You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The image of the architect is undeniably gendered. While the male architect might be celebrated as the ideal man in Hollywood romantic comedies, blessed with practicality and creativity in equal measure to impeccable taste and an enviable lifestyle, the image of the woman architect is not so clear cut. While women have been practicing and excelling in architecture for more than a hundred years, their professional identity, as constructed in the media, is complex and sometimes contradictory. This book explores the working lives and aspirations of women in architectural practice, but more than this it explores how popular media – newspapers, magazines, and websites – serve to define and de...
What is the role of design research in the types of insight and knowledge that architects create? That is the central question raised by this book. It acts as the introductory overview for Ashgate’s major new series, ’Design Research in Architecture’ which has been created in order to establish a firm basis for this emerging field of investigation within architecture. While there have been numerous architects-scholars since the Renaissance who have relied upon the interplay of drawings, models, textual analysis, intellectual ideas and cultural insights to scrutinise the discipline, nonetheless, until recently, there has been a reluctance within architectural culture to acknowledge and ...
Public toilets provide a unique opportunity for interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology are formed in public spaces and inscribed through design across cultures. This collection of original essays from international scholars is the first to explore the cultural meanings, histories, and ideologies of public toilets as gendered spaces. Ladies and Gents consists of two sets of essays. The first, "Potty Politics: Toilets, Gender and Identity," establishes the importance of accessible, secure public toilets to the creation of inclusive cities, work, and learning environments. The second set of essays, "Toilet Art: Design and Cultural Represent...
Exploring different, interrelated roles for the architect and researcher The practice of architecture manifests in myriad forms and engagements. Overcoming false divides, this volume frames the fertile relationship between the cultural and scholarly production of academia and the process of designing and building in the material world. It proposes the concept of the hybrid practitioner, who bridges the gap between academia and practice by considering how different aspects of architectural practice, theory, and history intersect, opening up a fascinating array of possibilities for an active engagement with the present. The book explores different, interrelated roles for practicing architects ...
None
Architects and fiction writers share the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being. Every architectural proposition is a kind of fiction before it becomes a built fact; likewise, every written fiction relies on the construction of a context in which a story can take place. This collection of essays explores what happens when fiction, experimental writing and criticism are combined and applied to architectural projects and problems. It begins with ficto-criticism – an experimental and often feminist mode of writing which fuses the forms and genres of essay, critique, and story – and extends it into the domain of architecture, challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and...
Much of feminist architectural scholarship focuses on the enormous task of instating women’s experience of space into spatial praxis. Hypersexual City: The Provocation of Soft-Core Urbanism suggests this attention to women’s invisibility in sociocultural space has overlooked the complex ways in which women already occupy space, albeit mostly as an image or object to be consumed, even purchased. It examines the occupation of urban space through the mediated representation of women’s hypersexualized bodies. A complex transaction proliferates in the commercial urban space of cities; this book seeks to address the cause and consequence of the increasing dominance of gendered representation...
This book explores experimental approaches to the design and construction of wooden structures in architecture, while presenting the results of an artistic research project. Through the use of digital tools, the anatomy of wood becomes a design-determining principle for spatial structures. The architects and artists also explore the potential of traditional craftsmanship and derive from this a material-oriented practice. Structures are not designed here for a specific use, but rather open up various usage possibilities due to their unique spatial and geometric properties. The documentation provides insight into an open-ended research process. Guest contributions reflect on the underlying concepts and thus the future relevance of wood as a building material.
Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, ...