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Investigating money's ambiguous position in architecture, with reflections on topics that range from the aesthetics of austerity to the underwriting of large-scale art projects.
An in-depth look at Boston's Prudential Center and what its story reveals about the evolution of the modern American city The Prudential Center anchors the Boston skyline with its tall, gray tower. It is also a historical beacon, representing a midcentury moment when insurance companies such as Prudential were particularly aware of how their physical presence and civic engagement reflected upon their intangible product: financial security. Looking to New York's Rockefeller Center, the creators of the Prudential Center aspired to use real estate development as a tool toward civic achievement, reinvigorating central Boston and integrating a large complex of buildings with new infrastructure for the automobile. Now available in paperback, this award-winning book tells the full story of “The Pru,” placing it in the political, economic, and architectural contexts of the period, and providing new insights into urban renewal in postwar America.
At a time when the technologies and techniques of producing the built environment are undergoing significant change, this book makes central architecture’s relationship to industry. Contributors turn to historical and theoretical questions, as well as to key contemporary developments, taking a humanities approach to the Industries of Architecture that will be of interest to practitioners and industry professionals, as much as to academic researchers, teachers and students. How has modern architecture responded to mass production? How do we understand the necessarily social nature of production in the architectural office and on the building site? And how is architecture entwined within wider fields of production and reproduction—finance capital, the spaces of regulation, and management techniques? What are the particular effects of techniques and technologies (and above all their inter-relations) on those who labour in architecture, the buildings they produce, and the discursive frameworks we mobilise to understand them?
The first digital turn in architecture changed our ways of making; the second changes our ways of thinking. Almost a generation ago, the early software for computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) spawned a style of smooth and curving lines and surfaces that gave visible form to the first digital age, and left an indelible mark on contemporary architecture. But today's digitally intelligent architecture no longer looks that way. In The Second Digital Turn, Mario Carpo explains that this is because the design professions are now coming to terms with a new kind of digital tools they have adopted—no longer tools for making but tools for thinking. In the early 1990s the design profess...
The discussion of architecture, with all the visibility of its objects, tends to downplay the invisible flows of money that sustain its production. It is as if the dependency on economic forces is too much to face up to; better then to celebrate the catalytic genius of the architectural hero and then the glorious outputs, and try to ignore everything else that goes on in between. This issue intends to probe the in-between space of the operations of architecture, examining the intersection of the projects of architecture with economies, and with it their associated social and political contexts and implications. It is only through a better understanding of the way that contemporary economics cut across architectural operations that one can learn to deal with these dominant forces in a resistive and transformational manner.
This book, Social Infrastructure: New York, one of a series that documents the Bass Fellowship at the Yale School of Architecture studio led by real estate developer Douglas Durst of the Durst Organization, a leading New York firm known for spearheading sustainable high-rise developments, and architect Bjarke Ingels, founder of Copenhagen- and New York-based Bjarke Ingels Group. Their students explored potential synergies between public and private programs in the design of inhabited bridges crossing major waterways in metropolitan New York. The group traveled to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to research developments that successfully integrated the needs of numerous stake-holders. The featured projects from the studio demonstrate a diverse range of approaches for combining residential, cultural, and commercial activities on complex and dense infrastructural sites in imaginative and productive ways.
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