Published in 1923, Toward an Architecture had an immediate impact on architects throughout Europe and remains a foundational text for students and professionals. Le Corbusier urges readers to cease thinking of architecture as a matter of historical styles and instead open their eyes to the modern world. Simultaneously a historian, critic, and prophet, he provocatively juxtaposes views of classical Greece and Renaissance Rome with images of airplanes, cars, and ocean liners. Le Corbusier's slogans--such as "the house is a machine for living in"--and philosophy changed how his contemporaries saw the relationship between architecture, technology, and history. This edition includes a new translation of the original text, a scholarly introduction, and background notes that illuminate the text and illustrations.
Pioneering manifesto by founder of "International School." Technical and aesthetic theories, views of industry, economics, relation of form to function, "mass-production split," and much more. Profusely illustrated.
2014 Reprint of 1927 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This classic work is a collection of essays written by Le Corbusier advocating for and exploring the concept of modern architecture. The book has had a lasting effect on the architectural profession, serving as the manifesto for a generation of architects, a subject of hatred for others, and unquestionably a critical piece of architectural theory. The architectural historian Reyner Banham once claimed that its influence was unquestionably "beyond that of any other architectural work published in this [20th] century to date." That unparalleled influence has continued, unabated, into the 21st century. The polemical book contains seven essays. Each essay dismisses the contemporary trends of eclecticism and art deco, replacing them with architecture that was meant to be more than a stylistic experiment; rather, an architecture that would fundamentally change how humans interacted with buildings. This new mode of living derived from a new spirit defining the industrial age, demanding a rebirth of architecture based on function and a new aesthetic based on pure form.
Rather than subscribing to a single position, this collection informs the reader about the current state of the discipline looking at changes across the broad field of methodological, theoretical and geographical plurality. Divided into three sections, Rethinking Architectural Historiography begins by renegotiating foundational and contemporary boundaries of architectural history in relation to other fields, such as art history and archaeology. It then goes on to critically engage with past and present histories, disclosing assumptions, biases and absences in architectural historiography. It concludes by exploring the possibilities provided by new perspectives, reframing the discipline in the light of new parameters and problematics. This timely and illustrated title reflects upon the current changes in historiographical practice, exploring potential openings that may contribute further transformation of the disciplines and theories on architectural historiography and addresses the current question of the disciplinary particularity of architectural history.
The essential walking companion to more than two hundred cutting-edge buildings constructed since the new millennium. The first decade of the 21st century has been a time of lively architectural production in New York City. A veritable building boom gripped the city, giving rise to a host of new—and architecturally cutting-edge—residential, corporate, institutional, academic, and commercial structures. With the boom now waning, this guidebook is perfectly timed to take stock of the city’s new skyline and map them all out, literally. This essential walking companion and guide features 200 of the most notable buildings and spaces constructed in New York’s five boroughs since the new millennium—The High Line, by James Corner Field Operations/Diller Scofidio + Renfro; 100 Eleventh Avenue, by Ateliers Jean Nouvel; Brooklyn Children’s Museum, by Rafael Vinoly Architects; 41 Cooper Square, by Morphosis; Poe Park Visitors Center, by Toshiko Mori Architect; and One Bryant Park, by Cook + Fox, to name just a few. Projects are grouped by neighborhood, allowing for easy, self-guided tours, with photos, maps, directions, and descriptions that highlight the most important aspects of each entry.
"Le Corbusier grew up in La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland, a city described by Karl Marx as "one unified watchmaking industry." Among the unifying social structures of La Chaux-de-Fonds was the Loge L'Amitié, the Masonic lodge with its francophone moral, social, and philosophical ideas, including the symbolic iconography of the right angle (rectitude) and the compass (exactitude). Le Corbusier would later describe these as "my guide, my choice" and as his "time-honored ideas, ingrained and deep-rooted in the intellect, like entries from a catechism." Through exhaustive research that challenges long-held beliefs, J.K. Birksted's Le Corbusier and the Occult traces the structure of Le Corbusier's brand of modernist spatial and architectural ideas based on startling new documents in hitherto undiscovered family and local archives."--Publisher.
This book sheds light on the contemporary status of phenomenological discourse in architecture and investigates its current scholastic as well as practical position. Starting with a concise introduction to the philosophical grounds of phenomenology from the points of view of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, it presents a critical reading of the works of some leading figures of architectural phenomenology in both theory and practice, such as Christian Norberg-Schultz, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Steven Holl. Highlighting the main challenges of the current phenomenological discourse in architecture, this book formulates a more articulated method of 'phenomenological interpretation' – dubbed 'phenomenal phenomenology' − as a new and innovative method of interpreting the built environment. Finally, using Tadao Ando's Langen Foundation Museum as a case study, it investigates the architect's contribution to phenomenological discourse, interprets and analyzes the Museum building using the new heuristic method, and thus provides a clear example of its applicability. By introducing a clear, articulated, and practical method of interpretation, this book is of interest to academics and students analyzing and studying architecture and the built environment at various scales.
Since first publication in 1998, Towards a New Museum has achieved iconic status as a seminal exploration of the late-20th-century revolution in museum architecture: the transformation from museum as restrained container for art to museum as exuberant companion to art. Author Victoria Newhouse critiqued numerous institutions for the display of art opened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, culminating in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao and Richard Meier's Getty Center in Los Angeles. In this expanded edition, she continues her investigation of new museums, assessing the radical, 21st-century changes that have propelled Herzog & de Meuron's De Young Museum in San Francisco and SANAA's 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, to the forefront of this building type. Among the institutions added to this new edition are the Giovanni and Marella Agnelli Pinacoteca, perched atop an enormous Fiat factory in Turin, Italy, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, both by Renzo Piano Building Workshop; three notable updates of the museum as sacred space, two by Yoshio Taniguchi and one by SANAA; the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati by Zaha Hadid; and expansions of the Reina Sofia Museum of Modern Art in Madrid by Ateliers Jean Nouvel, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by Herzog & de Meuron, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by Taniguchi. Finally, the De Young Museum, reflecting its own eclectic conditions, and the 21st Century Museum, consisting of non-hierarchical spaces for every conceivable kind of contemporary artwork as well as facilities for social exchange, are innovative hybrids that propose new directions for the future of museum architecture.
This book brings together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of European and American scholars to analyze the core theoretical features of the EU's new experimentalist governance architecture and explore its empirical development across a series of key policy domains.
