Architecture

About: Architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 25849 publications have been published within this topic receiving 225266 citations.

Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937-69

Abstract: In this meticulously researched book, Eric Mumford traces how members of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), such as Walter Gropius, Josep Lluis Sert, and their American associates, developed the discipline of urban design from the 1940s to the 1960s. Now widely known, this field has had significant influence in university departments and building projects around the world, but its roots in the urbanism of CIAM are not well understood. CIAM proposed a new type of architecture, one that drew on the strategies of both modern art and engineering to promote efficiency and rational city planning. Mumford challenges the idea that this modern urbanism only resulted in the clearing of historical neighborhoods in favor of the public housing that would famously fail. Rather, Mumford argues, CIAM goals were instrumental in forming the field of urban design, and it was the rejection of these goals by politicians and bureaucrats, rather than their implementation, that led to the now familiar and lamentable results of urban renewal and metropolitan sprawl.

Architecture and the environment : bioclimatic building design

Abstract: Sustainable building has commonly been seen as separate from mainstream architecture and has been accorded the status of worthy but dull design. Adopting the term "bioclimatic" in preference to "green" to describe buildings which are inspired by nature and have a clear strategy for minimizing environmental depredation, this book seeks to revise this judgement. Introductory chapters trace the history of bioclimatic design in architecture, exploring the relationship between architecture and the natural environment. An examination of three projects currently under construction points to future directions in bioclimatic architecture. The contemporary projects featured in the main section of the book are diverse - from office buildings which flaunt their measures for energy conservation in the form of external solar shading, wind towers, glazed atria and photovoltaic modules, to a church built from tubes of recycled paper and a museum constructed in timber and inserted in a woodland setting. Architects whose work is featured include Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Edward Cullinan, Foster and Partners, Herzog and Partners, Glenn Murcutt and Arata Isozaki.

Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory

Abstract: The discipline of architecture depends on the transmission in space and time of accumulated experiences, concepts, rules, and models. From the invention of the alphabet to the development of ASCII code for electronic communication, the process of recording and transmitting this body of knowledge has reflected the dominant information technologies of each period. In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking. Carpo highlights the significance of the invention of movable type and mechanically reproduced images. He argues that Renaissance architectural theory, particularly the system of the five architectural orders, was consciously developed in response to the formats and potential of the new printed media. Carpo contrasts architecture in the age of printing with what preceded it: Vitruvian theory and the manuscript format, oral transmission in the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century transition from script to print. He also suggests that the basic principles of "typographic" architecture thrived in the Western world as long as print remained our main information technology. The shift from printed to digital representations, he points out, will again alter the course of architecture.

The anaesthetics of architecture

Abstract: In this short, intentionally polemical book, Neil Leach draws on the ideas of philosophers and cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard to develop a novel and highly incisive critique of the consequences of the growing preoccupation with images and image-making in contemporary architectural culture.The problem with this preoccupation, Leach argues, is that it can induce a sort of numbness, as the saturation of images floods the senses and obscures deeper concerns. This problem is particularly acute for a discipline such as architecture, which relies heavily on visual representation. As a result, architects can become anaesthetized from the social and political realities of everyday life. In the intoxicating world of the image, the aesthetics of architecture threaten to become the anaesthetics of architecture. In this culture of aesthetic consumption, this "culture of the cocktail," meaningful discourse gives way to strategies of seduction, and architectural design is reduced to the superficial play of empty, seductive forms.