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Spatial Infrastructure is a collection of essays crafting a self-consistent project that recasts architectural thinking as a form of knowledge by addressing a number of fundamental questions relevant to the reading of works across styles, time-periods, and geographic boundaries. José Aragüez's second book revolves around a new concept in architecture, spatial infrastructure , that operates both as a design tool capable of projecting architectural thinking forward, and as an analytical category that shifts our understanding of the history of the field and contemporary production. Taken together, the collection of essays presented here investigates some of the most intractable issues pertain...
SOUPERgreen! features projects and essays that offer a long overdue critique of the current approach to “green” architecture and, in turn, demonstrate a more appropriate way for architects to address the challenges posed by the environmental crisis. In sharp contrast to contemporary examples of “green” or “sustainable” architecture—which primarily rely upon the invisible agency of unremarkable technologies and materials to reduce resource consumption, but which do so without producing a necessary shift in the public’s perception of the environment or behavior towards it—SOUPERgreen! demonstrates how green technology can not only perform from a measurable standpoint, but can...
Winy Maas proposed a provocative and inspiring brief; he asked participants to redesign the cities of Rotterdam and New York in a way that everything is reachable within five minutes. A series of serious questions arise from the challenging brief: 'What will such a city look like? What happens to such an hypothesis if cars are the only mode of transport? What will such a city look like when it is only accessed by public transport? Or by walking?' How one can extend the knowledge of compact or dense cities? How fast cities can be? Is increased speed an ideal concept for future cities? Is development of new infrastructure sustainable for cities in future? Can Rotterdam become such a city? Is it possible to upscale Manhattan? How does mobility affects the working and living qualities of the cities and how is mobility shaping cities?
Reality Bytes is a collection of essays by Bart Lootsma, written in the years from 1998 to 2009. "Byte" is a unit of digital information used in information technology and most commonly consists of eight bits. Reality Bytes is also the title of an essay by Bart Lootsma, in which he investigates the relationship between society and architects and town planners. Bart Lootsma, Professor of Architecture as well as architectural historian, critic and curator, is one of the most multi-faceted figures amongst contemporary architectural theorists. He has produced numerous publications, including "Superdutch", an appraisal of contemporary architecture in the Netherlands published in 2000. In Reality Bytes he has now for the first time compiled hitherto (mostly) unpublished texts on architectural theory, on Second Modernism, on populism and architecture, on landscape architecture and on the changing role of architects in society.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.
Historically, we see the city as the cramped, crumbling core of development and culture, and the suburb as the vast outlying wasteland – convenient, but vacant. Contemporary urban design proves this wrong. In New SubUrbanisms, Judith De Jong explains the on-going "flattening" of the American Metropolis, as suburbs are becoming more like their central cities – and cities more like their suburbs through significant changes in spatial and formal practice as well as demographic and cultural changes. These revisionist practices are exemplified in the emergence of hybrid sub/urban conditions such as parking practices, the residential densification of suburbia, hyper-programmed public spaces an...
Strongly interdisciplinary in its scope, this book situates Soane’s house-museum within the broader context of early nineteenth-century British aesthetics, theories of taste, and cultural currents, viewing it as a cultural and artistic product as well as an architectural and museological one.
This text focuses on cities as the dominant form of human settlement for the future, examining the transformation that is happening in urban connobations worldwide today. The last few decades have seen a rate of change and growth in cities that has never been seen before, resulting in giant metropoles with over twenty million inhabitants. This book tackles the causes of these changes, and looks at how the planning and design of cities can shape the urban future.
The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projecti...
This book brings together a diverse group of theoreticians to explore architectural theory as a discipline, assessing its condition and relevance to contemporary practice. Offering critical assessment in the face of major social and environmental issues of today, 17 original contributions address the relevance of architectural theory in the contemporary world from various perspectives, including but not limited to: politics, gender, representation, race, environmental crisis, and history. The chapters are grouped into two distinct sections: the first section explores various historical perspectives on architectural theory, mapping theory’s historiographical turn and its emergence and decli...