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In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practi...
This book examines the role that time plays in the life of buildings, adopting a comparative study of this influence between European and Chinese traditions. Whilst issues of time in architecture have attracted increasing interest by academics in the West, challenging the dominant modernist precepts of space, there is little understanding of the subject in China and how these compare to historical and contemporary perspectives in Europe. A guiding premise of the investigation is that notions of building time require insight into how cultural habits commingle with natural rhythms, or what David Leatherbarrow calls “concurrency”. Rather than examining specific buildings, the first three ch...
This book is a practical and theoretical exploration of the embodied imagining processes of devised performance in which the human and more-than-human are co-implicated in the creative process. This study brings together the work of French theatre pedagogue Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999) and French philosopher of science and the imagination Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) to explore the notion of the imagination as embodied, enactive and embedded in the devising process. An exploration of compelling correspondences with Bachelard, whose writings imbue Lecoq’s teaching ethos, offers new practical and theoretical perspectives on Lecoq’s ‘poetic body’ in contemporary devising practices. Int...
How do buildings act with people and among people in the performances of life? This collection of essays reveals a deep alliance between architecture and the performing arts, uncovering its roots in ancient stories, and tracing a continuous tradition of thought that emerges in contemporary practice. With fresh insight, the authors ask how buildings perform with people as partners, rather than how they look as formal compositions. They focus on actions: the door that offers the possibility of making a dramatic entrance, the window that frames a scene, and the city street that is transformed in carnival. The essays also consider the design process as a performance improvised among many players...
Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respec...
Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect’s role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later...
This book argues that the creative industries, which include publishing, music, cinema, crafts, and design, have a crucial role to play in the future of culture, and contribute to national GDP and wealth creation in both the formal and informal economies. The book is the collection of papers from researchers, academicians, and industrialists in different, allied fields of design, and covers the areas of applied art and design; built environment; fashion and textiles; and spatial design and interior environments.
This edited collection gathers contributions from a diverse range of renowned scholars and professionals to uncover the unique relationship between passive architectural systems and activism. Focusing on the pioneering work of the influential American chemist and inventor, Harold R. Hay (1909–2009), and the environmental awareness events that took hold in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, the book assembles essays which closely examine Hay's contribution to architecture and the work of those who directly and tangentially were affected by it. The book also offers insights into the role of passive energy design today. Appealing to researchers, architects and students interested in architecture and design technology, Activism in Architecture explores the role of passive environmental inventions as an active agent in shaping socio-political debates.
The Place of Silence explores the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Bringing together contributions by internationally recognized scholars in architecture and the humanities, it explores the diverse practices, affects, politics and cultural meanings of silence, silent places and silent buildings in historical and contemporary contexts. What counts as silence in specific situations is highly relative, and the term itself carries complex and varied significations which make it a revealing field of study. Chapters explore a range of themes, from the apparent 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world; through designed silent spaces; to the forced silences of oppression, catastrophe, or technological breakdown. The book unfolds a rich and complementary array of perspectives which address – through the lens of architecture and place – questions of sound, atmosphere, and attunement, together building a volume which will form the key scholarly resource on architecture and silence.
Architectural drawings and models are instruments of imagination, communication, and historical continuity. The role of drawings and models, and their ownership, placement, and authorship in a ubiquitous digital age deserve careful consideration. Expanding on the well-established discussion of the translation from drawings to buildings, this book fills a lacuna in current scholarship, questioning the significance of the lives of drawings and models after construction. Including emerging, well-known, and world-renowned scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory and curatorial practices, the thirty-five contributions define recent research in four key areas: drawing sites/sites...