Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy
Jim Stirling and the Red Trilogy

Author: Alan Berman

Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780711231443

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A re-evaluation of three 'red buildings', designed by Jim Stirling: the University of Leicester Engineering Building (and James Gowan), the History Faculty and Library at Cambridge and the residential Florey Building at Queen's College, Oxford. These are buildings much praised by architects, yet hated by the members of the universities that use them. Alan Berman has drawn together essays which put the buildings in their historical context, and which explore both their radical features and their technical failings. In addition, twenty-four of today's most famous architects - including Will Alsop, Norman Foster, Richard MacCormac and Richard Rogers - explain and partly seek to defend, the importance of these radical and controversial buildings. With top contributors and newly commissioned photography, as well as stunning drawings taken from the Jim Stirling archives, this book attempts a serious re-engagement with the continuing debate between modern architects and the public.

Speaking of Buildings
Speaking of Buildings

Author: Naomi Stead

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1616898909

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By and large, architectural historians use texts, drawings, and photographs to craft their narratives. Oral testimony from those who actually occupy or construct buildings is rarely taken as seriously. Speaking of Buildings offers a rebuttal, theorizing the radical potential of a methodology that has historically been cast as unreliable. Essays by an international group of scholars look at varied topics, from the role of gossip in undermining masculine narratives in architecture to workers' accounts of building with cement in midcentury London to a sound art piece created by oral testimonies from Los Angeles public housing residents. In sum, the authors call for a renewed form of listening to enrich our understanding of what buildings are, what they do, and what they mean to people.

Why Are We Waiting?
Why Are We Waiting?

Author: Nicholas Stern

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 0262029189

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An urgent case for climate change action that forcefully sets out, in economic, ethical, and political terms, the dangers of delay and the benefits of action. The risks of climate change are potentially immense. The benefits of taking action are also clear: we can see that economic development, reduced emissions, and creative adaptation go hand in hand. A committed and strong low-carbon transition could trigger a new wave of economic and technological transformation and investment, a new era of global and sustainable prosperity. Why, then, are we waiting? In this book, Nicholas Stern explains why, notwithstanding the great attractions of a new path, it has been so difficult to tackle climate change effectively. He makes a compelling case for climate action now and sets out the forms that action should take. Stern argues that the risks and costs of climate change are worse than estimated in the landmark Stern Review in 2006—and far worse than implied by standard economic models. He reminds us that we have a choice. We can rely on past technologies, methods, and institutions—or we can embrace change, innovation, and international collaboration. The first might bring us some short-term growth but would lead eventually to chaos, conflict, and destruction. The second could bring about better lives for all and growth that is sustainable over the long term, and help win the battle against worldwide poverty. The science warns of the dangers of neglect; the economics and technology show what we can do and the great benefits that will follow; an examination of the ethics points strongly to a moral imperative for action. Why are we waiting?

Stirling + Wilford
Stirling + Wilford

Author: Peter C. Papademetriou

Publisher: Artifice Incorporated

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 9781908967343

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James Stirling and Michael Wilford realised a significant body of work during their partnership. Considered one of the most important international architectural practices of the twentieth century, Stirling and Wilford made an exceptional contribution to contemporary architecture. Young, radical and eccentric, their work rejected the prevalent orthodoxy of the International Style, revisiting instead the early masters of heroic Modernism and achieving legendary status amongst a younger generation of architects. With early work in the UK and then Europe, from the late 1970s the practice designed buildings at four American Universities: Harvard, Rice, Cornell and UC Irvine, as well as a number of unbuilt projects. The Arthur M Sackler Museum at Harvard University, 1984, retains an iconic status, and straddles the postmodern and classical vocabulary that Stirling and Wilford employed at the Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, 1984, and No 1 Poultry, completed in 1997, after Stirling's death in 1992. Yet, despite the significance of these projects, until now, the contribution of the practice's work in the United States to the development of late twentieth century architecture has never been fully appraised. Through texts by eminent contributors including Kenneth Frampton, Robert Maxwell and Anthony Vidler, Stirling and Wilford American Buildings reassesses the importance of this body of work, establishing the legacy of the later American work of one of the twentieth century's most influential architectural practices.

Great Windows in Modern Architecture
Great Windows in Modern Architecture

Author: Kevin Adams

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 1003857906

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Windows are moments in modern architecture where we look to ascertain elegance, technical expression and material language or to capture a certain atmosphere. A window opening is as much an interval and an opportunity as it is a device for admitting light, air or views; it is simultaneously a physical aperture but also a philosophical opening of collaboration and reflection. In order to understand the language of a building we might look to the detail of the window. But what does this mean and why does modern architecture invest so much expression in the window? This book explores how the act of detailing and situating windows in buildings is a key proponent in the language of architecture, which both informs and works with the contingencies of design and construction. It investigates 18 case studies in-depth using painstakingly drawn details and vivid photographs in full colour to define what makes these windows “great” and how each window is situated within both its technical and philosophical context and as an overall development of modern architecture. Case studies include the work of Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Pierre Chareau, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Le Corbusier, Stirling and Gowan, Raili and Reima Pietilä, Louis Kahn, Peter Womersley, Miralles/Pinós, Steven Holl, Glen Murcutt and O’Donnell + Tuomey.

Leicester Engineering Building
Leicester Engineering Building

Author: John McKean

Publisher: Phaidon Press

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 9780714831541

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James Stirling was one of the most influential architects of the late twentieth century. He established his world-wide reputation in the 1960s while still in partnership with James Gowan, and his strong personal style is first seen to emerge in the extraordinary Leicester University Engineering Building, the last project to be completed by the partnership. Its slender, almost transparent, tower rises above the projecting forms of its wedge-shaped auditoria. This constructivist inspired ensemble is juxtaposed with the industrial toughness of the engineering workshops whose saw-tooth factory glazing cuts across its roof at an acute angle, setting up a powerful and contradictory geometry.

Modernism as Memory
Modernism as Memory

Author: Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2018-01-15

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 145295626X

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After World War II, West Germans and West Berliners found ways of communicating both their recent sufferings and aspirations for stable communities through buildings that fused the ruins of historicist structures with new constructions rooted in the modernism of the 1910s and ‘20s. As Modernism as Memory illustrates, these postwar practices undergird the approaches later taken in influential structures created or renovated in Berlin following the fall of the Wall, including the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag, the New Museum and the Topography of Terror. While others have characterized contemporary Berlin’s museums and memorials as postmodern, Kathleen James-Chakraborty argues that these environments are examples of an “architecture of modern memory” that is much older, more complex, and historically contingent. She reveals that churches and museums repaired and designed before 1989 in Düren, Hanover, Munich, Neviges, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, and Weil am Rhein contributed to a modernist precedent for the relationship between German identity and the past developed since then in the Ruhr region and in Berlin. Modernism as Memory demonstrates that how one remembers can be detached from what one remembers, contrasting ruins with recollections of modernism to commemorate German suffering, the Holocaust, and the industrial revolution, as well as new spaces for Islam in the country.

Shaping the Surface
Shaping the Surface

Author: Stephen Kite

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-11-17

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1350320684

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Shaping the Surface explores the history of modern British architecture through the lens of surface, materiality and decoration. Picking up on a trait that art historian Nikolaus Pevsner first identified as a 'national mania for beautiful surface quality', this book makes a new contribution to architectural history and visual culture in its detailed examination of the surfaces of British architecture from the middle of the 19th century up to the turn of the 21st century. Tracing this continuing sensibility to surface all the way through to the modern era, it explores how and why surface and materiality have featured so heavily in recent architectural tradition, examining the history of British architecture through a selection of key cultural moments and movements from Romanticism and the Arts and Crafts, to Brutalism, High-Tech, Post-Modernism, Neo-Vernacular, and the New Materiality. Embedded within the narrative is the question of whether such national characters can exist in architecture at all – and indeed the extent to which it is possible to identify a British architectural consciousness in an architectural tradition characterised by its continuous importation of theories, ideas, materials and people from around the globe. Shaping the Surface provides a deep critique and meditation on the importance of surface and materiality for architects, designers, and historians everywhere - in Britain and beyond - while it also serves as a thematic introduction to modern British architectural history, with in-depth readings of the works of many key British architects, artists, and critics from Ruskin and William Morris to Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Rogers and Caruso St John.

The Stone Dogs
The Stone Dogs

Author: S. M. Stirling

Publisher:

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780671720094

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The long-standing cold war between the ruthless Draka, occupiers of Europe and Asia, and the American-led Alliance turns fiery when the Draka manipulate life's genetic code to create the ultimate secret weapon.

Revelations
Revelations

Author: Elaine Pagels

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-03-06

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 110157707X

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A startling exploration of the history of the most controversial book of the Bible, by the bestselling author of Beyond Belief. Through the bestselling books of Elaine Pagels, thousands of readers have come to know and treasure the suppressed biblical texts known as the Gnostic Gospels. As one of the world's foremost religion scholars, she has been a pioneer in interpreting these books and illuminating their place in the early history of Christianity. Her new book, however, tackles a text that is firmly, dramatically within the New Testament canon: The Book of Revelation, the surreal apocalyptic vision of the end of the world . . . or is it? In this startling and timely book, Pagels returns The Book of Revelation to its historical origin, written as its author John of Patmos took aim at the Roman Empire after what is now known as "the Jewish War," in 66 CE. Militant Jews in Jerusalem, fired with religious fervor, waged an all-out war against Rome's occupation of Judea and their defeat resulted in the desecration of Jerusalem and its Great Temple. Pagels persuasively interprets Revelation as a scathing attack on the decadence of Rome. Soon after, however, a new sect known as "Christians" seized on John's text as a weapon against heresy and infidels of all kinds-Jews, even Christians who dissented from their increasingly rigid doctrines and hierarchies. In a time when global religious violence surges, Revelations explores how often those in power throughout history have sought to force "God's enemies" to submit or be killed. It is sure to appeal to Pagels's committed readers and bring her a whole new audience who want to understand the roots of dissent, violence, and division in the world's religions, and to appreciate the lasting appeal of this extraordinary text.