Intentions in Architecture

Intentions in Architecture
Author: Christian Norberg-Schulz
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 1968-09-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262640022

The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art. Norberg-Schulz is a practicing architect; his buildings stand in several countries; and he elucidates the nature of architectural reality with a practiced eye and from a practical viewpoint. Although the methods and theory that his book develops are uncompromisingly rigorous and tightly formed, they are everywhere related to actual building, through specific examples and through the use of over 100 photographs. The structure that Norberg-Schulz has fashioned is surely one of the most impressive intellectual edifices that any architect has ever produced. The materials that are organically worked into it include Gestalt psychology, the mechanics of perception, information theory, modern analytic philosophy, and in particular, linguistic analysis, and the general theory of signs and symbols. The result, however, is not an eclectic hodge-podge; all these materials have their place and purpose; none is applied extraneously for "show" or purely decorative effect. And all this divergent material had to be joined according to plan within formal bounds in order to produce a theory with equally divergent applications: one that can treat not only of the aesthetics of architecture but equally well of its social, psychological, and cultural effects. The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art.

Architecture of Good Intentions

Architecture of Good Intentions
Author: C. Rowe
Publisher: Wiley
Total Pages: 144
Release: 1994-10-31
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781854903075

Colin Rowe displays a witty and inspirational view of today's architectural scene.

Genius Loci

Genius Loci
Author: Christian Norberg-Schulz
Publisher: New York : Rizzoli
Total Pages: 220
Release: 1980
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Attempts to develop a theory of understanding architecture in concrete, existential terms, following the guidelines of Heidegger

Terror and Wonder

Terror and Wonder
Author: Blair Kamin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2011-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0226423123

Collects the best of Kamin's writings for the Chicago Tribune from the past decade.

Integrated Buildings

Integrated Buildings
Author: Leonard R. Bachman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 494
Release: 2004-01-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 047146774X

An "anatomical" study of building systems integration with guidelines for practical applications Through a systems approach to buildings, Integrated Buildings: The Systems Basis of Architecture details the practice of integration to bridge the gap between the design intentions and technical demands of building projects. Analytic methods are introduced that illustrate the value, benefit, and application of systems integration, as well as guidelines for selecting technical systems in the conceptual, schematic, and design development stages of projects. Landmark structures such as Eero Saarinen's John Deere Headquarters, Renzo Piano's Kansai International Airport, Glenn Murcutt's Magney House, and Richard Rogers's Lloyd's of London headquarters are presented as part of an extensive collection of case studies organized into seven categories: Laboratories Offices Pavilions Green Architecture High Tech Architecture Airport Terminals Residential Architecture Advanced material is provided on methods of integration, including an overview of integration topics, the systems basis of architecture, and the integration potential of various building systems. An expanded case study of Ibsen Nelsen's design for the Pacific Museum of Flight is used to demonstrate case study methods for tracing integration through any work of architecture. Visually enhanced with more than 300 illustrations, diagrams, and photographs, Integrated Buildings: The Systems Basis of Architecture is a valuable reference guide for architecture and civil engineering students, as well as architects, engineers, and other professionals in the construction industry.

Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science

Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science
Author: Alberto Perez-Gomez
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1985-04-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262660555

This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Between the late Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, the ancient arts of architecture were being profoundly transformed by the scientific revolution. This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Throughout, it relates the major architectural treatises of successive generations to the larger culture and the writings of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. The book leads the reader through the controversy that was generated by Claude Perrault in the seventeenth century. His writings began to cast doubt on the absolute aesthetic value of the classical orders and the "perfect" proportions that were architecture's legacy from Pythagorean times. Thus the once immutable "invisible" system lost its special status forever. The book focuses in particular on eighteenth-century developments in the science of mechanics and emerging techniques in structural analysis which slowly entered the architectural treatises and found their way into practice, often by way of civil and military engineers. And by the nineteenth century, the book notes, even architectural rendering and drawing were radically changed through the introduction of new descriptive and projective geometries. Tracing these fundamental changes in architectural intentions, Pérez-Gómez challenges many popular misconceptions about the theory and history of modern architecture. At the same time, he suggests an intangible loss, that of a culture's power to express through a building its total mathematical, mystical, and magical world-view.

Toward an Architecture

Toward an Architecture
Author: Le Corbusier
Publisher:
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2007
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780892368990

Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.

Architecture's Historical Turn

Architecture's Historical Turn
Author: Jorge Otero-Pailos
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2013-11-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1452942692

Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. Jorge Otero-Pailos shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. In the first critical intellectual account of the movement, Otero-Pailos discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, Otero-Pailos contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as Otero-Pailos makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory. Otero-Pailos reveals how, ultimately, the rise of architectural phenomenology played a crucial double role in the rise of postmodernism, creating the antimodern specter of a historical consciousness and offering the modern notion of essential experience as the means to defeat it.

Welcome to Your World

Welcome to Your World
Author: Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0062199188

One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

Precedents in Architecture

Precedents in Architecture
Author: Roger H. Clark
Publisher: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1996
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Precedents in Architecture provides a vocabulary for architectural analysis that will help you understand the works of others, and aid you in creating your own designs. Here, you will examine the work of internationally known architects with the help of a unique diagrammatic technique, which you can also use to analyze existing buildings. In addition to the sixteen original contributors, the Second Edition features seven new, distinguished architects. All 23 architects were selected because of the strength, quality, and interest of their designs.