The Light Construction Reader
The Light Construction Reader

Author: Todd Gannon

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781580931052

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The exhibition "Light Construction," held at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1995, maintains a lasting influence on contemporary architecture. Architects represented in the show, such as Steven Holl and Toyo Ito, continue to win prestigious commissions. Others, such as Herzog and de Meuron and Frank Gehry, have risen to celebrity status with the completion of competition-winning designs for the Tate Museum, Bankside, in London and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. These works share a taste for glass, perforated metal, and other transparent materials. In bringing together the work of these diverse architects, "Light Construction" raised crucial questions about the role of materials, the nature of architectural effects, and the legacy of modernism. The second volume of the Source Books in Architecture series, The Light Construction Reader is an ambitious collection of thirty-eight essays that explores the themes and issues surrounding this important exhibition. Included here are essays by exhibition curator Terence Riley as well as noted architects and critics such as Peter Eisenman, Anthony Vidler, Greg Lynn, and Robin Evans. The complete transcripts of the Light Construction Symposium, held at Columbia University in conjunction with the exhibition, are also included. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky's widely influential essay "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal" is presented here for the first time together with its lesser-known sequel of 1971. Also represented are Italo Calvino, Jacques Derrida, Jean Starobinski, and many others.

Transparency
Transparency

Author: Daniel Jutte

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 0300271522

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A wide-ranging illustrated history of transparency as told through the evolution of the glass window Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, this book is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window. Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.

Print and Specifications Reading for Construction
Print and Specifications Reading for Construction

Author: Ron Russell

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2024-04-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1394202555

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Updated guidance for accurately interpreting graphic and written construction documents, including commercial ones Print and Specifications Reading for Construction is an easy-to-understand yet comprehensive manual on how to interpret construction documents, including the often quite complicated construction specifications for commercial building projects, covering both the graphic and written sets and demonstrating how they relate to each other. Complete sets of construction documents for three actual building projects are available on the book companion website. Practice questions and exercises are included throughout the text to aid in seamless reader comprehension and information retention. Written by a highly qualified author with more than three decades of experience in the field, Print and Specifications Reading for Construction includes information on: Basics of construction plan reading and relevant terminology, including architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and civil drawings and specifications Use of schematics in today's construction environment, and updates on soils and structural members Terminology and practical applications of BIM and sustainability, and clearly illustrated descriptions of various structural members Real construction problems in large-scale residential and commercial projects via included sample sets Covering both print reading and key construction specifications, Print and Specifications Reading for Construction is an easy-to-understand, accessible, and completely comprehensive guide on the subject for students in construction management and construction technology programs.

Translucent Building Skins
Translucent Building Skins

Author: Scott Murray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 113623568X

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Exploring the design of innovative building enclosure systems (or skins) in contemporary architecture and their precedents in earlier twentieth century modern architecture, this book examines the tectonics, the history and the influence of translucency as a defining characteristic in architecture. Highly illustrated throughout with drawings and full colour photographs, the book shows that translucency has been and continues to be a fertile ground for architectural experimentation. Each chapter presents a comparative analysis of two primary buildings: a recent project, paired with a historical precedent, highlighting how architects in different eras have realized the distinctive effects of translucency. The included buildings span a variety of program types, ranging from a single-family residence, to a factory, to a synagogue. Whether it is Pierre Chareau’s glass-lens curtain wall at the Maison de Verre, Frank Lloyd Wright’s wall of stacked glass tubes at the Johnson Wax Research Tower, or Peter Zumthor’s use of acid-etched glass in a double-skin envelope at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, the included projects each offer an exemplary case study of innovations in materiality and fabrication techniques. Today, among many contemporary architects, there is an engagement with new technologies, new material assemblies, and new priorities such as sustainability and energy-efficiency. A resurgent interest in translucency as a defining quality in buildings has been an important part of this recent dialogue and this book makes essential reading for any architect looking to incorporate aspects of translucency into their buildings.

The Freudian Reading
The Freudian Reading

Author: Lis Moller

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1512805483

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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title In The Freudian Reading, Lis Møller examines the premises, procedures, and objectives of psychoanalytic reading in order to question the kind of knowledge such readings produce. But above all, she questions the role of Freud as master explicator. Although Freud has been seen as a great synthesizer, Møller contends that his significance as a reader lies elsewhere. For Møller, this significance lies in the way Freud presses his inquiry to the point where he encounters something he cannot explain or that he can only explain at the risk of overthrowing previous conclusions. Such "moments of crisis" occur repeatedly in Freud's work, causing him to swerve from his original train of thought, or even to call into question the theoretical foundation of his interpretation. The dominant line of argument, therefore, is frequently punctuated with problems and questions. If we concentrate on these, Møller argues, we are forced to reconsider the traditional conception of a "Freudian reading" and to reassess our perceived notions of just what kind of reader Freud was. While The Freudian Reading is based on a wide range of Freud's writings, it concentrates on four central texts: Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva", From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, "The Uncanny," and "Constructions in Analysis." The discussion does not progress chronologically. Rather, it explores the ways in which these texts interact: how they reflect, comment on, and contradict one another. The Freudian Reading is a concentrated, subtle analysis of Freud's interpretive practice, with special reference to his interpretations of literary texts. It will be of interest to scholars and students of literary theory and criticism as well as to readers in the field of psychoanalysis.

No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture
No Matter: Theories and Practices of the Ephemeral in Architecture

Author: Anastasia Karandinou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1317087151

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How do digital media (mobile phones, GPS, iPods, portable computers, internet, virtual realities, etc.) affect the way we perceive, inhabit and design space? Why do architects traditionally design, draw and map the visual, as opposed to other types of sensations of space (the sound, the smell, the texture, etc.)? Architecture is not only about the solid, material elements of space; it is also about the invisible, immaterial, intangible elements of space. This book examines the design, representation and reception of the ephemeral in architecture. It discusses how architects map and examine the spatial qualities that these elements create and questions whether - and if so, how - they take them into account in the designing process. Karandinou argues that current interest in the ephemeral in contemporary culture and architecture is related to the evolution of digital media; and that it is related to the new ways of thinking about space and everyday situations that new media enables. With sound and video recording devices now being embedded in everyday gadgets and mobile phones, capturing sounds or ephemeral situations and events has become an everyday habit. New animation techniques allow designers to think about space through time, as they are able to design dynamic and responsive spaces, as well as static spaces explored by someone over time. Contemporary video games are no longer based on a simple visual input and a keyboard; they now involve other senses, movement, and the response of the whole body in space. This book therefore argues that the traditional binary opposition between the sensuous and the digital is currently being reversed. Subsequently, new media can also function as a new tool-to-think-with about space. Designers are now able to think through time, and design spaces accordingly. Time, temporality, ephemerality, become central issues in the designing process. The notion first claimed by Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s, that the emergence of new di

Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959
Architecture of Great Expositions 1937-1959

Author: Rika Devos

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1317179102

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This book investigates architecture as a form of diplomacy in the context of the Second World War at six major European international and national expositions that took place between 1937 and 1959. The volume gives a fascinating account of architecture assuming the role of the carrier of war-related messages, some of them camouflaged while others quite frank. The famous standoffs between the Stalinist Russia and the Nazi Germany in Paris 1937, or the juxtaposition of the USSR and USA pavilions in Brussels 1958, are examples of very explicit shows of force. The book also discusses some less known - and more subtle - messages, revealed through an examination of several additional pavilions in both Paris and Brussels; of a series of expositions in Moscow; of the Universal Exhibition in Rome that was planned to open in 1942; and of London’s South Bank Exposition of 1951: all of them related, in one way or another, to either an anticipation of the global war or to its horrific aftermaths. A brief discussion of three pre-World War II American expositions that are reviewed in the Epilogue supports this point. It indicates a significant difference in the attitude of American exposition commissioners, who were less attuned to the looming war than their European counterparts. The book provides a novel assessment of modern architecture’s involvement with national representation. Whether in the service of Fascist Italy or of Imperial Japan, of Republican Spain or of the post-war Franquista regime, of the French Popular Front or of socialist Yugoslavia, of the arising FRG or of capitalist USA, of Stalinist Russia or of post-colonial Britain, exposition architecture during the period in question was driven by a deep faith in its ability to represent ideology. The book argues that this widespread confidence in architecture’s ability to act as a propaganda tool was one of the reasons why Modernist architecture lent itself to the service of such different masters.

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech
Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech

Author: Todd Gannon

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1606065300

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Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

Surface
Surface

Author: Giuliana Bruno

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-06-09

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 022611483X

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What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.

The Mourning After
The Mourning After

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 9401204063

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Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.