The Material Imagination
The Material Imagination

Author: Matthew Mindrup

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-03

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 131702446X

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In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practice, the material imagination is employed when the architect 'thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary.' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses and everyday experience. Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect’s imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.

Ceilings and Dreams
Ceilings and Dreams

Author: Paul Emmons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-07-08

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 135106584X

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Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world confronts enormous challenges, and almost all of our thinking, debating and decision-making takes place under endless ceiling grids. Quantitative research establishes that spaces with taller ceilings elicit broader, more creative thoughts. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology: they have become the blind spot of modern architecture. The twenty essays in this book look across cultures, places and ceilings over time to discover their potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is a key to unlock the architectural imagination. Ceilings and Dreams aims to correct this blind spot and encourages architects and designers, researchers and students, to look up through writings organized into three expansive categories: reveries, suspensions and inversions. The contributors contemplate the architecture of levity and the potential of the ceiling, once again, as a place for dreaming.

The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models
The Routledge Companion to Architectural Drawings and Models

Author: Federica Goffi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-05-30

Total Pages: 869

ISBN-13: 100055032X

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Architectural drawings and models are instruments of imagination, communication, and historical continuity. The role of drawings and models, and their ownership, placement, and authorship in a ubiquitous digital age deserve careful consideration. Expanding on the well-established discussion of the translation from drawings to buildings, this book fills a lacuna in current scholarship, questioning the significance of the lives of drawings and models after construction. Including emerging, well-known, and world-renowned scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory and curatorial practices, the thirty-five contributions define recent research in four key areas: drawing sites/sites of knowledge construction: drawing, office, construction site; the afterlife of drawings and models: archiving, collecting, displaying, and exhibiting; tools of making: architectural representations and their apparatus over time; and the ethical responsibilities of collecting and archiving: authorship, ownership, copyrights, and rights to copy. The research covers a wide range of geographies and delves into the practices of such architects as Sir John Soane, Superstudio, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wajiro Kon, Germán Samper Gnecco, A+PS, Mies van der Rohe, and Renzo Piano.

Structures and Architecture. A Viable Urban Perspective?
Structures and Architecture. A Viable Urban Perspective?

Author: Marie Frier Hvejsel

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2022-07-07

Total Pages: 1782

ISBN-13: 100078620X

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Structures and Architecture. A Viable Urban Perspective? contains extended abstracts of the research papers and prototype submissions presented at the Fifth International Conference on Structures and Architecture (ICSA2022, Aalborg, Denmark, 6-8 July 2022). The book (578 pages) also includes a USB with the full texts of the papers (1448 pages). The contributions on creative and scientific aspects in the conception and construction of structures as architecture, and on the role of advanced digital-, industrial- and craft -based technologies in this matter represent a critical blend of scientific, technical, and practical novelties in both fields. Hence, as part of the proceedings series Structures and Architecture, the volume adds to a continuous exploration and development of the synergetic potentials of the fields of Structures and Architecture. With each volume further challenging the conditions, problems, and potentials related to the art, practice, and theory of teaching, researching, designing, and building structures as vehicles towards a viable architecture of the urban environment. The volumes of the series appear once every three years, in tandem with the conferences organized by the International Association of Structures and Architecture and are intended for a global readership of researchers, practitioners, and students, including architects, structural and construction engineers, builders and building consultants, constructors, material suppliers, planners, urban designers, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, artists, product manufacturers, and other professionals involved in the design and realization of architectural, structural, and infrastructural projects.

The Place of Silence
The Place of Silence

Author: Mark Dorrian

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-02-06

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1350076619

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The Place of Silence explores the poetics and politics of silence in architecture. Bringing together contributions by internationally recognized scholars in architecture and the humanities, it explores the diverse practices, affects, politics and cultural meanings of silence, silent places and silent buildings in historical and contemporary contexts. What counts as silence in specific situations is highly relative, and the term itself carries complex and varied significations which make it a revealing field of study. Chapters explore a range of themes, from the apparent 'loss of silence' in the contemporary urban world; through designed silent spaces; to the forced silences of oppression, catastrophe, or technological breakdown. The book unfolds a rich and complementary array of perspectives which address – through the lens of architecture and place – questions of sound, atmosphere, and attunement, together building a volume which will form the key scholarly resource on architecture and silence.

Great Windows in Modern Architecture
Great Windows in Modern Architecture

Author: Kevin Adams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1003857868

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Windows are moments in modern architecture where we look to ascertain elegance, technical expression and material language or to capture a certain atmosphere. A window opening is as much an interval and an opportunity as it is a device for admitting light, air or views; it is simultaneously a physical aperture but also a philosophical opening of collaboration and reflection. In order to understand the language of a building we might look to the detail of the window. But what does this mean and why does modern architecture invest so much expression in the window? This book explores how the act of detailing and situating windows in buildings is a key proponent in the language of architecture, which both informs and works with the contingencies of design and construction. It investigates 18 case studies in-depth using painstakingly drawn details and vivid photographs in full colour to define what makes these windows “great” and how each window is situated within both its technical and philosophical context and as an overall development of modern architecture. Case studies include the work of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Pierre Chareau, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Le Corbusier, Stirling and Gowan, Raili and Reima Pietilä, Louis Kahn, Peter Womersley, Miralles/Pinós, Steven Holl, Glen Murcutt and O’Donnell + Tuomey.

Architecture Timed
Architecture Timed

Author:

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1118910680

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The traditional veneration of architecture for its monumental and enduring qualities seems to be changing. Architects and other designers are moving away from seeking permanence towards a more open, creative use of what time has to offer. This is revealed in new approaches to historic preservation, the proliferation of temporary structures, concerns regarding sustainability, and the employment of time-efficient processes. Architecture Timed explores the role of ideas about time in the design inclinations and choices of contemporary designers of the environment. Contributors consider how the new can be incorporated into the old; how designing for the very short term has significant advantages; how what is temporary can be re-used; and how the design of materials, buildings and landscapes can improve sustainability and enhance experiences of time passing. Many designers have replaced the ideal of ‘timelessness’ and the view of time as a series of singular, static moments with an enriched and more nuanced perspective, treating time as a source of inspiration to be embraced, not a condition to be defended against. Contributors include: Juhani Pallasmaa, Brian McGrath, Federica Goffi, Jill Stoner, Richard Garber and Eric Parry. Designers featured include: Agence Ter, Shigeru Ban, BanG Studio, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, EMF Landscape Architects, Gluck+, GRO Architects, Interboro Partners, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Enric Miralles, Eric Parry Architects, Carlo Scarpa, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, UNStudio and Peter Zumthor.

Digital Draw Connections
Digital Draw Connections

Author: Fabio Bianconi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 1137

ISBN-13: 3030597431

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This book stems from the seminal work of Robert Venturi and aims at re-projecting it in the current cultural debate by extending it to the scale of landscape and placing it in connection with representative issues. It brings out the transdisciplinary synthesis of a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to the theme, aimed at creating new models which are able to represent the complexity of a contradictory reality and to redefine the centrality of human dimension. As such, the volume gathers multiple experiences developed in different geographical areas, which come into connection with the role of representation. Composed of 43 chapters written by 81 authors from around the world, with an introduction by Jim Venturi and Cezar Nicolescu, the volume is divided into two parts, the first one more theoretical and the other one which showcases real-world applications, although there is never a total split between criticism and operational experimentation of research.

Architectures of Hiding
Architectures of Hiding

Author: Rana Abughannam

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 1003834116

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Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and alêtheia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and theories, this book contends the need for a critical study of hiding in the context of architectural processes. It urges the understanding of inherent opportunities, power structures and covert strategies, whether socio-cultural, geo-political, environmental or economic, as they are related to their hidescapes – the constructed landscapes of our built environments participating in the architectures of hiding. Looking at and beyond the intentions and agency that architects possess, architectural spaces lend themselves as apparatuses for various forms of hiding and un(hiding). The examples explored in this book and the creative works presented in the interviews enclosed in the interludes of this publication cover a broad range of geographic and cultural contexts, discursively disclosing hidden aspects of architectural meaning. The book investigates the imaginative intrigue of concealing and revealing in design processes, along with moral responsibilities and ethical dilemmas inherent in crafting concealment through the making and reception of architecture.

Design Innovations for Contemporary Interiors and Civic Art
Design Innovations for Contemporary Interiors and Civic Art

Author: Crespi, Luciano

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2016-09-08

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 1522506675

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In some post-industrial areas, re-designing structural interiors in an attractive way is becoming increasingly important to community members, as it helps promote local pride and a higher quality of life. Design Innovations for Contemporary Interiors and Civic Art examines novel techniques in structural designs in various cultural and social scenarios. Featuring innovative application methods, emergent trends, and research on tools being utilized in the field, this publication is a pivotal reference source for designers, researchers, practitioners, and professionals interested in interior design, urban culture, and structural aesthetics.