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This book examines experimental work by today's leading designers, scholars, philosophers, and biologists that rejects the idea that humans can somehow recreate a purely natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature.
In the 21st century, the word detail appears constantly in discussions of building, and we use it in many different ways-yet just over 250 years ago, detail meant nothing at all particular to the work of architects, engineers, or builders. Detailing Worlds is the first book to examine the origins and evolution of detail as a concept with meanings specific to practices of building. By exploring how past meanings and roles were ascribed to detail in different worlds of practice-those of academics, technicians, students, engineers, and architects-Detailing Worlds looks to the future, illuminating the ways disciplinary knowledge and the concepts on which it is based evolve and ch...
Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology’s role in architectural design Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume’s contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories—some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode—of seven techniques regularly used by the desi...
The research deals with a question about Architecture and its design strategies, combining historical information and digital tools. Design strategies are historically defined, they rely on geometry, context, building technologies and other factors. The study of Architecture´s own history, particularly in the verge of technological advancements, like the introduction of new materials or tools may shed some light on how to internalize digital tools like parametric design and digital fabrication.
A new paradigm combining architectural tradition with emerging technologies Digital tools have launched architecture into a dizzying new era, one in which wood, stone, metal, glass, and other traditional materials are augmented by pixels and code. In this ambitious exploration, an eminent thinker examines what, exactly, the building blocks of architecture have meant over the centuries and how technology may—or may not—be changing how we think about them. Antoine Picon argues that materiality is not only about matter and that the silence and inscrutability—the otherness—of raw materials work against humanity’s need to live in a meaningful world. He describes how people define who th...
A historical look at styles of technological research and design. If it is true, as Tocqueville suggested, that social and class systems shape technology, research, and knowledge, then the effects should be visible both at the individual level and at the level of technical institutions and local environments. That is the central issue addressed in Constructing a Bridge, a tale of two cultures that investigates how national traditions shape technological communities and their institutions and become embedded in everyday engineering practice. Eda Kranakis first examines these issues in the work of two suspension bridge designers of the early nineteenth century: the American inventor James Finl...
Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the design process entails three main shifts in the way we approach architecture: its movement from an abstracted mode of codification to the formation of its image, the emergence of the informed object as a statistical model rather than a fixed entity and the increasing porosity of the architectural discipline to other fields of knowledge. Instabilities and Potentialities aims to bridge theoretical and practical approaches in digital architecture.
Since antiquity, the sciences have served as a source of images and metaphors for architecture and have had a direct influence on the shaping of built space. In recent years, architects have been looking again at science as a source of inspiration in the production of their designs and constructions. This volume evaluates the interconnections between the sciences and architecture from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Architecture and the Sciences shows how scientific paradigms have migrated to architecture through the appropriation of organic and mechanical models. Conversely, architecture has provided images for scientific and technological discourse. Accordingly, this volume investigates the status of the exchanges between the two domains.Contents include: Alessandra Ponte, Desert Testing; Martin Bressani, Violet-le-Duc's Optic; Georges Teyssot, Norm and Type: Variations on a Theme; Reinhold Martin, Organicism's Other; Catherine Ingraham, Why All These Birds? Birds in the Sky, Birds in the Hand; Antoine Picon, Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm; and Felicity Scott, Encounters with the Face of America.
Since the large-scale use of concrete prefabricated parts in the 1960s and 1970s, this material has developed new applications in recent years and also become more aesthetically refined. Extremely light and thin varieties of concrete like the newly developed Ductal and virtually transparent concrete cladding allow for the creation of interesting and spectacular designs. Precisely such avant-garde architects as Tod Williams & Billie Tsien, Herzog & de Meuron, Zaha Hadid, and Steven Holl make frequent use of these materials. Eight articles and essays by noted authors such as Antoine Picon, Adrian Forty, Guy Nordenson, Franz Ulm, and others shed light on specific aspects of this material and its new forms. Scattered throughout the book are also 30 attractive recent buildings, which illustrate and exemplify these developments. Included are projects by Takashi Yamaguchi, Baumschlager & Eberle, Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Foster and Partners, Ingenhoven und Partner, Santiago Calatrava, Hariri & Hariri, Tadao Ando, Antoine Predock and others.
This title takes a fresh look at a familiar building type - the town house in 18th century London - and investigates the circumstances in which individuals made decisions about living in London, and particularly about their West End house.