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Rodrigo Perez de Arce's essay Urban Transformations and Architectural Additions was published during the formative stages of Post Modernism, at the point where theory was becoming seriously established. Jencks' first essays formalising the term Post Modernism in architecture and the revised Learning from Las Vegas were published the previous year. In planning terms, modernism had become associated with comprehensive redevelopment and forms of urban organisation that ignored context, history and any sense of tradition. De Arce considered the essential nature of buildings and the richness of historic urban form and explored how robust that essence was over time. He looked at the value of essen...
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The problem of "lost space," or the inadequate use of space, afflicts most urban centers today. The automobile, the effects of the Modern Movement in architectural design, urban-renewal and zoning policies, the dominance of private over public interests, as well as changes in land use in the inner city have resulted in the loss of values and meanings that were traditionally associated with urban open space. This text offers a comprehensive and systematic examination of the crisis of the contemporary city and the means by which this crisis can be addressed. Finding Lost Space traces leading urban spatial design theories that have emerged over the past eighty years: the principles of Sitte and...
City of Play shows how play is built into the very fabric of the modern city. From playgrounds to theme parks, skittle alleys to swimming pools, to the countless uncontrolled spaces which the urban habitat affords – play is by no means just a childhood affair. A myriad essentially unproductive playful pursuits have, through time, modelled the modern city and landscape. Architect and scholar Rodrigo Pérez de Arce's erudite, original, and often surprising study explores a curiously neglected dimension of architectural design and practice: ludic space. It is an architectural history of the playground – from the hippodrome to the Situationist city – of space released from productive ends ...
Rodrigo Perez de Arce's essay Urban Transformations and Architectural Additions was published during the formative stages of Post Modernism, at the point where theory was becoming seriously established. Jencks' first essays formalising the term Post Modernism in architecture and the revised Learning from Las Vegas were published the previous year. In planning terms, modernism had become associated with comprehensive redevelopment and forms of urban organisation that ignored context, history and any sense of tradition. De Arce considered the essential nature of buildings and the richness of historic urban form and explored how robust that essence was over time. He looked at the value of essen...
In his new text, Fred Scott brings together ideas of what might constitute a theory of interior, or interventional design.
Political Postmodernisms shows how sites outside of Western Europe and North America undermine an established narrative of architecture theory and history. It focuses specifically on postmodern architecture, which is traditionally understood as embodying the flippant and apolitical aesthetics of capitalist affluence. By investigating postmodern architecture’s manifestations in the unlikely settings of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, the book argues for a new account that incorporates the political roles it plays when seen in a global perspective. Political Postmodernisms has three goals. First, it...
The publication of The Planning of a New Town in 1961 aroused remarkable interest. Its pages described a private new town, sponsored by the London County Council (LCC), to be built at Hook in Hampshire; a scheme that innovatively combined Garden City/New Town traditions with sensitivity to modern design. At its heart lay a multilevel and megastructural town centre intended to serve as a genuine focus for the gathering community, featuring shops and amenities placed on a pedestrian deck with cars and servicing beneath. The report itself proved extremely popular even though the New Town had fallen foul of political opposition at local and national levels and had been abandoned before any construction took place. It offers an insight into the flux of ideas that surrounded New Town development in the early 1960s. Analysing the world as it might have been not only identifies choices that were once available for shaping the built environment, it also often reveals once-cherished hopes and aspirations about how people might live in cities.
Chilean architecture—along with that of São Paolo and Mexico City—sets a benchmark for the intersection of modernism with vernacular influences in Latin America. Culture, landscape, and the geology of this earthquake-prone region have all served as important filters for the practice of post-1950s design in Chile. This volume introduces the modern architecture of Chile to readers in the United States. Looking primarily at domestic architecture as a lens for studying the larger movement, Fernando Pérez Oyarzun considers the relationship between theory and practice in Chile. As he shows in his chapter, during the early 1950s the School of Valparaíso offered the possibility of developing ...