Download or read book Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment written by Henri Lefebvre and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment is the first publication in any language of the only book devoted to architecture by Henri Lefebvre. Written in 1973 but only recently discovered in a private archive, this work extends Lefebvre’s influential theory of urban space to the question of architecture. Taking the practices and perspective of habitation as his starting place, Lefebvre redefines architecture as a mode of imagination rather than a specialized process or a collection of monuments. He calls for an architecture of jouissance—of pleasure or enjoyment—centered on the body and its rhythms and based on the possibilities of the senses. Examining architectural examples from the Renaissance to the postwar period, Lefebvre investigates the bodily pleasures of moving in and around buildings and monuments, urban spaces, and gardens and landscapes. He argues that areas dedicated to enjoyment, sensuality, and desire are important sites for a society passing beyond industrial modernization. Lefebvre’s theories on space and urbanization fundamentally reshaped the way we understand cities. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment promises a similar impact on how we think about, and live within, architecture.

Download or read book Origins of Architectural Pleasure written by Grant Hildebrand and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging study discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing--and useful for survival--from ancient times to the present. 119 photos. 6 line figures.

Download or read book The Urban Revolution written by Henri Lefebvre and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1970, The Urban Revolution marked Henri Lefebvre’s first sustained critique of urban society, a work in which he pioneered the use of semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist methodologies in analyzing the development of the urban environment. Although it is widely considered a foundational book in contemporary thinking about the city, The Urban Revolution has never been translated into English—until now. This first English edition, deftly translated by Robert Bononno, makes available to a broad audience Lefebvre’s sophisticated insights into the urban dimensions of modern life.Lefebvre begins with the premise that the total urbanization of society is an inevitable process that demands of its critics new interpretive and perceptual approaches that recognize the urban as a complex field of inquiry. Dismissive of cold, modernist visions of the city, particularly those embodied by rationalist architects and urban planners like Le Corbusier, Lefebvre instead articulates the lived experiences of individual inhabitants of the city. In contrast to the ideology of urbanism and its reliance on commodification and bureaucratization—the capitalist logic of market and state—Lefebvre conceives of an urban utopia characterized by self-determination, individual creativity, and authentic social relationships.A brilliantly conceived and theoretically rigorous investigation into the realities and possibilities of urban space, The Urban Revolution remains an essential analysis of and guide to the nature of the city.Henri Lefebvre (d. 1991) was one of the most significant European thinkers of the twentieth century. His many books include The Production of Space (1991), Everyday Life in the Modern World (1994), Introduction to Modernity (1995), and Writings on Cities (1995).Robert Bononno is a full-time translator who lives in New York. His recent translations include The Singular Objects of Architecture by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel (Minnesota, 2002) and Cyberculture by Pierre Lévy (Minnesota, 2001).

Download or read book The Architecture of Happiness written by Alain De Botton and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.

Download or read book New Traditional Architecture written by Mark Ferguson and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-03-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated volume presents Ferguson & Shamamian's finest work, including new houses, apartments, alterations and additions, and unbuilt design plans.

Download or read book The Space Within written by Robert McCarter and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture wasn’t what a building looks like on the day it opens but what it is like to live inside it thirty years later. In this book, architect and critic Robert McCarter persuasively argues that interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work after it has been built. McCarter reveals that we can’t really know a piece of architecture without inhabiting its spaces, and we need to counter our contemporary obsession with exterior views and forms with a renewed appreciation for interiors. He explores how interior space has been integral to the development of modern architecture from the late 1800s to today, and he examines how architects have engaged interior space and its experiences in their design processes, fundamentally transforming traditional approaches to composition. Eloquently placing us within a host of interior spaces, he opens up new ways of thinking about architecture and what its goals are and should be.

Download or read book Foundations of Landscape Architecture written by Norman Booth and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A visually engaging introduction to landscape architectural design Landscape architectural design seeks to create environments that accommodate users' varying lifestyles and needs, incorporate cultural heritage, promote sustainability, and integrate functional requirements for optimal enjoyment. Foundations of Landscape Architecture introduces the foundational concepts needed to effectively integrate space and form in landscape design. With over five hundred hand-rendered and digital drawings, as well as photographs, Foundations of Landscape Architecture illustrates the importance of spatial language. It introduces concepts, typologies, and rudimentary principles of form and space. Including designs for projects such as parks, campuses, and memorials, this text provides the core concepts necessary for designers to shape functional landscapes. Additionally, chapters discuss organizational and spatial design structures based on orthogonal forms, angular forms, and circular forms. Helping students, professionals, and lifelong learners alike, Foundations of Landscape Arch-itecture delivers a concrete understanding of landscape architectural design to inspire one's imagination for countless types of projects.

Download or read book An Architecture Manifesto written by Nadir Lahiji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

Download or read book Everyday Architecture of the Mid Atlantic written by Gabrielle M. Lanier and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1997-07-15 with total page 1278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyday Architecture of the Mid-Atlantic gives proof to the insights architecture offers into who we are culturally as a community, a region, and a nation.

Download or read book The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture written by Pier Vittorio Aureli and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-02-11 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

Download or read book Pursuit of Pleasure written by Jane Rendell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-07-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pursuit of Pleasure presents the figures of the rambler and the cyprian, the Eighteenth Century precursors to the Parisian flGneur and prostitute. The urban spaces traced by these figures were the clubs, sporting venues, operas, assembly rooms, streets and arcades of central London.Drawing on critical theory, geography and philosophy, The Pursuit of Pleasure extends and critiques the discipline of architectural history from a feminist perspective. The gendering of public space is considered to be a complex and shifting series of moves and looks between men and women, constructed and represented through spatial and social relations of consumption, display and exchange.Illustrated with contemporary prints and drawings, The Pursuit of Pleasure is an extraordinarily rich analysis of the gendered issues of public space at the birth of the modern metropolis.

Download or read book A Pattern Language written by Christopher Alexander and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 1216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Download or read book Seattle Architecture written by Maureen R. Elenga and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of Historic Seattle's Preservation Education and Publications Award Seattle Architecture: A Walking Guide to Downtown opens with an historical overview and timeline featuring the people and events that have shaped the Seattle that we know today. The guidebook is divided into nine tours beginning where Seattle did, at Pioneer Square, and ending at Seattle Center, the location of the futuristic-themed 1962 Century 21 World's Fair. The front flap folds out, providing a map of the areas covered in the book. Each tour is accompanied by an introduction and area map with points of interest identified by numbers that correspond to individual entries. Architect names and dates of completion are provided at the beginning of each entry, and an icon indicates when a building is on a local or national landmarks register.

Download or read book Architecture for Teens written by Danielle Willkens and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical introduction to architecture for aspiring teen architects Architecture is a fascinating, diverse field that blends technology, creativity, engineering, and even psychology. Discover the possibilities with this in-depth choice in architecture books for teens. Delve into the world of architecture, learn about recent innovations in sustainability and inclusivity, and uncover the details behind real architectural projects. Explore an overview of architectural movements and designers from prehistory to modern-day, and check out inspiring interviews with working professionals. With tons of practical advice for pursuing a career, you'll find out how you can become an architect and help build an environmentally responsible world from the ground up! Go beyond other architecture books for teens with: Architecture essentials—Get to know the five basic elements of architecture: structure, program, economics, aesthetics, and region. Creative career options—Learn what it means to work in residential or industrial architecture, specialize in historic preservation, create landscapes, innovate in urban planning, and more. Real-world examples—Go behind the scenes on real architectural projects with colorful illustrations, breakdowns of the design process, and thoughtful examinations of their impact. Learn all about the role of an architect with this comprehensive selection in architecture books for teens.

Download or read book Architecture and Meaning on the Athenian Acropolis written by Robin Francis Rhodes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-06-30 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the several buildings making up the Acropolis as a group, or narrative.

Download or read book Architecture of the Middle Ages written by Ulrike Laule and published by Feierabend Verlag, Ohg. This book was released on 2004 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architecture of the Middle Ages is still vividly present in the cities of Europe. This highly pictorial text provides information on medieval buildings, introducing the fundamentals and the unique features of the Romanesque and Gothic art of building, and especially of sacred buildings.

Download or read book Architecture As Space written by Bruno Zevi and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 1993-08-21 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work (first published in Italian in 1948, translated in 1957, and revised in 1974) examines the history of architecture in light of its essence as space, animating and illuminating architectural creations so that their beauty—or indifference—is exposed. Along with commercial and dwelling units, temples, palaces, and cathedrals, Zevi treats structures such as fountains, columns, and monuments, subjecting them all to aesthetic, cultural, and functional criteria and explaining them in easily understood terms. Beautifully illustrated with examples from the entire history of the art, this is one of the most stimulating and provocative books ever written on the history and purpose of architecture.