Architectural Colossi and the Human Body
Architectural Colossi and the Human Body

Author: Charalampos Politakis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-08-10

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1315512912

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The human body has been used as both a model and metaphor in architecture since antiquity. This book explores how it has been an inspiration for the exterior form of architectural colossi through the years. It considers the body as a source of architectural and artistic representation and in doing so explores the results of such practices in colossal sculptures and architectural praxis within a philosophical discourse of space, time and media. Architectural Colossi and the Human Body discusses the role of Platonic and Cartesian philosophy and how philosophers such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, and theoreticians such as Frascari and Pallasmaa, have seen, described and analysed the human body and the role of architecture and perception. Drawing upon three key case studies and by employing theoretical ideas of Venturi and others, this book will provide an understanding of the role of anthromorphism and the relation and use of the human body with reference to selected architects and artists.

Anatomical Drawing
Anatomical Drawing

Author: Sue Field

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-05-30

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1350285579

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Intersecting art, science and the scenographic mise-en-scène, this book provides a new approach to anatomical drawing, viewed through the contemporary lens of scenographic theory. Sue Field traces the evolution of anatomical drawing from its historical background of hand-drawn observational scientific investigations to the contemporary, complex visualization tools that inform visual art practice, performance, film and screen-based installations. Presenting an overview of traditional approaches across centuries, the opening chapters explore the extraordinary work of scientists and artists such as Andreas Vesalius, Gérard de Lairesse, Santiago Ramón y Cajal and Dorothy Foster Chubb who, through the medium of drawing dissect, dismember and anatomize the human form. Anatomical Drawing examines how forms, fluids and systems are entangled within the labyrinthine two-dimensional drawn space and how the body has been the subject of the spectacle. Corporeal proportions continue to be embodied within the designs of structures, buildings and visual art. Illustrated throughout, the book explores the drawings of 17th-century architect and scenographer Inigo Jones, through to the ghostly, spectral forms illuminated in the present-day X-ray drawings of the artist Angela Palmer, and the visceral and deeply personal works of Kiki Smith. Field analyses the contemporary skeletal manifestations that have been spawned from the medieval Danse Macabre, such as Walt Disney's drawn animations and the theatrical staging, metaphor and allegorical intent in the contemporary drawn artworks of William Kentridge, Peter Greenaway, Mark Dion and Dann Barber. This rigorous study illustrates how the anatomical drawing shapes multiple scenographic encounters, both on a two-dimensional plane and within a three-dimensional space, as the site of imaginative agency across the breadth of the visual and performance arts. These drawings are where a corporeal, spectacularized representation of the human body is staged and performed within an expanded drawn space, generating something new and unforeseen - a scenographic worlding.

The Accidental Possibilities of the City
The Accidental Possibilities of the City

Author: Katherine Smith

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 347

ISBN-13: 0520305485

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Claes Oldenburg’s commitment to familiar objects has shaped accounts of his career, but his associations with Pop art and postwar consumerism have overshadowed another crucial aspect of his work. In this revealing reassessment, Katherine Smith traces Oldenburg’s profound responses to shifting urban conditions, framing his enduring relationship with the city as a critical perspective and conceiving his art as urban theory. Smith argues that Oldenburg adapted lessons of context, gleaned from New York’s changing cityscape in the late 1950s, to large-scale objects and architectural plans. By examining disparate projects from New York to Los Angeles, she situates Oldenburg’s innovations in local geographies and national debates. In doing so, Smith illuminates patterns of urbanization through the important contributions of one of the leading artists in the United States.

Site, Dance and Body
Site, Dance and Body

Author: Victoria Hunter

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-02-05

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 3030648001

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how ‘site-based body practice’ can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

The Architecture of Medieval Churches
The Architecture of Medieval Churches

Author: John A.H. Lewis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-20

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 1351796046

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Architecture of Medieval Churches investigates the impact of affective theology on architecture and artefacts, focusing on the Middle Ages as a period of high achievement of this synthesis. It explores aspects of medieval church and cathedral architecture in relation to the contemporary metaphysics and theology, which articulated an integrated theocentric culture, architecture, and art. Three modes of attention: comprehension, instruction, and contemplation, informed the builders’ intuition and intention. The book’s central premise reasons that love for God was the critical force in the creation of vernacular church architecture, using a selection of medieval writings to provide a unique critique of the genius of architecture and art during this period. An interdisciplinary study between architecture, theology, and philosophy, it will appeal to academics and researchers in these fields.

Designing for Socialist Need
Designing for Socialist Need

Author: Katharina Pfützner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-06

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1317284194

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does industrial design operate outside of capitalist consumer culture? Designing for Socialist Need assembles a detailed picture of industrial design practice in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Drawing on much previously unexplored material from a wide variety of sources, it not only maps out some of the ideological, institutional and economic contexts within which GDR design functioned, it also critically reconstructs the designers’ aims and perspectives in order to argue that they shared a profoundly socially responsible approach to design. By focusing on their ideas and approaches, this volume attends to the previously unacknowledged intellectual and practical richness of GDR design culture and demonstrates that it can provide pertinent insights not only for scholars of GDR history or German design, but also for contemporary design practitioners, theorists and educators with an interest in sustainability in design.

The Ideal of Total Environmental Control
The Ideal of Total Environmental Control

Author: Suzanne Strum

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1351787241

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

**Finalist for the Thought and Criticism category of the FAD Awards 2019** This book traces the ideal of total environmental control through the intellectual and geographic journey of Knud Lönberg- Holm, a forgotten Danish architect who promoted a unique systemic, cybernetic, and ecological vision of architecture in the 1930s. A pioneering figure of the new objectivity and international constructivism in Germany in 1922 and a celebrated peer of radical figures in De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian constructivism, when he emigrated to Detroit in 1923 he introduced the vanguard theory of productivism through his photography, essays, designs, and pedagogy. By following Lönberg- Holm’s ongoing matrix of relations until the postwar era with the European vanguards in CIAM and former members of the Structural Study Associates (SSA), especially Fuller, Frederick Kiesler, and C. Theodore Larson, this study shows how their definition of building as a form of environmental control anticipated the contemporary disciplines of industrial ecology, industrial metabolism, and energy accounting.

From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work
From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work

Author: Kostas Tsiambaos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 1317205081

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this book, Tsiambaos redefines the ground-breaking theory of Greek architect and town planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis (The Form of Space in Ancient Greece) and moves his thesis away from antiquity and ancient architecture, instead arguing that it can only be understood as a theory founded in modernity. In light of this, the author explores Doxiadis’ theory in relation to the work of the controversial Greek architect Dimitris Pikionis. This parallel investigation of the philosophical content of Doxiadis’ theory and the design principles of Pikionis’ work establishes a new frame of reference and creates a valuable and original interpretation of their work. Using innovative cross-disciplinary tools and methods which expand the historical boundaries of interwar modernism, the book restructures the ground of an alternative modernity that looks towards the future through a mirror that reflects the ancient past. From Doxiadis’ Theory to Pikionis’ Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture is fascinating reading for all scholars and students with an interest in modernism and antiquity, the history and theory of architecture, the history of ideas and aesthetics or town planning theory and design.

Elements of Architecture
Elements of Architecture

Author: Pierre von Meiss

Publisher: EPFL Press

Published: 2013-11-13

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 294022269X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Modernity has opened the way to a greater pluralism of forms. But even if architecture is a cultural phenomenon, that does not mean it is a product of fashion.Its principles are enduring and its foundations less tangible than the novice who tried to shake them would realize. To start that stretch towards the foundations one must first acquire the basics: to know the permanence of the architectural field and appreciate the certainties tested by time. This book will act as a guide for the reaching hand. The first part explores the mediums of compositional architecture and the relationships between space, light, and place. Four or five thousand years of history demonstrate the persistence of certain fundamental principles intrinsic to a discipline that organizes, in three dimensions, the vital space of man. In the second part, the author provides certain keys to manage the relationship between shape, materials, and construction – recalling that the need to build, by itself, has never been enough to design the form of the house or the city. Neither encyclopedia nor dictionary, this book seeks to fill a gap in light of our time: it serves as a contemporary introduction to architectural design and criticism. Following the praise of critics, the first edition has been adopted as a reference text in numerous schools and translated into several languages. This new translation from the 3rd French edition offers revised and reworked content with an additional three chapters dedicated to tectonics.

American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979
American Artists Engage the Built Environment, 1960-1979

Author: Susanneh Bieber

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-31

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1000894800

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume reframes the development of US-American avant-garde art of the long 1960s—from minimal and pop art to land art, conceptual art, site-specific practices, and feminist art—in the context of contemporary architectural discourses. Susanneh Bieber analyzes the work of seven major artists, Donald Judd, Robert Grosvenor, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Mary Miss, who were closely associated with the formal-aesthetic innovations of the period. While these individual artists came to represent diverse movements, Bieber argues that all of them were attracted to the field of architecture—the work of architects, engineers, preservationists, landscape designers, and urban planners—because they believed these practices more directly shaped the social and material spaces of everyday life. This book’s contribution to the field of art history is thus twofold. First, it shows that the avant-garde of the long 1960s did not simply develop according to an internal logic of art but also as part of broader sociocultural discourses about buildings and cities. Second, it exemplifies a methodological synthesis between social art history and poststructural formalism that is foundational to understanding the role of art in the construction of a more just and egalitarian society. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, architecture, urbanism, and environmental humanism.