Introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi The late Robin Evans (1944-1993) was a highly original historian of architecture whose writings covered a wide range of concerns: society's role in the evolution and development of building types, aspects of geometry, modes of projection, military architecture, representation of all kinds. No matter what the topic, however, he always drew on firsthand experience, arriving at his insights from direct observation. This book brings together eight of Evans's most significant essays. Written over a period of twenty years, from 1970, when he graduated from the Architectural Association, to 1990, they represent the diverse interests of an agile and skeptical mind. The book includes an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a chronological account of the development of Evans's writing by Robin Middleton, and a bibliography by Richard Difford. CONTENTS Towards Anarchitecture The Rights of Retreat and Rites of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall Figures, Doors and Passages Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space Not to Be Used for Wrapping Purposes Translations from Drawing to Building The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique Mies van der Rohes Paradoxical Symmetries
The late Robin Evans was a historian whose writings covered a wide range of architectural concerns: society's involvement in building types; spatial relations; aspects of geometry; and modes of projection. This text brings together eight of Robin Evans's essays, including Mies van der Rohe's Paradoxical Symmetries and others that were first published in the AA Files series. Written over a period of 20 years from 1970 to 1990, the essays are representative of his diverse body of work. The essays are supported by an introduction by Mohsen Mostafavi, a survey of Evans's writings by Robin Middleton, and an annotated bibliography by Richard Difford.
Robin Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form. Anyone reviewing the history of architectural theory, Robin Evans observes, would have to conclude that architects do not produce geometry, but rather consume it. In this long-awaited book, completed shortly before its author's death, Evans recasts the idea of the relationship between geometry and architecture, drawing on mathematics, engineering, art history, and aesthetics to uncover processes in the imagining and realizing of architectural form. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormant role but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and drawing, drawing and building. He suggests a theory of architecture that is based on the many transactions between architecture and geometry as evidenced in individual buildings, largely in Europe, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. From the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Raphael's S. Eligio and the work of Piero della Francesca and Philibert Delorme to Guarino Guarini and the painters of cubism, Evans explores the geometries involved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative, intuitive, or rhetorical aspects of architecture. In particular he concentrates on the history of architectural projection, the geometry of vision that has become an internalized and pervasive pictorial method of construction and that, until now, has played only a small part in the development of architectural theory. Evans describes the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture and urges resistance to the idea that pictures provide all that architects need, suggesting that there is much more within the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines the different fields of projective transmission that concern architecture, and investigates the ambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and its metaphors.
We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infrastructure rather than architecture. This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the “corridors of power,” bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.
This is the first textbook for architectural drawing with the computer that is based on understanding how digital drawing fundamentally differs from drawing with lead pencils on drafting boards. Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today demonstrates a cinematically-inspired, cybernetically imaged, architectural drawing system for thinking about architecture as embedded in relationships within the world at large. It opens up the possibility of inventing new ways of building as framing flowing matter in order to live a philosophy of ?newness?. The authors, who have for fifteen years collaborated in teaching architectural students, link the architectural drawing text with research in the expanded field of architecture, which includes neurology, biology, ecology, physics, sustainability and philosophy. The book is written in an accessible and direct tone. Providing both an understanding of the visual perception behind drawing and practical exercises, it is set to become the key text book on the subject at both undergraduate and graduate level. It is highly illustrated with black and white diagrams and drawings. Praise for Cinemetrics Sulan Kolatan, Max Fisher Visiting Professor at University of Michigan and Partner in KOL/MAC LLC, and William Mac Donald, Professor and Chair of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design at School of Architecture, Pratt Institute, and Partner in KOL/MAC LLC: 'By progressively positioning their architectural research on "digital drawing" as contemporary cultural practice, Brian Mc Grath and Jean Gardner demonstrate not only a unique lateral intelligence but ? to paraphrase George Lang's declaration that tradition is a conspiracy often used to keep the future from happening-? ensure that the future is happening.now. This daringly analytical book precisely and effectively delineates heretofore hidden systems of emergent relations between ideology, methodology, representation, and production.? Joan Ockman, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University: ?With this engaging, mind-expanding, and original guide to contemporary modalities of visualizing and representing architecture, the authors usher the not-yet-initiated into the digital design age.? Mark Robbins, Dean and Professor, Syracuse University School of Architecture ?Cinemetrics extends the parameters of representation by drawing on aspects of media, film and video. This book is an addition to the lineage of expanding the pictorial field - the Nude Descending a Staircase meeting the battleship Potempkin. The digital drawing methodology produces an explosive shattering of architectural space and reflects the understanding of multiple vantage points and the simultaneity of events in the manner of postmodern literature and filmmakers such as Godard. These drawings have the power to communicate as seductively as the moving image how architecture, space, inhabitation, perception and experience unfold over time. The book offers new ways to analyze space and more importantly new ways of generating it.? Professor Neil Spiller, Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory, Vice Dean, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London: ?In a world of change, fluctuating points of view, duration and virtuality, it is vital for designers to reassess the representation of their work in new and non-orthogonal ways, This book addresses this most fundamental of design questions and explains various representational protocols for the designer at the cusp of the twenty-first century. A must have book.? Susan S Szenasy, Editor in Chief, Metropolis Magazine: ?A new generation of architects and designers has turned form the drafting table to computer drafting and design, seemingly seamlessly and without much turmoil. But, in reality, a whole new way of thinking about architecture has developed--the computer is changing way designers see the physical world. Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today discusses the theory and practice of design in the digital age. Kim Tanzer, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) President 2007-08; Professor of Architect, University of Florida ?Five hundred years from now architects may look at Cinemetrics the way today?s architects look at Alberti?s On Painting--as a critical point of disciplinary redirection. In fact, if architecture is still being built 500 years from now it may well be a result of the cognitive shift McGrath and Gardner propose, asking us to ?lose perspective and find duration.? In the process of laying out a concrete set of design strategies, this book makes original connections between theory and ecology, science and art, technology and touch.? Karen Van Lengen Dean and Edward E Elson Professor of School of Architecture, University of Virginia: ?This is a serious and timely book that proposes new methods of representation for designers working in the digital age. The ?moving drawing system? celebrates the designer as a multidimensional thinker, a networked thinker, a flux conductor in search of new relationships and possibilities for cultural and environmental design. This book, with its stunning and sophisticated visual documentation, is destined to be an essential resource for the next generation of designers.? Michael Weinstock, Academic Head and Master of Technical Studies, Architectural Association School of Architecture: 'The presentation of a drawing system based on a cinematic understanding of the dynamics of architectural space is admirably clear, and the system has the potential to generate new spaces.?
Esra Akcan describes the introduction of modern architecture into Turkey after the Kemalist political elite took power in 1923 and invited German architects to redesign the new capital of Ankara.
This second edition is fully revised and updated and includes new chapters on sustainability, history and archaeology, designing through drawing and drawing in architectural practice. The book introduces design and graphic techniques aimed to help designers increase their understanding of buildings and places through drawing. For many, the camera has replaced the sketchbook, but here the author argues that freehand drawing as a means of analyzing and understanding buildings develops visual sensitivity and awareness of design. By combining design theory with practical lessons in drawing, Understanding Architecture Through Drawing encourages the use of the sketchbook as a creative and critical tool. The book is highly illustrated and is an essential manual on freehand drawing techniques for students of architecture, landscape architecture, town and country planning and urban design.
Materiality is a recurring and central issue in architecture. This book explains how materials are "constructed", how they become cultural substances. Metamorphism investigates the complex relationship between natural materials and technology, science and sensuality. Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) made the notion of Stoffwechsel the key element of his theory. With this concept he intended to explain how a structural form originally bound to a method of processing is transferred from one material to another, liberated from its original function. For the first time, the book investigates the subject from a historic point of view whilst reflecting on current interdisciplinary research. Examples from Aalto to Zumthor illustrate the specific aspects of historic and contemporary material concepts.
Hubsch's argument that the technical progress and changed living habits of the nineteenth century rendered neoclassical principles antiquated is presented here along with responses to his essay by architects, historians, and critics over two decades.
Drawing Imagining Building focuses on the history of hand-drawing practices to capture some of the most crucial and overlooked parts of the process. Using 80 black and white images to illustrate the examples, it examines architectural drawing practices to elucidate the ways drawing advances the architect’s imagination. Emmons considers drawing practices in the Renaissance and up to the first half of the twentieth century. Combining systematic analysis across time with historical explication presents the development of hand-drawing, while also grounding early modern practices in their historical milieu. Each of the illustrated chapters considers formative aspects of architectural drawing practice, such as upright elevations, flowing lines and occult lines, and drawing scales to identify their roots in an embodied approach to show how hand-drawing contributes to the architect’s productive imagination. By documenting some of the ways of thinking through practices of architectural handdrawing, it describes how practices can enrich the ethical imagination of the architect. This book would be beneficial for academics, practitioners, and students of architecture, particularly those who are interested in the history and significance of hand-drawing and technical drawing.
