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Architectural discourse and practice are dominated by a false dichotomy between design and chance, and governed by the belief that the architect’s role is to defend against the indeterminate. In Architectures of Chance Yeoryia Manolopoulou challenges this position, arguing for the need to develop a more creative understanding of chance as aesthetic experience and critical method, and as a design practice in its own right. Examining the role of experimental chance across film, psychoanalysis, philosophy, fine art and performance, this is the first book to comprehensively discuss the idea of chance in architecture and bring a rich array of innovative practices of chance to the attention of architects. Wide-ranging and through a symbiotic interplay of drawing and text, Architectures of Chance makes illuminating reading for those interested in the process and experience of design, and the poetics and ethics of chance and space in the overlapping fields of architecture and the aleatoric arts.
Architecture can be analogous to a history, a fiction, and a landscape. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The catalyst to this tradition was the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the eighteenth century of new art forms: the picturesque landscape, the analytical history, and the English novel. Each of them instigated a creative and questioning response to empiricism’s detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world, and together they stimulated a design practice and lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries. Associating the changing natural world with journeys in self-understanding, and the design process with a visual and spatial autobiography, this book describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive centuries, analysing an enduring and evolving tradition from the picturesque and romanticism to modernism. Creative architects have often looked to the past to understand the present and imagine the future. Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.
Digital Poetics celebrates the architectural design exuberance made possible by new digital modelling techniques and fabrication technologies. By presenting an unconventional and original ’humanistic’ theory of CAD (computer-aided design), the author suggests that beyond the generation of innovative engineering forms, digital design has the potential to affect the wider complex cultural landscape of today in profound ways. The book is organised around a synthetic and hybrid research methodology: a contemporary, propositional and theoretical discursive investigation and a design-led empirical research. Both methods inform a critical construct that deals with the nature, forms, and laws of...
This fascinating argument from Jonathan Hill presents the case for the significance and importance of the immaterial in architecture. Architecture is generally perceived as the solid, physical matter that it unarguably creates, but what of the spaces it creates? This issue drives Hill's explorative look at the immaterial aspects of architecture. The book discusses the pressures on architecture and the architectural profession to be respectively solid matter and solid practice and considers concepts that align architecture with the immaterial, such as the superiority of ideas over matter, command of drawing and design of spaces and surfaces. Focusing on immaterial architecture as the perceived absence of matter, Hill devises new means to explore the creativity of both the user and the architect, advocating an architecture that fuses the immaterial and the material and considers its consequences, challenging preconceptions about architecture, its practice, purpose, matter and use. This is a useful and innovative read that encourages architects and students to think beyond established theory and practice.
Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill’s investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture’s relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather’s effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.
This book provides a clear guide for practitioners looking to establish or already conducting research projects in a practice context and graduate students looking to support their studies and role within practice. The book is divided into three key sections. The first section, across Chapters Two and Three, discusses why research is relevant to practice, how it benefits both practice and their clients, the breadth of topics, and tackles the key challenges facing research in practice and discusses how to overcome them, including how to fund research in practice. Section two, across Chapters Four to Seven, focuses on the mechanics of a research project, providing a step-by-step guide to revie...
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a...
Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice presents a selection of essays, architectural experiments and works that explore the diversity within the fields of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Specific in this selection is the question of how and why architecture can and should manifest in a critical and reflective capacity, as well as to examine how the discipline currently resonates with contemporary art practice. It does so by reflecting on the first 10 years of the architectural journal, P.E.A.R. (2009 to 2019). The volume argues that the initial aims of the journal – to explore and celebrate the myriad forms through which architecture can exist – are n...
Each architectural design is a new history. To identify what is novel or innovative, we need to consider the present, past and future. We expect historical narratives to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The aim of this volume is to understand each design as a visible and physical history. Historical understanding is investigated as a stimulus to the creative process, highlighting how architects learn from each other and other disciplines. This encourages us to consider the stories about history that architects fabricate. An eminent set of international contributors reflect on the relevance of historical insight for contemporary design, drawing on the rich visual output of innovative studios worldwide in practice and education. Wide ranging and thought-provoking articles encompass fact, fiction, memory, time, etymology, civilisation, racial segregation and more. Features: Elizabeth Dow, Pezo von Ellrichshausen, Terunobu Fujimori, Perry Kulper, Lesley Lokko, Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Niall McLaughlin, Aisling O’Carroll, Arinjoy Sen, Amin Taha and Sumayya Vally.
Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou’s work performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas… demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.