The region of the Himalayas and the adjoining Tibetan plateau is known for its unique and characteristic vernacular architecture and housing culture which is slowly but surely disappearing. The first ...part of the book analyses 21 traditional houses in the region that respond in diverse ways to the specifics of their location and local climate. The second part presents a comparative study of the construction elements - walls, roof and façades - using photographs and hand-drawn construction details. The newly produced scale drawings provide an excellent basis for comparative review. Detailed plans, atmospheric photographs and informative texts take the reader on a journey through a fascinating building culture.
In fourth to sixth century Syria a nave-platform known as the Bema became popular in some regions before mysteriously disappearing; this study seeks to explain how these bemata functioned and which ...elements led to their decline.
This ground-breaking book aims to take a new and innovative view on how disability and architecture might be connected. Rather than putting disability at the end of the design process, centred mainly ...on compliance, it sees disability - and ability - as creative starting points for the whole design process. It asks the intriguing question: can working from dis/ability actually generate an alternative kind of architectural avant-garde?
To do this, Doing Disability Differently:
explores how thinking about dis/ability opens up to critical and creative investigation our everyday social attitudes and practices about people, objects and space
argues that design can help resist and transform underlying and unnoticed inequalities
introduces architects to the emerging and important field of disability studies and considers what different kinds of design thinking and doing this can enable
asks how designing for everyday life - in all its diversity - can be better embedded within contemporary architecture as a discipline
offers examples of what doing disability differently can mean for architectural theory, education and professional practice
aims to embed into architectural practice, attitudes and approaches that creatively and constructively refuse to perpetuate body 'norms' or the resulting inequalities in access to, and support from, built space.
Ultimately, this book suggests that re-addressing architecture and disability involves nothing less than re-thinking how to design for the everyday occupation of space more generally.
This book brings together a series of new and historical case studies to show how different phases of globalization are transforming the built environment. Taking a broad interdisciplinary approach, ...the author draws on sociological, geographical, cultural and postcolonial studies to provide a critical account of the development of three key concepts: global culture, post colonialism, and modernity. Subsequent case studies examine how global economic, political and cultural forces shape the forms of architectural and urban modernity in globalized suburbs and spaces in major cities worldwide.
The first book to combine global and postcolonial theoretical approaches to the built environment and to illustrate these with examples, Spaces of Global Cultures argues for a more historical and interdisciplinary understanding of globalization: one that places material space and the built environment at the centre and calls for new theories to address new conditions.
'This outstanding volume by Anthony King is empirically rich and sends deep theoretical tremors as well; an invaluable read.' - Jan Nederveen Pieterse, author of Globalization or Empire, Routledge 2004
'The book is very interdisciplinary—and inherently geographical ... It is sensitive to political and cultural context and highlights the various hegemonies at play in architecture.' - Environment and Planning A
'King's importance in shaping the way we understand globalization as an unequal and uneven system not only of economic but of material and cultural processes cannot be understated.' 'The empirical material in this book is excellent.' 'This is architectural history at its best.' - Rob Shields, Building Research and Information, 2005
'King provides an accessible and significant contribution to the literature on how transnational and global identities play out within the built environment ... it will be of considerable interest to a range of courses, from architecture and planning history to the sociology and geography of consumption.' - Journal of Consumer Culture
'...an excellent book that maps the multifaceted ways in which the built environment is influenced by transnational processes in general and a good overview of the research of one of its most important students in particular' - International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Anthony D. King is Bartle Professor of Art History and of Sociology, State University of New York at Binghamton. He has been Visiting Professor in Architecture, University of Califonia Berkeley and, for five years, Professor, Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.
Introduction. Part I: Theories 1. Worlds in the City: Wonders of Modern Design to Weapons of Mass Destruction 2. Interrogating Global Culture(s) 3. Cultures and Spaces of Postcolonial Knowledges 4. The Times and Spaces of Modernities 5. Writing Transnational Planning Histories: The Dialectics of Dual Development Part II: Histories 6. Suburb/Ethnoburb/Globurb: The Making of Contemporary Modernities 7. Villafication: The Transformation of Chinese Cities 8. Imagining the World at Home: The Distant Spaces of the Indian City 9. Transnational Delhi Revisited: The Spatial Language of Three Modernities 10. Imperialism, Colonialism and Architects of the Arts and Crafts in Britain Part III: Pasts/Presents/Futures 11. Ways of Seeing: Serendipity, Visuality, Experience
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical ...industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow.
Ornament Picon, Antoine
2014, 2013, 2014-05-28, 2014-05-29
eBook, Book
Once condemned by Modernism and compared to a 'crime' by Adolf Loos, ornament has made a spectacular return in contemporary architecture. This is typified by the works of well-known architects such ...as Herzog & de Meuron, Sauerbruch Hutton, Farshid Moussavi Architecture and OMA. There is no doubt that these new ornamental tendencies are inseparable from innovations in computer technology. The proliferation of developments in design software has enabled architects to experiment afresh with texture, colour, pattern and topology. Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the 'subjective' – the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception – and the political. Contrary to the message conveyed by the founding fathers of modern architecture, traditional ornament was not meant only for pleasure. It conveyed vital information about the designation of buildings as well as about the rank of their owners. As such, it participated in the expression of social values, hierarchies and order. By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in today's ornamental revival. What does it tell us about present-day culture? Why are we presently so fearful of meaning in architecture? Could it be that by steering so vehemently away from symbolism, contemporary architecture is evading any explicit contribution to collective values?
An unprecedented survey of the origins and evolution of Chinese architecture, from the last millennia BCE to today
Throughout history, China has maintained one of the world's richest built ...civilizations. The nation's architectural achievements range from its earliest walled cities and the First Emperor's vision of city and empire, to bridges, pagodas, and the twentieth-century constructions of the Socialist state. In this beautifully illustrated book, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt presents the first fully comprehensive survey of Chinese architecture in any language. With rich political and historical context, Steinhardt covers forty centuries of architecture, from the genesis of Chinese building through to the twenty-first century and the challenges of urban expansion and globalism.
Steinhardt follows the extraordinary breadth of China's architectural legacy-including excavation sites, gardens, guild halls, and relief sculpture-and considers the influence of Chinese architecture on Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Tibet. Architectural examples from Chinese ethnic populations and various religions are examined, such as monasteries, mosques, observatories, and tombs. Steinhardt also shows that Chinese architecture is united by a standardized system of construction, applicable whether buildings are temples, imperial palaces, or shrines. Every architectural type is based on the models that came before it, and principles established centuries earlier dictate building practices. China's unique system has allowed its built environment to stand as a profound symbol of Chinese culture.
With unprecedented breadth united by a continuous chronological narrative,Chinese Architectureoffers the best scholarship available on this remarkable subject for scholars, students, and general readers.
Architecture is often seen as the art of a thinking mind that arranges, organizes and establishes relationships between the parts and the whole. It is also seen as the art of designing spaces, which ...we experience through movement and use. Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. Examining and exploring the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings, this intriguing book will be of use to anyone with an interest in the theory of architecture and architecture's relationship to the cultural human environment.
The eighteenth century struggled to define architecture as either an art or a science-the image of the architect as a grand figure who synthesizes all other disciplines within a single master plan ...emerged from this discourse. Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang Goethe described the architect as their equal, a genius with godlike creativity. For writers from Descartes to Freud, architectural reasoning provided a method for critically examining consciousness. The architect, as philosophers liked to think of him, was obligated by the design and construction process to mediate between the abstract and the actual.
InOn the Ruins of Babel, Daniel Purdy traces this notion back to its wellspring. He surveys the volatile state of architectural theory in the Enlightenment, brought on by the newly emerged scientific critiques of Renaissance cosmology, then shows how German writers redeployed Renaissance terminology so that "harmony," "unity," "synthesis," "foundation," and "orderliness" became states of consciousness, rather than terms used to describe the built world. Purdy's distinctly new interpretation of German theory reveals how metaphors constitute interior life as an architectural space to be designed, constructed, renovated, or demolished. He elucidates the close affinity between Hegel's Romantic aesthetic of space and Daniel Libeskind's deconstruction of monumental architecture in Berlin's Jewish Museum.
Through a careful reading of Walter Benjamin's writing on architecture as myth, Purdy details how classical architecture shaped Benjamin's modernist interpretations of urban life, particularly his elaboration on Freud's archaeology of the unconscious. Benjamin's essays on dreams and architecture turn the individualist sensibility of the Enlightenment into a collective and mythic identification between humans and buildings.
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