"The relationship between contemporary architecture and nature is fundamental to today's creativity. Some architects reject nature or imagine that they can create an artificial world of their own - while others are seeking new ways, aided by science and the computer, to chart new directions for the buildings of tomorrow. From ecologically-oriented designs to the most astonishing new forms, this book shows how essential nature remains to architecture."--BOOK JACKET.
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 and offer examples of recent practice that integrates theater and dance. This collection advances architectural theory, history, and criticism by proposing the lens of performance as a way to engage the multiple roles that buildings can play, without reducing them to functional categories. By casting architecture as spatial action rather than as static form, these essays open a promising avenue for future investigation. For architects, the essays propose integrating performance into design through playful explorations that can reveal intense relationships between people and place, and among people in place. Such practices develop an architectural imagination that intuitively asks, 'How might people play out their stories in this place?' and 'How might this place spark new stories?' Questions such as these reside in the heart of all of the essays presented here. Together, they open a position in the intersection between everyday life and staged performance to rethink the role of architectural design.
The Kabbalistic idea of creation, as expressed through light, space and geometry, has left its unmistakable mark on our civilization. Drawing upon a wide array of historical materials and images of contemporary art, sculpture and architecture, architect Alexander Gorlin explores the influence, whether actually acknowledged or not, of the Kabbalah on modern design.
This monograph spans the 30-year history of the Denver-based firm Fentress Architects and examines the creative working process, tracing artistic influences and references to fashion, poetry, music, dance, and related disciplines.
Since the 1960s, art and architecture have experienced a series of radical and reciprocal trades. Just as artists have simulated ?architectural? means like plans and models, built structures and pavilions, or intervened in urban and public spaces, architects have employed ?artistic? strategies in art institutions, exhibitions, and more. Likewise, art galleries and museums have combined both activities, playing with the conditional differences between inside and outside the institutions. This book focuses on specific case studies of these two-way, interdisciplinary transactions. Included are texts and visual essays by Mark Dorrian, Rosemary Willink, Sarah Oppenheimer, and many others.
"A wide-ranging and inclusive history of American art and architecture from its seventeenth-century colonial beginnings to the latest installation and video work, this book: discusses the key artists, architects, art works, and buildings across the centuries; defines the characteristics of different periods and highlights the forms, techniques, and styles that are distinctively American; integrates discussions of works of visual art and buildings, revealing their shared social and aesthetic concerns; charts the ways in which American artists and architects both adopted and diverged from earlier European models to create their own language; and illustrates paintings, sculpture, photography, and new-media art plus dozens of building types, from colonial houses and churches to modernist and postmodernist museums, stations, and skyscrapers."--BOOK JACKET.
Tschumi Parc de la Villette is the first publication to document comprehensively Bernard Tschumi's first, and arguably still most celebrated project. With new and republished writing including a text by Bernard Tschumi and Anthony Vidler's "Trick-Track" originally published in 1986, alongside a newly-commissioned essay assesing the Parc from a contemporary and historical perspective, this book documents Parc de la Villette from its conception, through the 30 years of its existence, to the present. Tschumi Parc de la Villette includes drawings, concept sketches, models and photographs showing the development of the Parc over three decades, brought together in a single volume for the first time since the 1980s. One of the "Grands Projets" commissioned by the French Government in the 1980s, Parc de la Villette set a benchmark for urban parks in the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Tschumi constructed a series of follies across the site, creating what he called "the largest discontinuous building in the world". Published to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Parc, Tschumi Parc de la Villette broadly celebrates the project, and articularly the way in which it has been embraced by generations of Parisians and a diverse international public.
