often luminous evanescence. The 33 projects illustrated in this book exemplify this emerging sensibility, which is examined in a penetrating essay by Terence Riley, chief curator of the department of architecture and design at The Museum of Modern Art, that places the new work in a broad historic and cultural perspective. More than 30 architects are represented in this international selection, and it includes a broad range of building types, scales and technologies, from the small Leisure Studio created by a group of young Finnish architects to Renzo Piano's enormous Kansai International Airport in Japan. Also shown are the Goetz Collection in Munich by Herzog & de Meuron, the Fondation Cartier in Paris by Jean Nouvel, the ITM Building in Matsuyama, Japan, by Toyo Ito, and a set design by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. Each project includes a description by Terence Riley or Anne Dixon.
Download or read book The Architecture of Light written by Sage Russell and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-07-26 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Architecture Of LightBy Sage Russell
Download or read book Stillness Light written by Henry Plummer and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaker buildings have long been admired for their simplicity of design and sturdy craftsmanship, with form always following function. Over the years, their distinctive physical characteristics have invited as much study as imitation. Their clean, unadorned lines have been said to reflect core Shaker beliefs such as honesty, integrity, purity, and perfection. In this book, Henry Plummer focuses on the use of natural light in Shaker architecture, noting that Shaker builders manipulated light not only for practical reasons of illumination but also to sculpt a deliberately spiritual, visual presence within their space. Stillness and Light celebrates this subtly beautiful aspect of Shaker innovation and construction, captured in more than 100 stunning photographs.
Download or read book Light Air Openness written by Paul Overy and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking book examines the relationship between the modernist architecture of the 1920s and 1930s and that eras preoccupations with health, cleanliness, fresh air and sunshine, exploring how utopian notions of the clean machine and the hygienist movement inspired the pure geometric forms and sparkling surfaces of early modernist buildings. Anyone with an interest in architecture and/or modernism will find this original approach to a popular theme both engaging and enlightening.
Download or read book Cosmos of Light written by Henry Plummer and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the great visionaries and pioneers of modern architecture, Le Corbusier was a master of light, declaring it both a fundamental basis of architecture and the key to personal well-being. In this portfolio of 160 photographs taken over 40 years, Henry Plummer captures Le Corbusier's inspired use of natural light in three of his greatest achievements: the small pilgrimage chapel at Ronchamp, the Dominican monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette, and the parish church of Saint-Pierre in Firminy-Vert, all in France. In these modest religious works Le Corbusier deploys light to create enchanted, emotionally charged spaces wedded to the cosmic rhythm of sunlight and season. Cosmos of Light reveals how the artist reimagined sacred space and charted new ways that buildings can both reveal and inhabit the universe around them.
