Interpretation in Architecture

Interpretation in Architecture
Author: Adrian Snodgrass
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134222645

Drawing on cultural theory, phenomenology and concepts from Asian art and philosophy, this book reflects on the role of interpretation in the act of architectural creation, bringing an intellectual and scholarly dimension to real-world architectural design practice. For practising architects as well as academic researchers, these essays consider interpretation from three theoretical standpoints or themes: play, edification and otherness. Focusing on these, the book draws together strands of thought informed by the diverse reflections of hermeneutical scholarship, the uses of digital media and studio teaching and practice.

Architecture and Interpretation

Architecture and Interpretation
Author: Jill A. Franklin
Publisher: Boydell Press
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1843837811

Essays centred on the methods, pleasures, and pitfalls of architectural interpretation. Architecture affects us on a number of levels. It can control our movements, change our experience of our own scale, create a particular sense of place, focus memory, and act as a statement of power and taste, to name but a few. Yet the ways in which these effects are brought about are not yet well understood. The aim of this book is to move the discussion forward, to encourage and broaden debate about the ways in which architecture is interpreted, with aview to raising levels of intellectual engagement with the issues in terms of the theory and practice of architectural history. The range of material covered extends from houses constructed from mammoth bones around 15,000 years ago in the present-day Ukraine to a surfer's memorial in Carpinteria, California; other subjects include the young Michelangelo seeking to transcend genre boundaries; medieval masons' tombs; and the mythographies of early modern Netherlandish towns. Taking as their point of departure the ways in which architecture has been, is, and can be written about and otherwise represented, the editors' substantial Introduction provides an historiographical framework for, and draws out the themes and ideas presented in, the individual contributors' essays. Contributors: Christine Stevenson, T. A. Heslop, John Mitchell, Malcolm Thurlby, Richard Fawcett, Jill A. Franklin, StephenHeywood, Roger Stalley, Veronica Sekules, John Onians, Frank Woodman, Paul Crossley, David Hemsoll, Kerry Downes, Richard Plant, Jenifer Ní Ghrádraigh, Lindy Grant, Elisabeth de Bièvre, Stefan Muthesius, Robert Hillenbrand, AndrewM. Shanken, Peter Guillery.

Towards an Articulated Phenomenological Interpretation of Architecture

Towards an Articulated Phenomenological Interpretation of Architecture
Author: M. Reza Shirazi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1134679726

This book sheds light on the contemporary status of phenomenological discourse in architecture and investigates its current scholastic as well as practical position. Starting with a concise introduction to the philosophical grounds of phenomenology from the points of view of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, it presents a critical reading of the works of some leading figures of architectural phenomenology in both theory and practice, such as Christian Norberg-Schultz, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Steven Holl. Highlighting the main challenges of the current phenomenological discourse in architecture, this book formulates a more articulated method of 'phenomenological interpretation' – dubbed 'phenomenal phenomenology' − as a new and innovative method of interpreting the built environment. Finally, using Tadao Ando's Langen Foundation Museum as a case study, it investigates the architect's contribution to phenomenological discourse, interprets and analyzes the Museum building using the new heuristic method, and thus provides a clear example of its applicability. By introducing a clear, articulated, and practical method of interpretation, this book is of interest to academics and students analyzing and studying architecture and the built environment at various scales.

How to Read Architecture

How to Read Architecture
Author: Paulette Singley
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 463
Release: 2019-06-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429557450

How to Read Architecture is based on the fundamental premise that reading and interpreting architecture is something we already do, and that close observation matters. This book enhances this skill so that given an unfamiliar building, you will have the tools to understand it and to be inspired by it. Author Paulette Singley encourages you to misread, closely read, conventionally read, and unconventionally read architecture to stimulate your creative process. This book explores three essential ways to help you understand architecture: reading a building from the outside-in, from the inside-out, and from the position of out-and-out, or formal, architecture. This book erodes boundaries between the frequently compartmentalized fields of interior design, landscape design, and building design with chapters exploring concepts of terroir, scenography, criticality, atmosphere, tectonics, inhabitation, type, form, and enclosure. Using examples and case studies that span a wide range of historical and global precedents, Singley addresses the complex interaction among the ways a building engages its context, addresses its performative exigencies, and operates as an autonomous aesthetic object. Including over 300 images, this book is an essential read for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of architecture with a global focus on the interpretation of buildings in their context.

Against Architecture

Against Architecture
Author: Denis Hollier
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 1992-02-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780262581134

Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, among others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work.

Privacy and Publicity

Privacy and Publicity
Author: Beatriz Colomina
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 1996-02-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262531399

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.

Architecture of Siam

Architecture of Siam
Author: Clarence T. Aasen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1998
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

This book is about the special and identifying role architecture has played over the last 15 centuries in the construction of the highly diverse and complex culture of Siam. The combination of its written and visual content and its contemporary theoretical underpinnings makes this the most comprehensive, critical and challenging interpretation of Siamese architecture that has been written.

Architecture and Modern Literature

Architecture and Modern Literature
Author: David Anton Spurr
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2017-05-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0472900803

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.

Consuming Architecture

Consuming Architecture
Author: Daniel Maudlin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2014-03-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317801792

Projecting forward in time from the processes of design and construction that are so often the focus of architectural discourse, Consuming Architecture examines the variety of ways in which buildings are consumed after they have been produced, focusing in particular on processes of occupation, appropriation and interpretation. Drawing on contributions by architects, historians, anthropologists, literary critics, artists, film-makers, photographers and journalists, it shows how the consumption of architecture is a dynamic and creative act that involves the creation and negotiation of meanings and values by different stakeholders and that can be expressed in different voices. In so doing, it challenges ideas of what constitutes architecture, architectural discourse and architectural education, how we understand and think about it, and who can claim ownership of it. Consuming Architecture is aimed at students in architectural education and will also be of interest to students and researchers from disciplines that deal with architecture in terms of consumption and material culture.