Architecture

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

Native American Architecture

Abstract: For many people, Native American architecture calls to mind the wigwam, tipi, iglu, and pueblo. Yet the richly diverse building traditions of Native Americans encompass much more, including specific structures for sleeping, working, worshipping, meditating, playing, dancing, lounging, giving birth, decision-making, cleansing, storing and preparing food, caring for animals, and honoring the dead. In effect, the architecture covers all facets of Indian life. The collaboration between an architect and an anthropologist, Native American Architecture presents the first book-length, fully illustrated exploration of North American Indian architecture to appear in over a century. Peter Nabokov and Robert Easton together examine the building traditions of the major tribes in nine regional areas of the continent from the huge plank-house villages of the Northwest Coast to the moundbuilder towns and temples of the Southeast, to the Navajo hogans and adobe pueblos of the Southwest. Going beyond a traditional survey of buildings, the book offers a broad, clear view into the Native American world, revealing a new perspective on the interaction between their buildings and culture. Looking at Native American architecture as more than buildings, villages, and camps, Nabokov and Easton also focus on their use of space, their environment, their social mores, and their religious beliefs. Each chapter concludes with an account of traditional Indian building practices undergoing a revival or in danger today. The volume also includes a wealth of historical photographs and drawings (including sixteen pages of color illustrations), architectural renderings, and specially prepared interpretive diagrams which decode the sacred cosmology of the principal house types.

Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco

Abstract: "Built for Change" is one of the most thorough evaluations ever conducted of the physical transformation of an American city. It is at once a model for historical research in urban architecture, a critique of urban design and residential building practices, and an advocacy text on zoning, preservation, and development.Moudon focuses on design strategies that can preserve the traditional urban fabric while still accommodating new buildings. Her work in fact, has played an important role in the drafting of new planning codes for residential areas of San Francisco.Anne Vernez Moudon is Professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning and Director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Washington

BERRA: a research architecture for service robots

Abstract: The architecture for a mobile service robot is discussed. The paper covers aspects related to overall design and implementation. The robot architecture is of the hybrid deliberative/reactive behavioral type. The strategy is selection where planning is viewed as configuration. The architecture can be divided into three layers, one for deliberation, one for task execution, and one reactive layer. Scalability and a high degree of flexibility have been primary design goals, making it easy to reconfigure the system. The system has been built in an object oriented fashion. An application of the architecture has been tested in a significant number of missions in our lab, where one room has been setup as an ordinary living room.

How do buildings mean? some issues of interpretation in the history of architecture1

Abstract: Architectural history as we know it has been written tacitly adhering to the crudest version of the paradigm of communication: all the attention has been focussed on the design of the new forms, none on their interpretation. It is time to realize, that even within the limits of the paradigm of communication, there should be a history of meaning, not only a history of forms.2 —Juan Pablo Bonta You think philosophy is difficult enough, but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect.3 —Ludwig Wittgenstein ABSTRACT Despite growing interest from historians in the built environment, the use of architecture as evidence remains remarkably under-theorized. Where this issue has been discussed, the interpretation of buildings has often been likened to the process of reading, in which architecture can be understood by analogy to language: either as a code capable of use in communicating the architect's intentions or more literally as a spoken or written language in its own right. After a historiographical survey, this essay, by contrast, proposes that the appropriate metaphor is one of translation. More particularly, it draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to suggest that architecture—and the interpretation of architecture— comprises a series of transpositions. As a building is planned, built, inhabited, and interpreted, so its meaning changes. The underlying logic of each medium shapes the way in which its message is created and understood. This suggests that the proper role of the historian is to trace these transpositions. Buildings, then, can be used as a historical source, but only if the historian takes account of the particular problems that they present. In short, architecture should not be studied for its meaning, but for its meanings. As historians we are always translating architecture: not reading its message, but exploring its multiple transpositions.

Toward an Architecture

Abstract: Architecture has nothing to do with the various "styles". Louis XIV, XV, XVI, and Gothic are to architecture what feathers are to a woman's head; they are pretty sometimes, but not always, and nothing more. Architecture has graver ends; capable of sublimity, it touches the most brutal instincts through its objectivity; it appeals to the highest of the faculties, through its very abstraction. Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture is an architecture of prisms, cubes, and cylinders, of trihedrons and spheres: the Pyramids, the Temple of Luxor, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Hadrian's Villa. Architectural abstraction has the distinctive and magnificent quality that, while being rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes it. Brute fact is amenable to ideas only through the order that is projected onto it. Volume and surface are the elements through which architecture manifests itself.