The Memoirs of John Douglas Forbes encompass watching the streetlamp lighters of San Francisco in 1912, to visiting the Royal Crescent in Bath in 2001, among many other memories. Art curator, educator, First Professor of the Darden School of the University of Virginia; hiker, kite flyer and traveler, who made a second family with the new wife he found through placing a Personal Ad in a magazine after becoming a widower --- John Douglas Forbes followed an unusual path. M.E. Forbes, in An Afterword to the Memoirs, speaks of the 38-year “May-December” journey she shared with Dr. Forbes.
Material Imagination in Architecture draws on history and the visual arts, and contemporary architecture to explore this popular theme in architectural practice and education. In the context of a discipline increasingly driven by digital production, this text explores architecture and making and the diverse influences on the material reality of architectural form: it argues that the crafts, fabrication and assemblage of its making remain vital elements of contemporary architectural language. This broad-ranging text bridges the gap between a technical or otherwise fragmentary knowledge of materials of the specialist, and the tacit or instinctive understanding of materials that the artist, sculptor or architect may have. It identifies key material themes pertinent to contemporary architectural debate and develops a discourse about future practice that is framed by environmental imperatives and grounded in a historical understanding of the meaning and use of materials. Material iconology in architecture is a well-established tradition and this book draws on that background to investigate the possibilities, and limits, of using materials in contemporary design to communicate the themes and contexts of an architectural project, a material’s relationship to context, and to the history of practices that belong to the traditions of making buildings. Each theme is explored in case studies from twelve countries around the world, including the UK, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia and China.
Films use architecture as visual shorthand to tell viewers everything they need to know about the characters in a short amount of time. Illustrated by a diverse range of films from different eras and cultures, this book investigates the reciprocity between film and architecture. Using a phenomenological approach, it describes how we, the viewers, can learn how to read architecture and design in film in order to see the many inherent messages. Architecture’s representational capacity contributes to the plausibility or 'reality' possible in film. The book provides an ontological understanding that clarifies and stabilizes the reciprocity of the actual world and a filmic world of illusion and human imagination, thereby shedding light on both film and architecture.
Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was also the most renowned restoration architect of his age, a celebrated medieval archaeologist and a fervent champion of Gothic revivalism. He published some of the most influential texts in the history of modern architecture such as the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle and Entretiens sur l’architecture, but also studies on warfare, geology and racial history. Martin Bressani expertly traces Viollet-le-Duc’s complex intellectual development, mapping the attitudes he adopted toward the past, showing how restoration, in all its layered meaning, shaped his outlook. Through his life journey, we follow the route by which the technological subject was born out of nineteenth-century historicism.
Covering 250 years of design tools and technologies, this book reveals how architects have produced the drawings, models, renderings and animations which show us the promise of what might be built.
Though many psychological theories refer to imagination as a relevant phenomena, we still lack knowledge about imaginative processes. The book “The Method of Imagination” is aimed at expanding the knowledge about imaginative processes as higher mental function, by starting from the empirical and phenomenological studies. The volume is an innovative multidisciplinary exploration in the study of imaginative processes as complex phenomena. It covers a wide range of fields, from psychology to sociology, from art and design to marketing and education. The book gathers young and experienced scholars from 6 different countries worldwide, providing a fresh look into the theoretical, methodological and applicative aspects of imagination studies. The audience for this book includes scholars and students in social and human sciences interested in the study and the use of imaginative processes. The volume can be also used as textbook/integrative reading in undergrad and master courses.
In this interdisciplinary anthology, essays study the relationship between the imagination and images both material and mental. Through case studies on a diverse array of topics including photography, film, sports, theater, and anthropology, contributors focus on the role of the creative imagination in seeing and producing images and the imaginary.
Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.
This Element explores the nature of both imagination and creative thinking in an effort to understand the relation between them and also to understand their role in the vast array of activities in which they are typically implicated, from art, music, and literature to technology, medicine, and science. Focusing on the contemporary philosophical literature, it will take up several interrelated questions: What is imagination, and how does it fit into the cognitive architecture of the mind? What is creativity? Is imagination required for creativity? Is creativity required for imagination? Is a person simply born either imaginative or not (and likewise, either creative or not), or are imagination and creativity skills that can be cultivated? And finally, are imagination and creativity uniquely human capacities, or can they be had by nonbiological entities such as AI systems?
This book gathers peer-reviewed papers presented at the 3rd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination (IMG), held in Milano, Italy, in November 2021. Highlighting interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research concerning graphics science and education, the papers address theoretical research as well as applications, including education, in several fields of science, technology and art. Mainly focusing on graphics for communication, visualization, description and storytelling, and for learning and thought construction, the book provides architects, engineers, computer scientists, and designers with the latest advances in the field, particularly in the context of science, arts and education.
