Architecture and Alienation
Architecture and Alienation

Author: David Clarke

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781412835916

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The debate over architecture has been raging for years & shows no signs of abatement. In these entertaining yet serious essays, Clarke traces the origin of the malaise of modern architecture to schools of architecture themselves, both in the United States & France. He is also critical of contemporary artists, & laments the fact that modern art has now lost its connection to architecture. Clarke believes that contemporary architects have alienated the public with hideous buildings & this disaffection will eventually result in the destruction of their profession. He urges renewed recognition of the interdependence of architecture & society, & of the humanities & architecture. This engagingly written work is an important cross-cultural commentary on the state of Western architecture, art & education today. Clarke is professor of Advanced Technical Studies at Southern Illinois University & author of a number of books on architecture & environmental design. Includes an introduction by David Watkin, Head of the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge.

Alienation
Alienation

Author: Rahel Jaeggi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 023153759X

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The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Rahel Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent work in the analytical tradition to reconceive alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. A revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.

Architecture's Evil Empire?
Architecture's Evil Empire?

Author: Miles Glendinning

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2010-10-15

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1861899815

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From Chicago to Toronto to Shanghai, cities around the world have sprouted “iconic” buildings by celebrity architects like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind that compete for attention both on the skyline and in the media. But in recent years, criticism of these extreme “gestural” structures, known for their often-exaggerated forms, has been growing. Miles Glendinning’s impassioned polemic, Architecture’s Evil Empire, looks at how today’s trademark architectural individualism stretches beyond the well-known works and ultimately extends to the entire built environment. Glendinning examines how the global empire of the current modernism emerged—particularly in relation to the excesses of global capitalism—and explains its key organizational and architectural features, placing its most influential theorists and designers in a broader context of history and artistic movements. Arguing against the excesses of iconic architecture, Glendinning advocates a vision of modern renewal that seeks to remedy the shattered and alienated look he sees in contemporary architecture. Mingling scholarship with wry humor and a genuine concern for the state of architecture, Architecture’s Evil Empire will raise many heated debates and appeal to a wide range of readers, from architects to historians, interested in the built environment.

Intervening Spaces
Intervening Spaces

Author: Nycole Prowse

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-05-07

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9004365524

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Intervening Spaces examines the interconnectedness between bodies, time and space - the oscillating and at times political impact that occurs when bodies and space engage in non-conventional ways. Bodies intervene with space, creating place. Likewise, space can reconceptualise notions of the subject-body. Such respatialisation does not occur in a temporal vacuum. The moment can be more significant than a millennia in producing new ways to see corporeal connections with space. Drawing on theorists as diverse as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre and Grosz, temporal and spatial dichotomies are dissolved, disrupted and interrupted via interventions—revealing new ways of inhabiting space. The volume crosses disciplines contributing to the fields of Sociology, Literature, Performance Arts, Visual Arts, Architecture and Urban Design. Contributors are Burcu Baykan, Pelin Dursun Çebi, Michelle Collins, Christobel Kelly, Anthi Kosma, Ana Carolina Lima e Ferreira, Katerina Mojanchevska, Clementine Monro, Katsuhiko Muramoto, Nycole Prowse, Shelley Smith, Nicolai Steinø and İklim Topaloğlu.

Making Dystopia
Making Dystopia

Author: James Stevens Curl

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-08-23

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0191068160

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In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.

Event-Space
Event-Space

Author: Dorita Hannah

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-11

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1135053774

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As the symbolists, constructivists and surrealists of the historical avant-garde began to abandon traditional theatre spaces and embrace the more contingent locations of the theatrical and political ‘event’, the built environment of a performance became not only part of the event, but an event in and of itself. Event-Space radically re-evaluates the avant garde’s championing of nonrepresentational spaces, drawing on the specific fields of performance studies and architectural studies to establish a theory of ‘performative architecture’. ‘Event’ was of immense significance to modernism’s revolutionary agenda, resisting realism and naturalism – and, simultaneously, the monumentality of architecture itself. Event-Space analyzes a number of spatiotemporal models central to that revolution, both illuminating the history of avant-garde performance and inspiring contemporary approaches to performance space.

Architecture and Science-Fiction Film
Architecture and Science-Fiction Film

Author: David T. Fortin

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-12-05

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1351957465

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The home is one of our most enduring human paradoxes and is brought to light tellingly in science-fiction (SF) writing and film. However, while similarities and crossovers between architecture and SF have proliferated throughout the past century, the home is often overshadowed by the spectacle of 'otherness'. The study of the familiar (home) within the alien (SF) creates a unique cultural lens through which to reflect on our current architectural condition. SF has always been linked with alienation; however, the conditions of such alienation, and hence notions of home, have evidently changed. There is often a perceived comprehension of the familiar that atrophies the inquisitive and interpretive processes commonly activated when confronting the unfamiliar. Thus, by utilizing the estranging qualities of SF to look at a concept inherently linked to its perceived opposite - the home - a unique critical analysis with particular relevance for contemporary architecture is made possible.

Architecture and Labor
Architecture and Labor

Author: Peggy Deamer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-04-07

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 1000049760

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Through a collection of 13 chapters, Peggy Deamer examines the profession of architecture not as an abstraction, but as an assemblage of architectural workers. What forces prevent architects from empowering ourselves to be more relevant and better rewarded? How can these forces be set aside by new narratives, new organizations and new methods of production? How can we sit at the decision-making table to combat short-term real estate interests for longer-term social and ethical value? How can we pull architecture—its conceptualization, its pedagogy, and its enactment—into the 21st century without succumbing to its neoliberal paradigm? In addressing these controversial questions, Architecture and Labor brings contemporary discourses on creative labor to architecture, a discipline devoid of labor consciousness. This book addresses how, not just what, architects produce and focuses not on the past but on the present. It is sympathetic to the particularly intimate way that architects approach their design work while contextualizing that work historically, institutionally, economically, and ideologically. Architecture and Labor is sure to be a compelling read for pre-professional students, academics, and practitioners.

Perhaps it is High Time for a Xeno-architecture to Match
Perhaps it is High Time for a Xeno-architecture to Match

Author: Armen Avanessian

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783956793875

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"Our decision to start the series of conversations with you is based on your implementation of the "xeno" in your perspective practices. Perhaps it is high time for a xeno-architecture to match aims to unpack the prefix xeno, probing what it entails -not merely rhetorically but also as a means of practice- in an attempt to bring the ideas it contains more concretely into the domain of architecture. It proposes to link the more philosophical discussions on the notion of xeno with the questions of instrumentalization and governance that are necessarily involved in the praxis and geopolitics of architecture. And it relates the significance of legal architectures and technologically driven transformations in the metaphysics of law back to the agenda of xeno-architecture."