Deconstructing the Kimbell

Deconstructing the Kimbell
Author: Michael Benedikt
Publisher: Lumen Press
Total Pages: 164
Release: 1991
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

A clear-sighted look at the impact of Derrida and the deconstructionists on contemporary architecture. "A terrific piece. It is a pleasure to read, very perceptive, lucid, and well argued."--Kenneth Frampton "A fine appraisal of a great work of art. The advice here is to skip Derrida and get right to Benedikt."--ABR

Light is the Theme

Light is the Theme
Author: Louis I. Kahn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Art museums
ISBN: 9780300179408

Originally published in 1975 as a memorial to the Kimbell Art Museum's architect, Louis I. Kahn, Light Is the Theme provides an extended expression of the major themes articulated in his design for the museum. The text consists solely of Kahn's own words and explores his innovative use of natural light and playful employment of materials, which achieve their most refined state in the Kimbell, widely regarded as the architect's crowning achievement and admired as one of the greatest museum buildings of the 20th century. Marking the 40th anniversary of the Kimbell Art Museum, this is the first time this classic book, updated with a new bibliography and a foreword by director Eric M. Lee, has been available outside of the museum. Distributed for the Kimbell Art Museum

For an Architecture of Reality

For an Architecture of Reality
Author: Michael Benedikt
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1987
Genre: Architectural design
ISBN: 9780930829056

Michael Benedikt teaches, practices architecture, and writes in Austin, where he is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas. His second book, Deconstructing the Kimbell (0-930829-16-6), is also published by Lumen. "Benedikt has written a bold theoretical essay, with stirring cultural implications, that argues to restore the missing sense of reality to architecture and insists on 'the direct esthetic experience of the real.' . . . a timely manifesto. Thought-provoking and eminently quotable, it succeeds admirably in what it sets out to do: to recall architecture, and not only architecture, to those all but mute meanings so often passed over and yet inseparable from our everyday existence.--Karsten Harries "This book will still be useful when this year's round arches have all been remodeled (isn't it inevitable?) into pointed. And because it is so vividly -and thoughtfully--written, it will still be a pleasure to read."--Charles Moore "Every literate architect should take an afternoon off to read and ponder this brief and thoughtful and thoroughly engaging book. . . . Benedikt says more about some central aesthetic and philosophical issues confronting contemporary architecture than many celebrated pundits manage to squeeze into a shelfful of books. . . . He offers a straightforward account of his own struggle to understand the pleasures and responsibilities of architecture in an age when aesthetic pleasure is all but indiscernible from entertainment, and responsibility is often a cover for thoughtless conformity."--Roger Kimball, Architectural Record "Benedikt marches bravely into the philosophical thicket to find a working definition of reality. . . . In his sensibilities, he is quite transcendental, much like a Thoreau or an Emerson in a hotel lobby of potted ficus trees."--Howard Mansfield, Small Press ". . . the book of the decade in Texas architectural circles. . . "--Texas Architect

Architecture Beyond Experience

Architecture Beyond Experience
Author: Michael Benedikt
Publisher: ORO Applied Research + Design
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781943532896

Architecture Beyond Experience is an interdisciplinary work in the service of one goal: the bringing about of a more relational, "posthuman" and yet humanist strain in architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much architectural production (and the larger economy's too), which is the making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences. The result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around it. I argue that it's time to find a deeper basis for making and judging architecture, a basis which is not personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational from the start. I use the word relational to describe an architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are beings. When architecture, they teach as well as protect; they tell us who we were and who we want to be; they exemplify, they deserve respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are social-relational values, values that both underlie and go beyond experiential ones (sometimes called "phenomenological"). Such relational values have been suppressed, in part because architects have joined the Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-center a profession.

Shadow-Makers

Shadow-Makers
Author: Stephen Kite
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2017-10-19
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1472588118

The making of shadows is an act as old as architecture itself. From the gloom of the medieval hearth through to the masterworks of modernism, shadows have been an essential yet neglected presence in architectural history. Shadow-Makers tells for the first time the history of shadows in architecture. It weaves together a rich narrative – combining close readings of significant buildings both ancient and modern with architectural theory and art history – to reveal the key places and moments where shadows shaped architecture in distinctive and dynamic ways. It shows how shadows are used as an architectural instrument of form, composition, and visual effect, while also exploring the deeper cultural context – tracing differing conceptions of their meaning and symbolism, whether as places of refuge, devotion, terror, occult practice, sublime experience or as metaphors of the unconscious. Within a chronological framework encompassing medieval, baroque, enlightenment, sublime, picturesque, and modernist movements, a wide range of topics are explored, from Hawksmoor's London churches, Japanese temple complexes and the shade-patterns of Islamic cities, to Ruskin in Venice and Aldo Rossi and Louis Kahn in the 20th century. This beautifully-illustrated study seeks to understand the work of these shadow-makers through their drawings, their writings, and through the masterpieces they built.

Sites

Sites
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 462
Release: 1992
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Beginning Design Technology

Beginning Design Technology
Author: Mike Christenson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2015-12-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317751523

Beginning Design Technology introduces how design technologies work together, including tools, materials, and software, such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk AutoCAD, and others. It teaches you how to think about each design tool, whether a software program or physical modelmaking, so that you will select one for its strengths for a specific task and know when and how to combine it with other tools. Topics include working with building information, texturing digital and physical artifacts, translating information from one form or file format to another, constructing at full-scale, and making digital and physical models. Chapter Summaries, exercises, discussion questions, a glossary, an appendix of common software commands, and an annotated bibliography will help you find what you need quickly and put the information into practice.

The Derrida Reader

The Derrida Reader
Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780803298071

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume.

Passages

Passages
Author: Graham Livesey
Publisher: University of Calgary Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1552381412

Informed by the work of writers such as Henri Lefebvre, Paul Ricouer and Michel de Certeau, this collection of essays examines through multiple lenses eight topics related to the contemporary urban domain. Recalling key aspects of our shared intellectual heritage, Passages seeks to demystify the structure and historical development of the contemporary city in an accessible, engaging style.

Bridging the Atlantic

Bridging the Atlantic
Author: Marina Perez de Mendiola
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1996-04-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438400624

The essays examine the linkages between the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America in the area of intellectual production over the centuries. No other book provides such a broad coverage of the most significant intellectual influences between the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. At the same time, it treats each case study with unparalleled interdisciplinary depth. Original essays by some of the most accomplished scholars from Europe, Latin America, and the United States address not only the question of the meaning of the Quincentennial of the Encounter, but also provide the first reflection on what lies ahead in terms of a research agenda and broader questions concerning the relationship between Europe and Latin America. The last ten years have been marked by an increasing interest in colonial and postcolonial studies. However, there has been a lack of anthologies in English chronicling the complex relationship between Spain, Latin America, and its colonial legacy. Bridging the Atlantic helps to fill this gap and stimulates new "dialectical encounters," as well as more comparative research on postcolonial questions.