Konrad Wachsmann and the Grapevine Structure
Konrad Wachsmann and the Grapevine Structure

Author: Marianne Burkhalter

Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783038601104

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book sheds new light on the work of German-born modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann (1901-1980) and his legendary knotted joints. It is based on years of research on Wachsmann's work by Swiss architect Christian Sumi. At the core of this book is Wachsmann's dynamic 'Grapevine Structure', a universal construction element developed with students in the early 1950s at the Chicago Institute of Design. The book also investigates the 'Local Orientation Manipulator' (LOM), an apparatus developed in 1969 by Wachsmann at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles that anticipated the robotic assembly of building components. Moreover, it explores Wachsmann's 'Packaged House System' and his designs for relocatable hangars for the US Air Force. The book features these through concise texts and rich illustrated material, the majority of which are published here for the first time. Fabio Gramazio, Matthias Kohler, and Hannes Mayer (Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich) revisit Wachsmann's ideas from a contemporary perspective where robotic building processes become increasingly common. An essay by neuroscientist Andreas Burkhalter looks at the phenomenon of knotted joints in the context of similar structures in the human brain. Architectural historian Marko Pogacnik highlights the significance of Wachsmann's lectures at the Salzburg Summer Academy in the late 1950s.

As in Ds
As in Ds

Author: Alison Smithson

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 9783907078426

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Architects Alison and Peter Smithson kept a visual diary of a drive from their London office to their Wiltshire cottage. The contrast of their sleek Citroen DS 19 with the verdant landscape links the urban and the rural in a sensible continuum. It was originally published as A Sensibility Primer in 1983.

Marianne Burkhalter + Christian Sumi
Marianne Burkhalter + Christian Sumi

Author: Lynnette Widder

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Swiss architects Marianne Burkhalter and Christian Sumi are dedicated to an exploration of the nature of materials and construction. In the last fifteen years, they have built a series of remarkable buildings in wood and stone in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Their work is a thoughtful pursuit of the fundamentals of architectural construction-a style that, like that of Zumthor's buildings, might be called Alpine minimalism. Their interest in simple forms and shapes, in luminous color, in the natural grain patterns of wood, and in the opportunities afforded by joinery and other forms of craftsmanship are evident in every aspect of their built work. This comprehensive monograph includes an in-depth look at 25 of Burkhalter and Sumi's projects, including their most famous built work, the Hotel Zurichberg. Essays by Eugene Asse, Detlef Mertins, Steven Spier, and Lynnette Widder, based respectively in Moscow, Toronto, London, and New York, explore their unique style and demonstrate the growing international acknowledgement of their practice." -- Publisher description.

White Walls, Designer Dresses
White Walls, Designer Dresses

Author: Mark Wigley

Publisher: MIT Press (MA)

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This work attempts to provide a new understanding of the historical avant-garde by analyzing the "clothing" of modern architecture. The author examines the relationships between architectural surfaces and clothing fashions and colour.

Konrad Wachsmann's Television
Konrad Wachsmann's Television

Author: Mark Wigley

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2021-02-02

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 3956795350

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A novel reading of the work of one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century. In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann's legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television. Investigating the archives of one of the most influential designers of the twentieth century, Wigley scrutinizes Wachsmann's design, research, and teaching, closely reading a succession of unseen drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, publications, syllabi, reports, and manuscripts to argue that Wachsmann is an anti-architect—a student of some of the most influential designers of the 1920s who dedicated thirty-five post–Second World War years to the disappearance of architecture. Wachsmann turned architecture against itself. His hypnotic projects for a new kind of space were organized around the thought that television enables a different way of living together. While architecture is typically embarrassed by television, preferring to act as if it never happened, Wachsmann fully embraced it. He dissolved buildings into pulsating mirages that influenced the experimental avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s; but Wigley demonstrates that this work was even more extreme than the experiments it inspired. Wigley's forensic analysis of a career shows that Wachsmann developed one of the most compelling manifestos of what architecture would need to become in the age of ubiquitous electronics.

The Goddess--La Déesse
The Goddess--La Déesse

Author: Christian Sumi

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9783037786260

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A celebration of the beloved Citroën DS, icon of screen, street and style, through drawings, photos and ephemera From the moment of its debut in 1955, the Citroën DS was a sensation and a magnet for movie stars, designers, philosophers and politicians alike. No other automobile was able to combine form and technology so coherently and seemingly effortlessly. Radical in its implementation and revolutionary in terms of comfort and safety, the DS is one of the most innovative design icons of the 20th century. In collaboration with Lars Müller Publishers, the Swiss architect Christian Sumi published the new edition of AS in DS(Alison Smithson in DS) in 2001. In this new book, he examines the characteristics of this classic vehicle, such as the body, the chassis or the legendary hydraulics, which he documents in carefully arranged picture series and with drawings by Flaminio Bertoni and the Citroën design team. Using image essays from advertising campaigns for the Citroën DS, Sumi critically examines its reception and iconization, along with theories that discuss the phenomenon in both a contemporary and philosophical context.

A Critic Writes
A Critic Writes

Author: Reyner Banham

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-09-01

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0520923200

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.

Buckminster Fuller Inc
Buckminster Fuller Inc

Author: Mark Wigley

Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783037784280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This intellectual biography rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth century. It shows that the obsessive, eccentric brilliance of Buckminster Fuller, as a unique amalgam of theorist, designer, and performance artist, was devoted completely to the architecture of radio. The book draws extensively on Fuller's archive to follow his thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastics to prosthetics, nanostructures to networks, and deep data to deep space. It shows that the critical arguments and material techniques of arguably the single most exposed designer of the last century were too radical to be grapsed at the time but have become urgently relevant today. Fuller becomes a crucial reference point in trying to understand and engage our increasingly electronic world."--Page 4 de la couverture

Finding buildings
Finding buildings

Author: Marianne Burkhalter

Publisher: Scheidegger and Spiess

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783858812971

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Burkhalter Sumi Architects were founded in Zurich in 1984. Marianne Burkhalter's chalk-drawings are fine examples for research that is carried-out simultaneously at various levels of differing importance. This title presents drawings for twenty projects, built and unrealised, over the years.

The Art of Joining
The Art of Joining

Author: Elizabeth Andrzejewski

Publisher: Spector Books

Published: 2019-03

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9783959052849

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The German architect Konrad Wachsmann (1901-80) played a major role in the development of industrialized building production, notably through his collaboration with Walter Gropius on a "Packaged House System" for prefabricated homes that could be assembled in under nine hours (Wachsmann was also known for the summer house he designed for Albert Einstein). This catalog collects research conducted at the Bauhaus in 2018 focusing on the decisive and historic importance of the universal wedge connector, one of Wachsmann's key contributions that radically expanded the capacity for industrialized home production in its deceptively simple design, saving considerable time and cost. The collected texts by scientists and designers position the connector as "the cornerstone of an industrialized building system," and elaborately trace the historical contexts of postwar modernism and industrial design that led to the development of this decisive piece of technology.