Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture
Author: Charles Jencks
Publisher: Academy Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-02-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780470014691

The second half of the 20th Century witnessed an outburst of theories and manifestoes that explored the possibilities of architecture: it's language, evolution and social relevance. The many 'crises in architecture' and emerging urban and ecological problems questioned the current orthodoxy: Modernism was criticised, questioned and overthrown, only to be extended, subverted and revivified. The result was a cascade of new theories, justifications and recipes for building. This anthology, first edited in 1997, brought together a coherent collection of texts that tracked these important shifts from all the major architectural thinkers and practitioners. In this new edition of the book, over twenty additional extracts are published that present an entirely new axis for architectural thinking. Whereas much of the 20th-Century thought was dominated by the 'perceived crisis' in Modernity, 'the new paradigm' or 'complexity paradigm' has been excited by the possibilities of Emergence in the Science of Complexity and Chaos theory. The reach of complexity is expressed through the primacy of Benoit Mandelbrot's theories on geometry, with an extract from his manifesto on fractals; and furthered through an outline of Emergence by Steven Johnson. It is also handled through texts that focus on the diagram and are demonstrated in its more applied form through passages dealing with the global city and culture. Essential for the student and practitioner alike, Theories and Manifestoes since its first edition has established itself as the touchstone book for architectural thought. It features seminal texts by Reyner Banham, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Colin Rowe and Robert Venturi. This is now ejected with greater currency with extracts from: Cecil Balmond, Foreign Office Architects, Daniel Libeskind, MVRDV, Lars Spuybroek, UN Studio and West 8.

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture
Author: Charles Jencks
Publisher: Academy Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 1997-08-05
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

This essential compendium presents more than 150 key arguments by major architectural philosophers and gurus of today and outlines the numerous developments that have taken flace in this field since the 1950s. Each of the statements is acocmpanied by a short biography of the architect and an extract from their principal texts drawn from a variety of sources.

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture

Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture
Author: Charles Jencks
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1997
Genre: Architecture, Modern
ISBN:

"Charles Jencks was the first to demonstrate that Modern architecture in the 1960s and 1970s had undergone a profound mutation into three major approaches - Post-Modernism, Late Modernism and New Modernism. He has shown how our pluralist age has oscillated between these and traditional approaches . In this title, the thinking and ideas that have informed, and continue to inform the architecture and urban design around us today, was presented as a compilation of writings by the most important architects, urbanists and theorists of the second half of the 20th century. The new edition brings thinking up to date with additional material that suggests the direction theory is taking into the 21st century." -- Web site.

An Architecture Manifesto

An Architecture Manifesto
Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429885067

In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture:

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture:
Author: Kate Nesbitt
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 610
Release: 1996-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568980546

Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of ArchitecturalTheory collects in a single volume the most significant essays on architectural theory of the last thirty years. A dynamic period of reexamination of the discipline, the postmodern eraproduced widely divergent and radical viewpoints on issues of making, meaning, history, and the city. Among the paradigms presented arearchitectural postmodernism, phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and feminism. By gathering these influential articles from a vast array of books and journals into a comprehensive anthology, Kate Nesbitt has created a resource of great value. Indispensable to professors and students of architecture and architectural theory, Theorizing a New Agenda also serves practitioners and the general public, as Nesbitt provides an overview, a thematic structure, and a critical introduction to each essay. The list of authors in Theorizing a New Agenda reads like a "Who's Who" of contemporary architectural thought: Tadao Ando, Giulio Carlo Argan, Alan Colquhoun, Jacques Derrida, Peter Eisenman, Marco Frascari, Kenneth Frampton, Diane Ghirardo, Vittorio Gregotti, Karsten Harries, Rem Koolhaas, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Thomas Schumacher, Ignasi de Sol-Morales Rubi, Bernard Tschumi, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and Anthony Vidler. A bibliography and notes on all the contributors are also included.

Towards a New Architecture

Towards a New Architecture
Author: Le Corbusier
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0486315649

Pioneering manifesto by founder of "International School." Technical and aesthetic theories, views of industry, economics, relation of form to function, "mass-production split," and much more. Profusely illustrated.

Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture

Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture
Author: Ulrich Conrads
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1975-11-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262530309

The present volume offers eloquent testimony that many of the master builders of this century have held passionate convictions regarding the philosophic and social basis of their art. Nearly every important development in the modern architectural movement began with the proclamation of these convictions in the form of a program or manifesto. The most influential of these are collected here in chronological order from 1903 to 1963. Taken together, they constitute a subjective history of modern architecture; compared with one another, their great diversity of style reveals in many cases the basic differences of attitude and temperament that produced a corresponding divergence in architectural style. In point of view, the book covers the aesthetic spectrum from right to left; from programs that rigidly generate designs down to the smallest detail to revolutionary manifestoes that call for anarchy in building form and town plan. The documents, placed in context by the editor, are also international in their range: among them are the seminal and prophetic statements of Henry van de Velde, Adolf Loos, and Bruno Taut from the early years of the century; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 annunciation of Organic Architecture; Gropius's original program for the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919; "Towards a New Architecture, Guiding Principles" by Le Corbusier; the formulation by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner of the basic principles of Constructivism; and articles by R. Buckminster Fuller on universal architecture and the architect as world planner. Other pronouncements, some in flamboyant style, including those of Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, and Louis I. Kahn. There are also a number of collective or group statements, issued in the name of movements such as CIAM, De Stijl, ABC, the Situationists, and GEAM. Since the dramatic effectiveness of the manifesto form is usually heightened by brevity and conciseness, it has been possible to reproduce most of the documents in their entirety; only a few have been excerpted.

Modern Architecture

Modern Architecture
Author: Otto Wagner
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 202
Release: 1988
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0226869393

In 1896, Otto Wagner's "Modern Architecture" shocked the European architectural community with its impassioned plea for an end to eclecticism and for a "modern" style suited to contemporary needs and ideals, utilizing the nascent constructional technologies and materials. Through the combined forces of his polemical, pedagogical, and professional efforts, this determined, newly appointed professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts emerged in the late 1890s - along with such contemporaries as Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Louis Sullivan in Chicago - as one of the leaders of the revolution soon to be identified as the "Modern Movement." Wagner's historic manifesto is now presented in a new English translation - the first in almost ninety years - based on the expanded 1902 text and noting emendations made to the 1896, 1898, and 1914 editions. In his introduction, Dr. Harry Mallgrave examines Wagner's tract against the backdrop of nineteenth-century theory, critically exploring the affinities of Wagner's revolutionary élan with the German eclectic debate of the 1840s, the materialistic tendencies of the 1870s and 1880s, and the emerging cultural ideology of modernity. Modern Architecture is one of those rare works in the literature of architecture that not only proclaimed the dawning of a new era, but also perspicaciously and cogently shaped the issues and the course of its development; it defined less the personal aspirations of one individual and more the collective hopes and dreams of a generation facing the sanguine promise of a new century

The Historiography of Modern Architecture

The Historiography of Modern Architecture
Author: Panayotis Tournikiotis
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2001-02-27
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262700856

The history of modern architecture as constructed by historians and key texts. Writing, according to Panayotis Tournikiotis, has always exerted a powerful influence on architecture. Indeed, the study of modern architecture cannot be separated from a fascination with the texts that have tried to explain the idea of a new architecture in a new society. During the last forty years, the question of the relationship of architecture to its history—of buildings to books—has been one of the most important themes in debates about the course of modern architecture. Tournikiotis argues that the history of modern architecture tends to be written from the present, projecting back onto the past our current concerns, so that the "beginning" of the story really functions as a "representation" of its end. In this book the buildings are the quotations, while the texts are the structure. Tournikiotis focuses on a group of books by major historians of the twentieth century: Nikolaus Pevsner, Emil Kaufmann, Sigfried Giedion, Bruno Zevi, Leonardo Benevolo, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Reyner Banham, Peter Collins, and Manfredo Tafuri. In examining these writers' thoughts, he draws on concepts from critical theory, relating architecture to broader historical models.