The Efficacy of Architecture

The Efficacy of Architecture
Author: Tahl Kaminer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317437446

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the ‘starchitecture’ system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007–8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a ‘disinterested’ position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization. At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.

The Efficacy of Architecture

The Efficacy of Architecture
Author: Tahl Kaminer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317437438

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the ‘starchitecture’ system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007–8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a ‘disinterested’ position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization. At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.

Architecture

Architecture
Author: Léon Krier
Publisher: Papadakis Publisher
Total Pages: 232
Release: 1998
Genre: Architecture, Modern
ISBN: 1901092038

This polemic is essential reading for anyone converned with the state and direction of architecture and urban planning today and will provake wide-ranging discussion.

Why Architects Still Draw

Why Architects Still Draw
Author: Paolo Belardi
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2014-02-14
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0262321432

An architect's defense of drawing as a way of thinking, even in an age of electronic media. Why would an architect reach for a pencil when drawing software and AutoCAD are a click away? Use a ruler when 3D-scanners and GPS devices are close at hand? In Why Architects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi offers an elegant and ardent defense of drawing by hand as a way of thinking. Belardi is no Luddite; he doesn't urge architects to give up digital devices for watercolors and a measuring tape. Rather, he makes a case for drawing as the interface between the idea and the work itself. A drawing, Belardi argues, holds within it the entire final design. It is the paradox of the acorn: a project emerges from a drawing—even from a sketch, rough and inchoate—just as an oak tree emerges from an acorn. Citing examples not just from architecture but also from literature, chemistry, music, archaeology, and art, Belardi shows how drawing is not a passive recording but a moment of invention pregnant with creative possibilities. Moving from the sketch to the survey, Belardi explores the meaning of measurement in a digital era. A survey of a site should go beyond width, height, and depth; it must include two more dimensions: history and culture. Belardi shows the sterility of techniques that value metric exactitude over cultural appropriateness, arguing for an “informed drawing” that takes into consideration more than meters or feet, stone or steel. Even in the age of electronic media, Belardi writes, drawing can maintain its role as a cornerstone of architecture.

The History of Architecture

The History of Architecture
Author: Gaynor Aaltonen
Publisher: Arcturus Publishing
Total Pages: 710
Release: 2013-07-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1782127976

This book takes a bird's eye view of architecture in time, and explores the different ways architects have responded to civilizations, giving them the buildings and cities they deserve.

Architecture and Health

Architecture and Health
Author: Dina Battisto
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 455
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0429664850

Architecture and Health recognizes the built environment and health as inextricable encouraging a new mind-set for the profession. Over 40 international award-winning projects are included to explore innovative design principles linked to health outcomes. The book is organized into three interdependent health domains—individual, community, and global—in which each case study proposes context-specific architectural responses. Case studies include children’s hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, elderly housing, mental health facilities, cancer support centers, clinics, healthy communities, healthcare campuses, wellness centers, healing gardens, commercial offices, infrastructure for developing countries, sustainable design, and more. Representing the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia, each author brings a new perspective to health and its related architectural response. This book brings a timely focus to a subject matter commonly constricted by normative building practices and transforms the dialogue into one of creativity and innovation. With over 200 color images, this book is an essential read for architects, designers, and students to explore and analyze designed environments that promote health and well-being.

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism
Author: Davide Ponzini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2020-05-28
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351847236

Transnational Architecture and Urbanism combines urban planning, design, policy, and geography studies to offer place-based and project-oriented insight into relevant case studies of urban transformation in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Since the 1990s, increasingly multinational modes of design have arisen, especially concerning prominent buildings and places. Traditional planning and design disciplines have proven to have limited comprehension of, and little grip on, such transformations. Public and scholarly discussions argue that these projects and transformations derive from socioeconomic, political, cultural trends or conditions of globalization. The author suggests that general urban theories are relevant as background, but of limited efficacy when dealing with such context-bound projects and policies. This book critically investigates emerging problematic issues such as the spectacularization of the urban environment, the decontextualization of design practice, and the global circulation of plans and projects. The book portends new conceptualizations, evidence-based explanations, and practical understanding for architects, planners, and policy makers to critically learn from practice, to cope with these transnational issues, and to put better planning in place.

Architecture as the Ethics of Climate

Architecture as the Ethics of Climate
Author: Jin Baek
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-06-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317438000

At a time when climate and ethics have become so important to architectural debate, this book proposes an entirely new way for architects to engage with these core issues. Drawing on Tetsuro Watsuji‘s (1889-1960) philosophy, the book illuminates climate not as a collection of objective natural phenomena, but as a concrete form of bond in which "who we are"—the subjective human experience—is indivisibly intertwined with the natural phenomena. The book further elucidates the inter-personal nature of climatic experiences, criticizing a view that sees atmospheric effects of climate under the guise of personal experientialism and reinforcing the linkage between climate and ethos as the appropriateness of a setting for human affairs. This ethical premise of climate stretches the horizon of sustainability as pertaining not only to man’s solitary relationship with natural phenomena—a predominant trend in contemporary discourse of sustainability—but also to man’s relationship with man. Overcoming climatic determinism—regional determinism, too—and expanding the ethics of the inter-personal to the level where the whole and particulars are joined through the dialectics of the mutually-negating opposites, Jin Baek develops a new thesis engaging with the very urgent issues inherent in sustainable architecture. Crucially, the book explores examples that join climate and the dynamics of the inter-personal, including: Japanese vernacular residential architecture the white residential architecture of Richard Neutra contemporary architectural works and urban artifacts by Tadao Ando and Aldo Rossi Beautifully illustrated, this book is an important contribution to the discourse which surrounds architecture, climate and ethics and encourages the reader to think more broadly about how to respond to the current challenges facing the profession.

The Architecture of Neoliberalism

The Architecture of Neoliberalism
Author: Douglas Spencer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-10-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1472581539

The Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, and Greg Lynn shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought. Analysing architectural projects in the fields of education, consumption and labour, The Architecture of Neoliberalism examines the part played by contemporary architecture in refashioning human subjects into the compliant figures - student-entrepreneurs, citizen-consumers and team-workers - requisite to the universal implementation of a form of existence devoted to market imperatives.