Architectural Anxiety

Architectural Anxiety
Author: Kristin Maurer
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0557358981

In this thesis I will investigate the possibilities of restoring freedom. I describe situations where I suffer from architectural anxiety, analyse these situations and sometimes find practical solutions for architectural safety. These solutions are based on my own fear experiences but also intended to help others to overcome their (similar) fears, get relaxed and comfortable. The different solutions can serve as inspiration for a design of the perfect safe space.

Warped Space

Warped Space
Author: Anthony Vidler
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2002-02-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780262720410

How psychological ideas of space have profoundly affected architectural and artistic expression in the twentieth century. Beginning with agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the late nineteenth century, followed by shell shock and panic fear after World War I, phobias and anxiety came to be seen as the mental condition of modern life. They became incorporated into the media and arts, in particular the spatial arts of architecture, urbanism, and film. This "spatial warping" is now being reshaped by digitalization and virtual reality. Anthony Vidler is concerned with two forms of warped space. The first, a psychological space, is the repository of neuroses and phobias. This space is not empty but full of disturbing forms, including those of architecture and the city. The second kind of warping is produced when artists break the boundaries of genre to depict space in new ways. Vidler traces the emergence of a psychological idea of space from Pascal and Freud to the identification of agoraphobia and claustrophobia in the nineteenth century to twentieth-century theories of spatial alienation and estrangement in the writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Focusing on current conditions of displacement and placelessness, he examines ways in which contemporary artists and architects have produced new forms of spatial warping. The discussion ranges from theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze to artists such as Vito Acconci, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, and Rachel Whiteread. Finally, Vidler looks at the architectural experiments of Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Daniel Libeskind, Greg Lynn, Morphosis, and Eric Owen Moss in the light of new digital techniques that, while relying on traditional perspective, have radically transformed the composition, production, and experience—perhaps even the subject itself—of architecture.

Happy by Design

Happy by Design
Author: Ben Channon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2023-11-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003822835

Can good design truly make us happier? Given that we spend over 80% of our time in buildings, shouldn't we have a better understanding of how they make us feel? Happy by Design explores the ways in which buildings, spaces and cities affect our moods. It reveals how architecture and design can make us happy and support mental health, and explains how poor design can have the opposite effect. Presented through a series of easy-to-understand design tips and accompanied by beautiful diagrams and illustrations, Happy by Design is a fantastic resource for architects, designers and students, or for anybody who would like to better understand the relationship between buildings and happiness. With the pandemic and cost-of-living crisis, the importance of designing for mental wellbeing has never been higher on the agenda. Whether through low-energy design, designing in better ventilation to avoid passing on pathogens or the realisation of the importance of accessing nature within an environment, this revised edition has been updated to reflect a changed world.

Atomic Dwelling

Atomic Dwelling
Author: Robin Schuldenfrei
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0415676088

International scholars from architecture, design, urban planning, and interior design here reappraise modern life in the context of practices of dwelling over the span of the postwar period. Reassessing culture and the economic and political effects on civilian life, this collection looks at what role material objects, interior spaces, and architecture played in quelling or fanning the anxieties of modernism's ordinary denizens.

Architectural Intelligence

Architectural Intelligence
Author: Molly Wright Steenson
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2022-11-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262546787

Architects who engaged with cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies poured the foundation for digital interactivity. In Architectural Intelligence, Molly Wright Steenson explores the work of four architects in the 1960s and 1970s who incorporated elements of interactivity into their work. Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Cedric Price, and Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Architecture Machine Group all incorporated technologies—including cybernetics and artificial intelligence—into their work and influenced digital design practices from the late 1980s to the present day. Alexander, long before his famous 1977 book A Pattern Language, used computation and structure to visualize design problems; Wurman popularized the notion of “information architecture”; Price designed some of the first intelligent buildings; and Negroponte experimented with the ways people experience artificial intelligence, even at architectural scale. Steenson investigates how these architects pushed the boundaries of architecture—and how their technological experiments pushed the boundaries of technology. What did computational, cybernetic, and artificial intelligence researchers have to gain by engaging with architects and architectural problems? And what was this new space that emerged within these collaborations? At times, Steenson writes, the architects in this book characterized themselves as anti-architects and their work as anti-architecture. The projects Steenson examines mostly did not result in constructed buildings, but rather in design processes and tools, computer programs, interfaces, digital environments. Alexander, Wurman, Price, and Negroponte laid the foundation for many of our contemporary interactive practices, from information architecture to interaction design, from machine learning to smart cities.

The Anxious City

The Anxious City
Author: Richard J. Williams
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2004-03-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134467427

In the Western world, cities have arguably never been more anxious: practical anxieties about personal safety and metaphysical anxieties about the uncertain place of the city in culture are the small change of journalism and political debate. Cities have long been regarded as problems, in need of drastic solutions. In this context, the contemporary revival of city centres is remarkable. But in a culture that largely fears the urban, how can the contemporary city be imagined? How is it supposed to be used or inhabited? What does it mean? Taking England since WWII as its principal focus, this provocative and original book considers the Western city at a critical moment in its history.

Architect?

Architect?
Author: Roger K. Lewis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1998
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262621212

Architect? addresses issues and concerns of relevance to students choosing among different types of programme, schools, firms and architectural career paths, and explores both the up-side and the down-side to the profession.

Schools That Heal

Schools That Heal
Author: Claire Latane
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 164283078X

What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses consistently reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways--from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations--to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to create nurturing and inspiring schools for all children.

Impossible Presence

Impossible Presence
Author: Terry E. Smith
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2001-09-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780226763859

Impossible Presence brings together new work in film studies, critical theory, art history, and anthropology for a multifaceted exploration of the continuing proliferation of visual images in the modern era. It also asks what this proliferation—and the changing technologies that support it—mean for the ways in which images are read today and how they communicate with viewers and spectators. Framed by Terry Smith's introduction, the essays focus on two kinds of strangeness involved in experiencing visual images in the modern era. The first, explored in the book's first half, involves the appearance of oddities or phantasmagoria in early photographs and cinema. The second type of strangeness involves art from marginalized groups and indigenous peoples, and the communicative formations that result from the trafficking of images between people from vastly different cultures. With a stellar list of contributors, Impossible Presence offers a wide-ranging look at the fate of the visual image in modernity, modern art, and popular culture. Contributors: Jean Baudrillard Marshall Berman Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe Elizabeth Grosz Tom Gunning Peter Hutchings Fred R. Myers Javier Sanjines Richard Shiff Hugh J. Silverman Terry Smith