Showing papers on "Architecture published in 1987"

The modern urban landscape

Abstract: Why do the cities of the late twentieth century look as they do? What values do their appearance express and enfold? Their sheer scale and the durability of their materials assure that our cities will inform future generations about our era, in the same way that gothic cathedrals and medieval squares tell us something of the Middle Ages. In the meantime, our urban landscapes can tell us much about ourselves. For E. C. Relph, the urban landscape must be envisioned as a total environment-not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway. Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An "internationalism" made possible by new building technologies and more rapid communications has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. "As a result," writes Relph, "the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human."

An architecture for intelligent interfaces: outline of an approach to supporting operators of complex systems

Abstract: The conceptual design of a comprehensive support system for operators of complex systems is presented. Key functions within the support system architecture include information management, error monitoring, and adaptive aiding. One of the central knowledge sources underlying this functionality is an operator model that involves a combination of algorithmic and symbolic models for assessing and predicting an operator's activities, awareness, intentions, resources, and performance. Functional block diagrams are presented for the overall architecture as well as the key elements within this architecture. A variety of difficult design issues are discussed, and ongoing efforts aimed at resolving these issues are noted.

The concept of dwelling: on the way to figurative architecture

Abstract: housing forms that have differing degrees of popularity" (Guideline 14, pp. 49-50), may not sit well with adventurous tenant groups or adventurous designers, even though bankers may like the sound of them. Who can predict, in advance, what forms will be unpopular? When they announce Guideline 37, "Avoid sharing private, ground-level front paths" (pp. 76-77), yet come out in favor of communal laundries and outdoor drying yards (Guidelines 137 and 138, pp. 194195), I’m perplexed. This is all controversial: economically, socially, and politically. Surely there are cultural differences and age group differences to be spelled out. The book is equipped with two substantial chapters on designing a site plan for children of different ages, looking at preschoolers, five-to-twelve year olds, and teenagers. This is an exciting, detailed look at children’s spatial needs in housing, the most detailed I’ve seen anywhere. And there is a whole chapter on security that sketches these issues--crucial in lowincome neighborhoods~in great detail. However, it still may not be stringent enough for site planning and building design in the most difficult American neighborhoods. So, for readers interested in housing design and site planning, this is the most comprehensive set of social guidelines available. And, for that same reason, the most controversial. Dolores Hayden is Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90024.

The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression

Abstract: Illustrations Linguistic Note Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction Ch. 1: Imagines Mundi: Narrative, Ritual, and Architectural Exemplars of Cosmogony Ch. 2: Architectural Archetypes: Reflections on Housing in "Paradise" Ch. 3: House Temples: Architecture for the Gods Ch. 4: Houses Are Human: Architectural Self-images Ch. 5: At Home: The Complementarity of House, Family, and Tomb Ch. 6: The Power of Architecture: Politics, Protection, and Jurisprudence in House Design and Use Ch. 7: "The Dance of Drums": Notes on the Architecture and Staging of Funeral Performances Conclusions: Architectural Exegesis: On Building Ontology, Metaphor, and Multiplexity Notes Bibliography

The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s

Abstract: This major work by Manfredo Tafuri, one of today's most important theoretical historians and critics of architecture and urbanism, presents his critique of traditional approaches to historical investigation and criticism in a penetrating analysis of the avant-gardes and discourses of architecture. Tafuri probes the lines between reality and ideology, the gap that avant-garde ideology places between its own demands and its translation into techniques, the ways in which the avant-garde reaches compromises with the world, and the conditions that permit its existence. Interweaving intellectual models and modes of production and consumption, Tafuri constructs an elaborate network of references, comparisons, and analogies that leads to an interpretation of history as an archaeology of fragments and interpretations rather than a linear progression or compact block. In his methodological introduction, he states that the historiographic work should set into crisis not only its subjects and their plurality but also the historical project itself and the critical operations and languages of history it employs. "The Sphere and the Labyrinth" charts an extensive itinerary from Piranesi to postmodernism. Piranesi, "the Wicked Architect, " used architectural language in ways that transgressed and destroyed traditional boundaries. The avant-gardes of the twentieth century continue two major Piranesian themes, "the limit of forms and ... the violence done to the forms themselves." Tafuri points out that what appeared to be the possibility of affecting the social and physical order through the introduction of a "poetics of transgression, " as in the deployment of the metropolis as a mise-en-scene infuturist and expressionist theater or in the encounters between the German and Soviet avant-gardes in Berlin in the early 1920s, emerges merely as aesthetic techniques, codified and self-referential. Dismantling and reassembling the structure of the ideology of the avant-garde, Tafuri analyzes the relationship between the avant-garde and the planning of three great world-systems: the USSR on the threshold of the first 5-year plan; the United States on the verge of the New Deal; and Weimar Germany in the grip of "Sozialpolitik. In the 1970s, he observes, the mechanisms of control and management of urban space clash with political reality. He examines the work of, among others, Stirling, Rossi, Gregotti, Venturi, Eisenman, Graves, Hejduk, Argest, and Gandelsonas, and finds a disenchanted avant-garde engaged in a private dialogue with forms, intent on playing "a glass bead game." Manfredo Tafuri is Chairman of the Faculty of the History of Architecture and the Director of the Institute of History at the Architecture Institute in Venice. He is the author of "Architecture and Utopia and coauthor with Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co, and Mario Manieri-Elia of The American City (both MIT Press paperbacks).

The architecture of community: some new proposals on the social consequences of architectural and planning decisions

Abstract: Summary: "Territorial" theories argue that spatial design can only play an important role in society by virtue of there being a "correspondence" between spatial zones and social identities. In this paper it is argued that "structured non-correspondence" can also play a positive social role, with quite different consequences for spatial design. To the extent that a system works on non-correspondences it functions more probabilistically. It relies on numbers and frequencies of events which take place to reproduce a statistically stable global system, rather than on the formal clarity of its structure. This gives non-correspondence systems a robustness which highly structured systems do not possess. They can thus tolerate much more local disorder and yet be reproducible.

Tradition in the Service of Modernity: Architecture and Urbanism in French Colonial Policy, 1900-1930

Abstract: When the Parisian art critic Leandre Vaillat visited Morocco in the 1920s, he was enraptured with what he saw. Casablanca and especially llabat seemed to represent the convergence of two diametrically opposed paths for twentieth-century cities: a modern vision of wide, orderly streets coexisted, apparently peacefully, with the picturesque charm of the indigenous North Africa madina, a setting adapted to a more traditional way of life. Morocco, Vaillat wrote, is \"a laboratory of western life and a conservatory of oriental life.'l Like other astute European visitors, Vaillat recognized that this cultural imagery constituted an essential element of the French colonial presence. For historians today the strategies become even more clear: urban design-sometimes used in radically different ways within the same city-assumed a major role in efforts to make colonialism more popular among Europeans and more tolerable to the colonized peoples. Administrators of three French colonies of the early twentieth century Indochina, Madagascar, and, most notably, Morocco consciously used urban culture as a cornerstone of their political endeavors. Their notion of culture, by no means monolithic, emphasized variety and simultaneity what the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, describing an earlier period in French cultural life, called \"heteroglossia.\"2 The

The decorative art of today

Abstract: Among the most famous of Le Corbusier's works, this book first came out in 1925 as a companion volume to "Towards a New Architecture" and "The City of Tomorrow," two of the most influential writings on architecture and town planning Le Corbusier produced. This is the first English translation of Le Corbusier's densely illustrated polemic against the crafts tradition and superfluous ornament in interior decoration."The Decorative Art of Today" was inspired by and written in protest to the Decorative Arts Exhibition mounted in Paris in 1925. In it Le Corbusier warned about certain dangerous trends he saw emerging in interior, industrial, and architectural design. He did not like what he saw. Against the official tradition of interior decoration, he called for an architecture that satisfied the imperatives of function through form and for an interior and an industrial design that responded to the industrial needs of the present, machine-age methods of production.Although the exhibition that spawned the term "Art Deco" was organized by the French Ministry of Industry and Commerce for the purpose of creating a market for French arts and crafts and to fend off the influx of foreign products, Le Corbusier saw an opportunity to show that the industry was capable of supplying not only the apartment but the entire city with mass-produced furniture and objects. His own roots lay in the crafts tradition; yet in this book he rejects the masters Ruskin, Hoffmann, Guimard, and Grasset and provides a theoretical basis for his opposition to decoration. The translator, James Dunnett, is professor of architecture at the University of Canterbury.

The Writing of the walls : architectural theory in the late enlightenment

Abstract: Part 1: rebuilding the primitive hut spaces of production the theatre of industry confinement and cure the design of punishment the architecture of lodges asylums of libertinage. Part 2: the aesthetics of history symbolic architecture from the hut to the temple architecture of the museum the decline and fall of architecture.

Designing dreams: Modern architecture in the movies

Abstract: Where you can find the designing dreams modern architecture in the movies easily? Is it in the book store? On-line book store? are you sure? Keep in mind that you will find the book in this site. This book is very referred for you because it gives not only the experience but also lesson. The lessons are very valuable to serve for you, that's not about who are reading this designing dreams modern architecture in the movies book. It is about this book that will give wellness for all people from many societies.

Built for change: neighborhood architecture in san francisco

Abstract: or typical are any of these designs. The garden at Filoli, designed for William Bourn by Bruce Porter, is the most avant-garde design shown here. It compares favorably with the contemporary work of better known designers such as Charles Platt and Beatrix Farrand, but there is no discussion included to assist the reader to understand this. Nevertheless, as regional social history, this is a distinguished book that serves to emphasize the value of a photograph as an important primary document for the historian. As Dorothy Regnery, a local historian, says: \"To a historian, finding even one Moulin photograph related to a research project is like discovering a volume of primary documents.\" For the general reader, Gabriel Moulin’s San Francisco Peninsula is an exquisite evocation and summation of a vanished world. David C. Streatfield is Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98105.

Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism

Abstract: How the different narratives of four historians of architectural modernism-Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri-advanced specific versions of modernism. Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context. Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse-and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectual experiments of the postwar period.

The Panagia Houses at Mycenae

Abstract: Domestic architecture at the site of Mycenae was systematically explored for the first time in a series of investigations sponsored by the Archaeological Society of Athens and Washington University in St. Louis between 1962 and 1966 and again in 1977. The work revealed a block of houses in the area north of the Treasury of Atreus, the so-called Panagia Houses. The author describes the artifacts and reconstructed floor plans, and draws comparisons with other Bronze Age sites. University Museum Monograph, 68