Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas

Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas

Author: Lara Schrijver

Publisher: transcript Verlag

Published: 2021-10-31

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 3839457599

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Lara Schrijver examines the work of Oswald Mathias Ungers and Rem Koolhaas as intellectual legacy of the 1970s for architecture today. Particularly in the United States, this period focused on the autonomy of architecture as a correction to the social orientation of the 1960s. Yet, these two architects pioneered a more situated autonomy, initiating an intellectual discourse on architecture that was inherently design-based. Their work provides room for interpreting social conditions and disciplinary formal developments, thus constructing a `plausible' relationship between the two that allows the life within to flourish and adapt. In doing so, they provide a foundation for recalibrating architecture today.


Oppositions Reader

Oppositions Reader

Author: K. Michael Hays

Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press

Published: 1998-11

Total Pages: 780

ISBN-13: 9781568981536

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A collection of essays from 26 issues of "Oppositions", this text presents contributions from architects, theorists and historians such as Aldo Rossi, Alan Colquhom, Leon Krier and Denise Scott Brown, amongst others, are included.


The Social Imperative

The Social Imperative

Author: H. Koon Wee

Publisher: Actar

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9780989331791

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This book contains multiple short critiques, reflections and manifestos, affording each contributing architect and intellectual the time and space to imagine new social paradigms in China. Emerging from a tumultuous history of high culture and complex territorial conditions, there is nothing straightforward about the social development of China. The complexity of the social practices developed by architects and shapers of the built environment can be explained in part by the last three decades of an intensified adoption of the market economy by the Communist Party of China, after an equally short three decades of closed-door communist control. There is no political meltdown like the democratization of the former Communist Bloc, but there is a constant managing of discontent and resistance across China. At the apex of the many creative and intellectual forces in China, architects harbor and give form to many tactics of resistance. Unfortunately, architects are also the instruments and minds complicit with profit-mongering developers and governments, pursuing unchecked urbanization, degradation of the environment, exploitation of the marginalized, and the creation of a very inequitable China. This book begins with an introduction that defines the forms and tendencies of China's society as it stands today, and it positions the work of a small number of architects and intellectuals who are at the forefront of reforming, rethinking and even revolutionizing the Chinese society. Beneath the veneer of a very successful China that the world readily acknowledges, a quiet revolution is taking place within the realms of architecture and the city. The social, architectural and urban theories documented in this book are organized around the established canons of social actions - from mobilizing, laboring, resisting and mediating, to networking, controlling, rationalizing and aestheticizing. This book aims to put the social agenda squarely back in the rapid development of the built environment in China. This publication is the culmination of a three-year study of social issues in the architecture and cities of China. It involved visits to sites undergoing massive change, discussions and debates among architects and critics, reflections by practitioners about their own work, and activists lobbying for social change. Supported by the non-profit AA Asia, the edition of the contents relied heavily on original input and exchanges between architects and theorists committed to China, from Asia and beyond. Since the 1990s, AA Asia remains one of a few unique think tanks committed to the study of architecture and cities in Asia. As an advocacy with strong academic roots, it seeks to establish the differences across various postcolonial and Asian contexts, and recalibrate the role of architecture in a technocratic era dominated by the global economy. With Contributions of Robert Adams, Lee Ambrozy, Yung Ho Chang, Chen Ling, Jeremy Chia, Cui Kai, Dong Gong, Dong Yugan, Mario Gandelsonas, Han Tao, Andrei Harwell, He Jianxiang, Hu Yan, Hua Li, Huang Weiwen, Huang Wenjing, Jiang Jun, Jeffrey Johnson, Michael Kokora, Kengo Kuma, Andrew Lee, Joan Leung Lye, Li Han, Li Hu, Li Shiqiao, Nartano Lim, William S.W. Lim, Liu Jiakun, Liu Kecheng, Liu Yichun, Long Ying, Ma Qingyun, Robert Mangurian, Meng Yan, Ou Ning, Alan Plattus, Mary-Ann Ray, Daan Roggeveen, Ruan Hao, Eunice Seng, Shi Jian, Victor Su, Sun Yimin, Wang Fei, Wang Shu, Wang Yan, H. Koon Wee, Shirley Woo, Wu Gang, Wu Liangyong, Xu Tiantian, Rocco Yim, Yu Kongjian, Zhang Ke, Zhao Liang, Zhou Yi, Zhu Tao, Zhu


Puerto Rico’s Henry Klumb

Puerto Rico’s Henry Klumb

Author: Cesar A. Cruz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-27

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 042962039X

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This book follows Henry Klumb’s life in architecture from Cologne, Germany to Puerto Rico. Arriving on the island, Klumb was a one-time German immigrant, a moderately successful designer, and previously a senior draftsman with Frank Lloyd Wright. Over the next forty years Klumb would emerge as Puerto Rico’s most prolific, locally well-known, and celebrated modern architect. In addition to becoming a leading figure in Latin American modern architecture, Klumb also became one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most accomplished protégés, and an architect with a highly attuned social and environmental consciousness. Cruz explores his life, works, and legacy through the lens of a sense of place, defined as the beliefs that people adopt, actions undertaken, and feelings developed towards specific locations and spaces. He argues that the architect’s sense of place was a defining quality of his life and work, most evident in the houses he designed and built in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico’s Henry Klumb offers a historical narrative, culminating in a series of architectural analyses focusing on four key design strategies employed in Klumb’s work: vernacular architecture, the grid and the landscape, dense urban spaces, and open air rooms. This book is aimed at researchers, academics, and postgraduate students interested in Latin American architecture, modernism, and architectural history.


Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture

Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture

Author: Thomas S. Hines

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780520085893

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"An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University "This study, part biography and part architectural analysis, is a modern masterpiece of architectural history. The prose is lucid and sometimes elegant--very much like the work of Richard Neutra which it so brilliantly examines."--Peter Gay, Yale University "An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University


The architecture of social reform

The architecture of social reform

Author: Isabel Rousset

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1526159678

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The architecture of social reform explores the fascinating intellectual origins of modern architecture’s obsession with domesticity. Copiously illustrated, Rousset’s revealing analysis demonstrates how questions over aesthetics, style, urbanization, and technology that gripped the modernist imagination were deeply ingrained in a larger concern to reform society through housing. The increasing demand for new housing in Germany’s rapidly growing cities fostered critical exchanges between a heterogeneous group of actors, including architects, urban theorists, planners, and social scientists, who called for society to be freed from class antagonism through the provision of good, modest, traditionally-minded domestic design. Offering a compelling account of architecture’s ability to act socially, the book provocatively argues that architectural theory underwent its most critical epistemological transformation in relation to the dynamics of modern class politics long before the arrival of the avant-garde.


Modern Architecture and Climate

Modern Architecture and Climate

Author: Daniel A. Barber

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0691248656

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How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.


Architecture of Defeat

Architecture of Defeat

Author: Kengo Kuma

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 0429751206

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Kengo Kuma, one of Japan’s leading architects, has been combining professional practice and academia for most of his career. In addition to creating many internationally recognized buildings all over the world, he has written extensively about the history and theory of architecture. Like his built work, his writings also reflect his profound personal philosophy. Architecture of Defeat is no exception. Now available in English for the first time, the book explores events and architectural trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in both Japan and beyond. It brings together a collection of essays which Kuma wrote after disasters such as the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11 and the earthquake and tsunami that obliterated much of the built landscape on Japan’s northern shore in a matter of minutes in 2011. Asking if we have been building in a manner that is too self-confident or arrogant, he examines architecture’s intrinsic—and often problematic—relationship to the powerful forces of contemporary politics, economics, consumerism, and technology, as well as its vital ties to society. Despite the title, Architecture of Defeat is an optimistic and hopeful book. Rather than anticipating the demise of architecture, Kuma envisages a different mode of conceiving architecture: guided and shaped by more modesty and with greater respect for the forces of our natural world. Beautifully designed and illustrated, this is a fascinating insight into the thinking of one of the world’s most influential architects.