Showing papers on "Architecture published in 1984"

Wayfinding in Architecture

Abstract: This book gives a wonderful introduction to wayfinding and its importance in architecture. The author describes the wayfinding experience of users, and the cognitive processes they use to find their destinations. There is also a thorough description of wayfinding features in architecture such as signage, maps, and architectural space.

What do we mean by building function

Abstract: Scientific approaches to architecture usually avoid the issue of building form, preferring to focus on function. But how can there be a theory of function without a systematic analysis of the key architectural variable of form? A theory of description is required. In this paper it is argued that such a theory can be built through the analysis of spatial form in buildings. Then once spatial form is describable in terms of a descriptive theory, a more powerfully scientific - and architectural - understanding of function is possible. The argument draws on several pieces of research carried out by the authors and their students, but focusses eventually on various types of medical building in order to illustrate certain general principles.

In the cause of architecture

Abstract: This chapter discusses the text of different letters that were exchanged between architects regarding various efforts and their accomplishments in the field of architecture. The chapter also outlines that upon leaving the office of Adler and Sullivan in 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright and his long-time friend Cecil Corwin set up a private practice in the Adler and Sullivan-designed Schiller Building in Chicago. That incident, and how he felt about it, was indicative of how highly he held the practice of architecture, not just as a mere profession but as a great art, as a sacred obligation to design beautiful structures in which others would live and work. It was clear that by 1900 his work was fully developed, having matured in the houses that sprang up across the Midwest prairie in and around Chicago, beginning with the Winslow residence in 1893. It is pointed out that the most important single event in the history and growth of modern architecture in Europe was the publication of the work The Completed Buildings and Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright by the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, in Berlin, 1910.

The rhetoric of architecture: A semiotic approach

Abstract: Communication and rhetoric are inherent aspects of architecture. Architecture uses signs to communicate its function and meaning. This communication is rhetorical when it induces its perceiver to use or to understand the architecture—from a hot dog stand to a monument. Movements in architecture, such as the Gothic or the International Style, promote certain values and beliefs, and can be studied as rhetorical movements. Like linguistic communication, architecture consists of codes, meanings, semantic shifts, and syntactic units.

A pictorial history of Chinese architecture : a study of the development of its structural system and the evolution of its types

Abstract: Liang Ssu-ch'eng (1901-1972) was a pioneer in the scientific study of Chinese architectural history. He virtually created this field in China, and most of its current practitioners are his students. The book, which he wrote in English for a Western public and originally intended to publish in the 1940s, provides a rare record and analysis of temples, pagodas, tombs, bridges, and imperial palaces that are China's architectural heritage. It is a record that could not be duplicated today because a number of the structures have since been altered or demolished.With his co-workers, Liang combed the countryside for ancient buildings which he photographed with his Leica camera and recorded in large, detailed architectural drawings of plans, elevations, and cross-sections. These drawings are a text in themselves. Bearing captions in Chinese and English, they teach fundamental lessons about the anatomy of Chinese structures.Liang's account covers the origin of Chinese architecture and its two surviving basic handbooks from the 12th and 18th centuries; architecture of the pre-Buddhist period; cave temples; buildings in wood traced through several periods of stylistic development from c. 850 to 1911; Buddhist pagodas (most of the surviving pagodas are masonry structures) from simple square plans to those that are multi-storied and eaved; and other masonry structures such as tombs, vaulted buildings, bridges; terraces; and gateways.For most of his life, Liang Ssu-ch'eng lived in China, but as a young man he received his architectural training at the University of Pennsylvania. Wilma and John K. Fairbank first met him in China in 1932. During his last visit to the United States, in 1947 as a Visiting Professor at Yale, Mrs. Fairbank agreed to edit his manuscript and to help him find an American publisher. However, a combination of political and personal circumstances, compounded by the loss of the original drawings and photographs (they were only rediscovered in 1980) made publication of this unusual project impossible until now.

Architecture and the Representation of Empire: India, 1860-1910

Abstract: No sooner had Smith taken his seat than William Emerson, who had just completed a design in an Indic style for a college in Allahabad, rose to dissent. The British, he maintained, should not carry into India a new style of architecture, but rather should follow the example of those whom they had supplanted as rulers, the Muslims, who "seized upon the art indigenous to the countries conquered, adapting it to suit their own needs and ideas." Indeed, he insisted, "it was impossible for the architecture of the west to be suitable to the natives of the east."2 A debate was thus joined that was to rage unabated for over fifty years: whether in their building in India the British ought to look to their own, or to India's architectural traditions. The choice between styles did not reflect solely aesthetic concerns. As with the contest between Classical and Gothic in Britain, such decisions involved as well larger conceptions of national identity and purpose. Indeed, by providing a vocabulary for the consideration of those questions, the architectural debates themselves shaped and defined Britain's conception of its national purpose.3 In the colonial environment the bricks and mortar carried with them especially far-reaching significance. The choice of styles, the arrangement of space within a building, and of course the decision by the government to erect a particular monument, all testified as both Smith and Emerson were aware, to a vision of empire. Sometimes these conceptions moved the architect in the design of a building; at others they lay embedded beneath the surface. In either case the varied ways empire was represented in these buildings help us to understand the assumptions that shaped Britain's imperial enterprise. This paper

Chinese Traditional Architecture

Abstract: Catalogue of the exhibition organized at the china house gallery, new york city, from april 6th to june 10th 1984, by the china institute in america. The first part is a comprehensive survey of the development of architecture and buildings technologies in china, written by fu xinian, an eminent archaeologist and scholar of chinese architecture. It is followed by ten essays by various authors on specific monuments and periods.

Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution

Abstract: Lissitzky's book is a classic in architectural and planning theory, as well as an important document in social and intellectual history. It contains an appendix of excerpted writings by his contemporaries--M. J. Ginzburg, P. Martell, Bruno Taut, Ernst May, M. Ilyin, Wilm Stein, Martin Wagner, Hannes Meyer, Hans Schmidt, and others--all of whom illuminate the architecture and planning of Europe and Russia during the 1920s. There are over 100 plates and drawings.

The Hot House: Italian New Wave Design

Abstract: "The Hot House" is in part a manifesto and in part a noncanonical history of the most progressive and heretical experiments in the applied arts and design. Covering two centuries of avant-garde designs, but concentrating on the 1950s to the present, the book looks at architecture and urban design as well as graphic, interior, exhibit, industrial, and fashion design. It discusses the role that such magazines as Casabella, Domus, and Modo have played on this lively front, and provides an insider's view of such figures and groups as Alessandro Mendini, Gaetano Pesce, Alychmia, Global Tools, Michele De Lucchi, Ettore Sottsass, and--the design world's hot new movement--Memphis. It also elucidates such concepts as banal design, soft design, radical architecture, and color cultures, and relates these and other design developments to social and political issues.Protagonist of many of these experiments, Andrea Branzi calls for a theory and practice in which the old methods and instruments--pencil, square, and compass--are rendered obsolete, and the formal commandments of modernism--comfort, function, and style--are banished. If Branzi's vision of the new domestic landscape bears any relation to the future home, the places we live and objects around us are on the verge of being radically transformed."The Hot House" dramatically expands the theoretical and operative limits of design. While precedents to "Il Nuovo Design" (The New Design) can be found in everything from Art Deco to De Stijl to Pop Art to California funk, Italy is the center of this new phenomenon and the "hot house" of its most intense activity. Beginning in the 1960s, there emerged a number of design studios that went by names like Archizoom, 9999, Superstudio, and UFO; their products redefined the basic architecture of furniture and clothing and polemicized an entire discipline.

The Immature Arts of City Design

Abstract: The Immature Arts of City Design Kevin Lynch Few Americans think that city-making is a fine art. Most professionals agree, if judged by their actions rather than by their words. We may at rimes enjoy a city, but only as a fact of nature— just there, like a mountain or the sea. But, of course, we are mistaken; cities are created objects, and at times in history they were managed and experienced as if they were works of art. However misshapen, a city is an intended landscape. This view of art as something isolated from other life concerns runs deep in our culture. Arty is a term of contempt, while artless means something genuine or natural. Inartistic and unscientific have very different connotations. Even if we lay those prejudices aside, the judgment that modern cities cannot be works of art may be quite correct. There seems to be a universal division in the planning field, a division between those engaged with social, economic, and locational policy at the urban level, and those concerned with physical form at the project level. Schools, professional roles, clients, and institutions are all divided in that way. Those academic departments of urban design that try to throw a bridge across the gap are subject to the constant temptation to devote themselves to the architectural design of large-scale, unified devel­ opment projects. Students with talents for the design of sensuous form drift to the established profession of architecture. Our schools of urban design depend primarily on foreign students, coming from countries in which there are greater opportunities for the design of large-scale projects— whether because of the stage of the country's development, or the presence of a more authoritarian regime. This surge of foreign students will recede in time, as urban design begins to be taught in the schools abroad (or it should recede, since urban design is rightly tied to the particularity of place and society). Few U. S. cities have an urban design division. Is urban design un-American? In any art, someone creates an object or event to convey meanings and feelings to a critical audience. The various arts may be more or less complex and ponderous, but they all involve an intentional creation, and the conveyance, intentional or not, of a personal experience through the sensuous form of the thing created. The artist has precedents, a transmitted skill, and works within a style. He makes inventions. In part, at least, his creations are enjoyed for themselves, and not solely as means to other ends. If it exists, city design is thought to be a branch of architecture. But it must manipulate things and activities that are connected over extensive spans of space and time, and that are formed and managed by numbers of actors. It operates through intervening abstractions: policies, programs, guidelines, specifications, reviews, incentives, institutions, prototypes, regulations, spatial allotments, and the like. Through all this clutter, it seeks to influence the daily experience of a bewildering variety of people. As a process, it is as far removed from the immediacy of direct handwork as one could possibly imagine, but in its effects it is just as immediate, and far more encompassing and powerful. City forms are more resistant to design than architectural forms, for the city has a ponderous inertia. It is the accumulated product of many historic actions, and will surely undergo as much again. Just to attain a well- known form—an axis, arcade, cluster, or greenbelt—can be a notable success. While innumerable precedents and images run through the head of any architectural designer (grand staircases, serpentine walls, tent structures, broken arcs—who could If we think of a fine landscape, we usually think of a rural one, or of some historic city center. Those places evolved gradually, and within the confines of custom, site, purpose, and technology, they emerged coherent. Or, when we remember some deliberate act of city design—Paris, Rome, or Beijing—we also remember it as a demonstration of dominant power. If we abhor tyranny, perhaps we should not look for an art of city design. If we live in a pluralistic, changing high-technology society, perhaps we cannot hope for one? Art (or design: the two terms are confounded) is something soft, irrational, concerned solely with appearance. At the scale of the city, it can only be a matter of decoration. It has no appreciable connection with the fundamental issues of city policy, which are economic and social. City planning is quantitative, rational, analytic. It speaks in words and numbers, not merely in pictures. It is oriented to policy, wrestles with administrative detail, skirts the political mine fields. Although it may appreciate the luxuries of design, it does not have time for them. Other things are too pressing. P l a c e s / V o l u m e 1, Number

The Law Courts: The Architecture of George Edmund Street

Abstract: George Edmund Street (1824-1881) was a leader of the High Victorian generation of British architects. A prolific and innovative artist, he also played an important role in the reshaping of architectural taste that occurred in England at mid century. This is the first book devoted exclusively to Street and his greatest work, the Royal Law Courts in the Strand.In The Law Courts, David Brownlee makes extensive use of the vast archives of the Public Record Office to document a monument that embodies both the professional controversies surrounding architectural theory and the personal conflicts of an architect caught between two generations of style. More than an examination of a single building, the book is also a history of political and legal reform in the middle of Queen Victoria's reign. In the course of describing the Law Courts in their urban and architectural context, Brownlee also discusses the nature of the bureaucracy that oversaw official patronage of the arts and the demands of clients whose interests often conflicted. He describes the competition in which Street attempted to unite the irregular vigor of Gothic with the quasi-classical symmetry and monumentality appropriate for a public building, the long series of revised designs which increasingly displayed the picturesque qualities of the new Queen Anne taste, and the actual construction of the Courts.David Brownlee is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. This book is volume 8 in the Architectural History Foundation Series.

The Powers of Architecture

Abstract: The current crisis in architecture's effectual and significative power is the result of historical processes which have boon analyzed (by the Left) as the development of industrial capitalism and (by Foucault) as the development of technical-instrumental power. These processes have led to the loss of the authority of the divine referential, of the authenticity of the object, and of our sense of historicity. To recover the power of meaning (beyond mere instrumentality, nostalgic sentimentality, and power emblems), the communicative relations between spatial structure and human life-praxis must be investigated critically. Only then will architecture and urban space contribute their hermencutic power to the retrieval of the human potential to appropriate the world, The powers of architecture consist in (a) its ability to influence the spatiotemporal articulation of life-praxis and thus to condition one's fundamental relations to the world and to oneself, and (b) its ability to communicate to us about this wo...

Towards an Architectural Definition of Normalization: Design Principles for Housing Severely and Profoundly Retarded Adults

Abstract: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Department of Psychology, and the Graduate School, University of Minnesota.

The Penguin dictionary of design and designers

Abstract: This text is a comprehensive historical guide to design and designers, from the Renaissance goldsmiths, painters and engravers to the Bauhaus and beyond The book consists of brief biographies of leading designers from 1450 to the present and, since the history of design is so closely linked with that of art and architecture, there are entries on the outstanding patrons and pundits of design, on exhibitions and institutions, on movements and styles, as well as on ornament, pattern books and periodicals Until recently, design historians have tended to look at only the recent past, and that from a modern viewpoint Here, the riches of the past are brought to light, as are many significant but, until now, neglected designers Interested browsers, as well as designers and art historians should find this a useful sourcebook