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Brutalism as Found
A critical appropriation of Brutalism in the crisis conditions of today. The Robin Hood Gardens public-housing estate in East London, completed in 1972, was designed by Alison and Peter Smithson as an ethical and aesthetic encounter with the flux and crises of the social world. Now demolished by the forces of speculative development, this Brutalist estate has been the subject of much dispute. But the clichéd terms of debate—a “concrete monstrosity” or a “modernist masterpiece”—have marginalized the estate’s residents and obscured its architectural originality. Recovering the social in the architectural, this book centers the estate’s lived experience of a multiracial working class, not to displace the architecture’s sensory qualities of matter and form, but to radicalize them for our present. Immersed in the materials, atmospheres, social forms and afterlives of this experimental estate, Robin Hood Gardens is reconstructed here as a socio-architectural expression of our times out of joint.
A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture
1960, following as it did the last CIAM meeting, signalled a turning point for the Modern Movement. From then on, architecture was influenced by seminal texts by Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi, and gave rise to the first revisionary movement following Modernism. Bringing together leading experts in the field, this book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the developments in architecture from 1960 to 2010. It consists of two parts: the first section providing a presentation of major movements in architecture after 1960, and the second, a geographic survey that covers a wide range of territories around the world. This book not only reflects the different perspectives of its various authors, but also charts a middle course between the 'aesthetic' histories that examine architecture solely in terms of its formal aspects, and the more 'ideological' histories that subject it to a critique that often skirts the discussion of its formal aspects.
Instabilities and Potentialities
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.
Teaching Architecture
What are the pressing questions in architecture – in teaching, research and practice? Based on their many years of experience, professors Inès Lamunière and Laurent Stalder come together in five meetings to search for answers. They describe an approach to architecture that is based on intellect as well as intuition and is both strict and pragmatic. And they sketch out creative processes that are indispensable in the development of projects with all their constraints in order to master the future challenges faced by the art of building.
Inventioneering Architecture
This guidebook is a device and also an invitation to navigate through the educational landscape of three swiss schools of architecture, presented in the exhibition "Inventioneering Architecture". Reflecting and commenting on the academic student work put on display, it suggests future challenges and shows a broad spectrum of strategies of the profession, developed by numerous design and research studios.
Minimal Architecture
What is minimalism? Or, more specifically, what isn't? In this fascinating aesthetic voyage, three experts in the field of architecture and art history trace the development of minimalism as a style and offer perspectives on the directions the movement is taking as it morphs towards the future. In double-page spreads filled with color photographs of the most innovative minimalist projects, this book illustrates three principal movements: the traditional, as practiced by Herzog & de Meuron in early works, Adolf Krischanitz and Tadao Ando; the ambiguous, in which architects not commonly associated with minimalism, such as OMA or Zaha Hadid, use it for specific projects; and the subversive, which appropriates minimalist concepts across a variety of new fields as exemplified in the architecture of Shigeru Ban or Lacaton & Vassal.
The House of Light and Entropy
Formerly announced as Maps and Territories, this collection of essays written by landscape historian Alessandra Ponte, begins with an investigation of the American obsession with lawns and then continues to collectively map the aesthetic, scientific and technological production of past and present North American landscapes. These include the American desert as a privileged site of scientific and artistic testing; the faraway projects of electrification of the Canadian North; the transformation of the notion and perception of waste and wasteland during the twentieth century; the photographic medium and its encounters with Native Americans; as well as an introductory essay, 'The Map and the Territory', written specifically for this volume.
Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture
Michelangelo's fame as a painter and sculptor tends to eclipse his reputation as an architect, but his impact here was just as profound. In this book, Cammy Brothers takes an unusual approach to Michelangelo's architectural designs, arguing that they are best understood in terms of his experience as a painter and sculptor. By following the steps by which Michelangelo arrived at his extraordinary inventions, the author questions conventional notions of spontaneity as a function of genius. Rather, she explores the idea of drawing as a mode of thinking, using its evidence to reconstruct the process by which Michelangelo arrived at new ideas. By turning the flexibility and fluidity of his figurative drawing methods to the subject of architecture, Michelangelo demonstrated how it could match the expressive possibilities of painting and sculpture.
Vernacular Modernism
Vernacular Modernism advocates a rethinking of the importance of the vernacular as part of the modernist discourse of place, from art to literature, from architectural to social practice.
