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British architect and critic Paul Shepheard is a fresh new voice in current postmodern debates about the history and meaning of architecture. In this wonderfully unorthodox quasi-novelistic essay, complete with characters and dialogue (but no plot), Shepheard draws a boundary around the subject of architecture, describing its place in art and technology, its place in history, and its place in our lives now. At a time when it is fashionable to say that architecture is everything—from philosophy to science to art to theory—Shepheard boldly and irreverently sets limits to the subject, so that we may talk about architecture for what it is. He takes strong positions, names the causes of the p...
How To Like Everything is a utopia. 'Utopia' is a word invented five hundred years ago at the start of the modern age as a description of the ideal society. It's composed of Latin parts that taken together mean 'no place' or 'nowhere'. We now use the word utopia to mean an impossible dream of perfection. How To Like Everything recasts the actual world, the forever-changing world we live in, as utopia: to make the impossible possible. This is not a dry academic debate. Paul Shepheard takes on his subject by threading questions, evidence and logic through hilarious, moving and thought-provoking stories. The action is set in the complicated city of Amsterdam, where he gets stuck in the briars of love affairs, existential decisions and conflicts with complete strangers. And the philosophy? He is a materialist. His utopia hinges on the question of whether there can be anything other than the present moment. ,
Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world—landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness is about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them.In the author's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental—he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our current strategy is the economic exploitat...
Paul Shepheard explains how every architectural move that man makes is set in a landscape. He draws on examples of fortified settlements in Norman England that reflect occupation and the New World's grid-layout cities reflecting reason.
Why write about buildings? Buildings are chunks of natural material, refashioned by humans and set down into place to stand as silent as the rocks and trees from which they were made. How can we describe that mute actuality? A building's only complete description is itself. Writing often intensifies the cloud that obscures buildings rather than dissipates it. So why do it? Two generations ago, architects had a real job to do, rebuilding cities shattered by war. It turned out to be more difficult than it looked. Now the grandchildren of those utopians have a different role, which is to rescue a world that is being turned by the media, the money men and the machines into a replica of itself. I...
A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.
Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.
Tom Hunter is a London-based photographer of international renown for his engaging, distinctive, and often provocative re-creations of Old Master paintings. In 1998 he won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award for A Woman Reading a Possession Order, a beautifully crafted photograph based on a composition by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). Featuring selections of the bold images that established Hunter’s reputation, together with new work, this book conveys the artist’s deep concern with depicting the lives of the residents of Hackney, East London, as captured in the headlines of Hunter’s local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette. These startling, sometimes tragic, stories are retold in carefully staged photographs, whose compositions are frequently derived from paintings in the National Gallery. An essay by best-selling novelist Tracy Chevalier examines Hunter’s story-telling, while Colin Wiggins discusses the relationship between Hunter’s work and paintings in the National Gallery and elsewhere.
Architects, however, tend to deny this, fearing contingency and preferring to pursue perfection.
Making tangible connections between theory and practice, ideas and form, this book encourages debate about the artistic, conceptual, and cultural significance of the way things look. What are the metaphysical concepts at the heart of design education, theory, and philosophy? Why do we assume that design is impossible to teach? This book challenges the traditional foundations of perception and takes an imaginative, radical approach, setting itself apart from the traditions of analytical philosophy, evolutionary psychology, and phenomenology which underpin much of current design theory and discourse. The new definition of perception produces startling consequences for conceptions of language, intelligence, meaning, the senses, emotions and subjectivity. This is an innovative, fresh view on design and how we can improve it for both practitioners and students in the architecture and design fields as well as philosophers.