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With contributions from provocative art and architectural historians, this book is a unique exposition of the temporary architecture erected for festivals and the role it has played in developing Western architectural and urban theory. Festival Architecture is arranged in historical periods – from Antiquity to the modern era – and divided between analyses of specific festivals, set in relation to contemporary architecture and urban design ideas and theories. Illustrated with a wealth of unusual and rarely-seen images from the European festival tradition, this is a fascinating outline of the history of festival architecture ideal for postgraduate architecture and urban design students.
Winner of the 2006 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award! The word 'nature' comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity. Architecture and Nature presents an in-depth study of how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the country have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.
A collection of essays which revisits D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form to explore the link between morphology and form-making in historical and contemporary design. Originally presented at the ACSA East Central conference "On Growth and Form: the Engineering of Nature"
The close connection between living nature and architecture is one of the most persistent and enduring themes of architectural theory. In the West it has come to be called organicism. For the creator, organicism can be seen as strategies of both invention and interpretation that draw from nature. This original publication makes explicit design methods that are drawn from living nature, and draws links between buildings across centuries and countries. Each essay interprets a unique aspect of organicism and puts it in its proper theoretical context. As a whole, the catalogue reveals the enduring strength of organicism in architectural education, research, and practice. Published in collaboration with Dalhousie Architectural Press to accompany an exhibition held at OCAD University, Toronto, for the Living Architecture Systems Group symposium, Spring 2019.
How do buildings act with people and among people in the performances of life? This collection of essays reveals a deep alliance between architecture and the performing arts, uncovering its roots in ancient stories, and tracing a continuous tradition of thought that emerges in contemporary practice. With fresh insight, the authors ask how buildings perform with people as partners, rather than how they look as formal compositions. They focus on actions: the door that offers the possibility of making a dramatic entrance, the window that frames a scene, and the city street that is transformed in carnival. The essays also consider the design process as a performance improvised among many players...
Considering a wide range of craftspeople, materials, and forms, The Allied Arts investigates the history of the complex relationship between craft and architecture by examining the intersection of these two areas in Canadian public buildings.
Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with the netherworld; as journeys through mystical lands; and as a means of establishing a sense of locality, metaphorically rooting the dweller's own identity in a well-defined part of the material world. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these forms of agency. Together the essays reveal a profound cultural significance of gardens previously overlooked by studies of garden styles.
Into the Great Wide Open is a book about a search for a form of practice in architecture. Practice here is understood both as a critical reflection of a status quo and its history, as well as forms of (active) intervention through designing and planning. The book is a fragmentary snapshot of an on going, constantly developing and altering process to find a place in the production and reflection of our built environment, and implicitly disputes the question: “What is to be done?”
Did you know that the uranium used to bomb the citizens of Hiroshima was mined at a forbidden site known as ‘the money place’ by First Nation people in northern Canada? Or have you heard about the environmental damage and social upheavals at the Atomic City of Oak Ridge? And how about the bikini swimwear? Did you know that the gaze on a woman’s belly button was that of military men carrying out atomic bombardments on the Bikini Atoll while fetishising ‘sex bombs’ and (an)atomic ‘bombshells’? And how about the poor Pacific Islanders who got their atolls blown to pieces. Have you heard about the colonial history of violence and oppression of those whose only aspiration was to liv...
Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room investigates what happens to domestic spaces, architecture, and the lives of urbanites during a socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late 1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet citizens. The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed a major urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the context of limited residential mobility, those remodeling a...