This book expands our understanding of the role of formal aesthetic criteria in twentieth-century artistic practices and reveals potentially transformative aspects in the art of architectural composition. The book stages an encounter of philosopher Gilles Deleuze?s (1925?1995) constructivist sensibility and architect Louis Kahn?s (1901?1974) mode of architectural figuration. This book is of interest to architects, artists, historians and theorists and to those wishing to learn about contemporary aesthetic practice and theory.
Architectural Aesthetic Speculations expands our understanding of the role of formal aesthetic criteria in twentieth-century artistic practices and reveals potentially transformative aspects in the art of architectural composition. The book stages an encounter of philosopher Gilles Deleuze's (1925–1995) constructivist sensibility and architect Louis Kahn's (1901–1974) mode of architectural figuration. This book is of interest to architects, artists, historians and theorists and to those wishing to learn about contemporary aesthetic practice and theory.
This book examines the role of art in French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s (1925–1995) late writings. Can works of art produce not only visual and spatial effects but also render ideas manifest? Can movement be treated in architecture so that it changes our relation to time? In what ways can sculpture help us to think differently, in a more open and creative way? In the last decade of his life, Deleuze wrote about these and other questions, increasingly turning to art as a model for a new way of thinking. Using examples from twentieth-century architecture, film, literature, painting and sculpture, this book follows Deleuze’s engagement with art to illustrate a new image of thought. This book is of interest to architects, artists and theorists and to those wishing to learn about Deleuze’s work and contemporary aesthetic practice and theory.
How can architecture develop better aesthetic directions for the twenty-first-century built environment? Our world, increasingly defined by efficient but unconsidered architecture and cities, seems to be getting uglier. In On the Appearance of the World, Mark Foster Gage asks why. He imagines a future scenario where architectural design and ideas from aesthetic philosophy align toward the production of a built world that is more humane, habitable, beautiful, and just.
For the first time, the speculative in architecture becomes a topic of critical research. It is investigated not as idealistic but as strategic acting within endless modernity. This modernity implies that speculation, as strategic acting, is not only applied to economic but also to political and aesthetic values. Values become mobile, valuations become a play with highs and lows, authors (architects) become winners or losers, and culture becomes fashion. Includes projects by NL Architects, MVRDV, Aristide Antonas, FAT, Ralf Schreiber, Pascual Sisto, Ant Farm, Caspar Stracke, OMA, JODI, Kevin Bauman and others. [From publisher's website].
This book examines the central decades of Peter Eisenman’s work through a formal and thematic analysis of key architectural projects and writings, revealing underlying characteristics and arguing for their productive continuity and transformative role. The book explores Eisenman’s approach to architectural form generation and thinking. It does this through a thematic and formal analysis of projects and writings from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Following an introductory chapter addressing the theme of potentialities, the book is organised in two parts. The first part focuses on key period writings of Eisenman, framing the close reading around a practice of resistance, the architect’s approach to history as analysis, and the transformative conceptualisation of time. In the second part, the book undertakes an analysis of select projects from the 1980s and 1990s. Three formal preoccupations and conceptual orientations – ground manipulations, figuration, and spatial events – organise this part of the book. Previously unpublished material from the Peter Eisenman fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, provides primary source material. A concluding chapter addresses Eisenman’s teaching, its relation to his larger project, and possible legacies for educators, practitioners, scholars, and theorists.
Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.
How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.
Architecture, Aesthetics, and the Predicaments of Theory offers a critical analysis of the methodological constants and shared critical strategies in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture. Central to these constants is the persistent role of aesthetics as a critical tool for the delimitation of architecture. This book analyzes the unceasing critical role aesthetics is given to play in the discourse of architecture. The book offers a close and critical reading of three seminal texts from three different periods in the history of theoretical discourse on Western architecture—the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and 19th-century Romanticism. The first text is Leone Battista Alberti's Ten Books on Architecture of 1452, the next Marc-Antoine Laugier’s An Essay on Architecture of 1753, and last, John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849. Additional influential texts from, among others, the 20th and 21st centuries are engaged with along the way to locate and contextualize the arguments within the broader discursive tradition of Western architecture. The book will interest scholars and students of architecture, architectural history and theory, as well as scholars and students of cultural studies, aesthetic philosophy, art history, literary criticism, and related disciplines.
