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.
Although we spend more than ninety percent of our lives inside buildings, we understand very little about how the built environment affects our behavior, thoughts, emotions, and well-being. We are ...biological beings whose senses and neural systems have developed over millions of years; it stands to reason that research in the life sciences, particularly neuroscience, can offer compelling insights into the ways our buildings shape our interactions with the world. This expanded understanding can help architects design buildings that support both mind and body. InMind in Architecture, leading thinkers from architecture and other disciplines, including neuroscience, cognitive science, psychiatry, and philosophy, explore what architecture and neuroscience can learn from each other. They offer historical context, examine the implications for current architectural practice and education, and imagine a neuroscientifically informed architecture of the future. Architecture is late in discovering the richness of neuroscientific research. As scientists were finding evidence for the bodily basis of mind and meaning, architecture was caught up in convoluted cerebral games that denied emotional and bodily reality altogether. This volume maps the extraordinary opportunity that engagement with cutting-edge neuroscience offers present-day architects.ContributorsThomas D. Albright, Michael Arbib, John Paul Eberhard, Melissa Farling, Vittorio Gallese, Alessandro Gattara, Mark L. Johnson, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Iain McGilchrist, Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Sarah Robinson
