"Including an exhaustive presentation of sketches, models, computer renderings, working drawings, and photographs of the construction process and the finished work, this book documents the project at a level of detail that allows complete and careful study from its conception to its completion. This in-depth graphic presentation is accompanied by commentaries from the architect, as well as series editors Jeffery Kipnis and Todd Gannon, that further explore both the cultural and technical significance of this important building."--BOOK JACKET.
Focusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, this book puts forward a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture. It discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but does so by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present. The work of each discussed architect is seen as addressing a historiographical problem. To this end, and this is the second important aspect of this book, the chosen buildings are discussed in terms of the thematic of the culture of building (the tectonic of column and wall for example) rather the formal, and this through a discussion that is informed by the latest available theories. Having set the aesthetic implication of the processes of the digitalization of architecture, the book's conclusion highlights "strategies" by which architecture might postpone the full consequences of digitalization, and thus the becoming of architecture as ornament on its own right.
Looking back over the twentieth century, Hartoonian discusses the work of three major architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, in reference to their theoretical positions and historicizes present architecture in the context of the ongoing secularization of the myths surrounding the traditions of nineteenth century architecture in general, and, in particular, Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic. Providing a valuable contribution to the current debates surrounding architectural history and theory, this passionately written book makes valuable reading for any architect.
Of the conceptual artists who began their careers in the 1960s and 1970s—Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Mel Bochner among them—Barry Le Va may be the most elusive. As this first study of his work reveals, his rigorously planned art was instigated to mask its creator’s intentions and methods, presenting itself as an “aftermath” of modernism’s claim to permanency and civil society’s preferred mode of monumentalism. For Michael Maizels, Le Va’s work constitutes a particularly productive subject of inquiry because it clearly articulates the interconnection between the avant-garde’s distrust of autonomous art objects, two decades of social unrest, the emergence of information theory, and lingering notions of scientific objectivity. Barry Le Va: The Aesthetic Aftermath explores how Le Va used such materials as shattered glass, spent bullets, sound recordings, scattered flour, and meat cleavers embedded in a floor to challenge the interlocking assumptions behind blind faith in lasting beauty, just government, and perfectible knowledge. Taking inspiration from popular crime novels as well as contemporary art theory, Le Va charged his viewers to attempt, like detectives at a crime scene, to decipher an order underlying the apparent chaos. Le Va’s installations were designed to erode not simply the presumed autonomy of the art object but also the economic and political authority of the art establishment. In his concluding chapter, Maizels looks at the more fixed work of the past two decades in which Le Va turned to architectural themes and cast concrete to probe the limits of dynamism and the idea of permanence.
An essential resource on the work of Bernard Tschumi Architects, with a focus on how concept, context, and program intersect with intuition in singular and unexpected ways. Event-Cities 5 is the fifth and final volume in the MIT Press series documenting recent built and unbuilt projects by renowned architect Bernard Tschumi. This volume expands on the theoretical preoccupations that have shaped Tschumi’s work in practice and pedagogy. In this volume, Tschumi embarks on what he calls a “poetics” that addresses both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in architectural projects. How do chance, intuition, and analogy, among other elements, intersect with the logical play of concept, context, and program to generate innovative and informed design? Highlights of this volume include circular building projects, works with suspended gardens and floating rectangular masses, superposed structures created via surrealist tactics, an immense educational research complex in France that hovers between building and urban design, a museum in China made from intersecting conic shapes, and a project for a cultural center in Italy that is structured as an investigation into courtyards and facades. The book features nearly 30 projects developed over the last fifteen years and highlights Tschumi’s longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity, but in questioning architecture itself.
The texts presented in Proportion Harmonies and Identities (PHI) Creating Through Mind and Emotions were compiled to establish a multidisciplinary platform for presenting, interacting, and disseminating research. This platform also aims to foster the awareness and discussion on Creating Through Mind and Emotions, focusing on different visions relevant to Architecture, Arts and Humanities, Design and Social Sciences, and its importance and benefits for the sense of identity, both individual and communal. The idea of Creating Through Mind and Emotions has been a powerful motor for development since the Western Early Modern Age. Its theoretical and practical foundations have become the working tools of scientists, philosophers, and artists, who seek strategies and policies to accelerate the development process in different contexts.
This volume takes an in-depth look at the Rotterdam bridge that brought UN Studio, the Dutch firm of Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, into the architectural spotlight.
The basic form of the American sports stadium has not changed much in the last century. But in an unexpected and controversial act of daring, the Arizona Cardinals football team selected awarding-winning architect and intellectual provocateur Peter Eisenman to design their stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Opened in the summer of 2006, Eisenman's latest work rejects all traditional and staid notions of the sports stadium. Inspired by and sectioned like a barrel cactus, its shell is composed of huge, steel paraboloid sections. The domed stadium boasts a steel-and-fabric retractable roof that allows lightto penetrate when closed while maintaining an airy feel inside. The most ground-breaking feature of the design is its grass roll-out field, which remains outside the stadium until game time, when it is rolled in on steel wheel sets powered by small electric motors. Eisenman Architects, the eighth volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark of excellence in civic and sports architecture.
"The award-winning Simmons Hall, completed in 2002, is Steven Holl's 'vertical slice of a city', an urban microcosm on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus. Motivated by the sea sponge and the idea of porosity, Holl invents a highly innovative structure that inspires its residents and compels them to revel in the unexpected. Immense interior voids, irregular and arrhythmic geometrical holes that form unexpected public spaces, as well as extraordinarily adaptable modular wooden furnisings, create a kinetic work-in-progress to be dictated by one's experience of the space and the whims of its occupants. Holl, whose tactile architecture has been celebrated as 'buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye', has channeled his love of sculptural shapes, details, and inventive and original use of light, space, color, and material in Simmons Hall to find its rightful place in the company of Alvar Aalto's Baker House, and Eero Saarinen's chapel and his Kresge Auditorium at MIT. [This book] features extensive photographic documentation by Andy Ryan of the construction and finished project. These images are accompanied by an exhaustive graphic presentation of sketches, model, rendering, and working drawings, interviews with Holl, and commentary from architects and critics that examine both the technical and cultural significance of this important structure"--Back cover.
One of America's leading landscape architects, Peter Walker has created a variety of significant landscapes worldwide, including joint projects with architects I. M. Pei, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano. Walker's broad field of practice includes urban design and planning and the creation of landscapes ranging in size from parks and university campuses to corporate headquarters, plazas, and private gardens. Peter Walker and Partners / Nasher Sculpture Center Garden focuses on his garden in Dallas, Texas, a set of "outdoor galleries" showcasing the Nasher collection of modern and contemporary sculpture. A museum without a roof, the garden, with its subtle balance of art and nature, is also a serene urban park, whose beauty perfectly complements Renzo Piano's design for the center. Peter Walker's informative sketches, drawings, and plans, along with photographs of the final design, reveal the delicate balance between art, culture, and context at the heart of the Nasher Foundation Sculpture Garden. Source Books in Landscape Architecture, produced in collaboration with the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, provide detailed documentation of important new projects.
