The book tackles a number of challenging questions: How can we conceptualize architectural objects and practices without falling into the divides architecture/society, nature/culture, ...materiality/meaning? How can we prevent these abstractions from continuing to blind architectural theory? What is the alternative to critical architecture? Mapping controversies is a research method and teaching philosophy that allows divides to be crossed. It offers a new methodology for following debates surrounding contested urban knowledge. Engaging in explorations of on-going and recent controversies and re-visiting some well-known debates, the analysis foregrounds, traces and maps the changing sets of positions triggered by design: the 2012 Olympics stadium in London, the Welsh parliament in Cardiff, the Heathrow airport runway extension, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower. By mobilizing digital technologies and new computational design techniques we are able to visualize the variety of factors that impinge on design and track actors’ trajectories, changing groupings, concerns and modalities of action. The book places architecture at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman, the particular and the general. It allows its networks to be re-established and to run between local and global, social and technical. Mapping controversies can be extrapolated to a wide range of complex phenomena of hybrid nature.
On rediscovering surroundings when information goes everywhere. The world is filling with ever more kinds of media, in ever more contexts and formats. Glowing rectangles have become part of the ...scene; screens, large and small, appear everywhere. Physical locations are increasingly tagged and digitally augmented. Amid this flood, your attention practices matter more than ever. You might not be able to tune this world out. So it is worth remembering that underneath all these augmentations and data flows, fixed forms persist, and that to notice them can improve other sensibilities. In Ambient Commons , Malcolm McCullough explores the workings of attention through a rediscovery of surroundings. McCullough describes what he calls the Ambient: an increasing tendency to perceive information superabundance whole, where individual signals matter less and at least some mediation assumes inhabitable form. He explores how the fixed forms of architecture and the city play a cognitive role in the flow of ambient information. As a persistently inhabited world, can the Ambient be understood as a shared cultural resource, to be socially curated, voluntarily limited, and self-governed as if a commons? Ambient Commons invites you to look past current obsessions with smart phones to rethink attention itself, to care for more situated, often inescapable forms of information.
The article is aimed at the identification of problems related to the revalorization of the architectural-spatial environment of the districts and landmarks in Yerevan and the development of possible ...further recommendations. It has been shown that today in the process of development of the center, issues related to environmental approaches and architectural design are not sufficiently taken into account. As a result of the study of the world experience, the physical forms related to the image content were separated and studied, in particular, districts and landmarks, which are part of the main objects of aesthetic revalorization. The types of these objects were coordinated and classified according to their meaning and function. As a result of professional literature and field observation, surveys, the characteristics of the objects were distinguished, the elements of the objects were identified and coordinated, and evaluations were given according to the criteria of the value of the object. The results are the basis for proposing a set of basic principles and patterns for the aesthetic revalorization of the architectural environment.
'Digital Architecture Beyond Computers' explores the deep history of digital architecture, tracing design concepts as far back as the Renaissance and connecting them with the latest software used by ...designers today. It develops a critical account of how the tools and techniques of digital design have emerged, and allows designers to deepen their understanding of the digital tools they use every day. What aesthetic, spatial, and philosophical concepts converge within the digital tools architects employ? What is their history? And what kinds of techniques and designs have they given rise to?
Harry Francis Mallgrave combines a history of ideas about architectural experience with the latest insights from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary biology to make a ...powerful argument about the nature and future of architectural design.
The book presents a new theory of space: how and why it is a vital component of how societies work. The theory is developed on the basis of a new way of describing and analysing the kinds of spatial ...patterns produced by buildings and towns. The methods are explained so that anyone interested in how towns or buildings are structured and how they work can make use of them. The book also presents a new theory of societies and spatial systems, and what it is about different types of society that leads them to adopt fundamentally different spatial forms. From this general theory, the outline of a 'pathology of modern urbanism' in today's social context is developed.
