Architecture - Criticism

The industrial city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was originally settled in colonial times by Moravians from southeastern Germany. These religious utopians were noted for urban planning. In this large-format, richly illustrated volume, historian William Murtagh compares more than 20 Bethlehem landmarks with other Moravian communities...

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch--whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation...

"A lucid, well-organized survey of the almost infinite variety of production spaces of western theatre.... Carlson's survey must be admired for its wealth of carefully researched and elegantly articulated information concerning the relation of urban planning, architecture, and interior and exterior theatre embellishment to...

Historic Architecture in Northwest Philadelphia is a colorful and comprehensive look at the rich architectural history of the Wissahickon Valley, and the people who made it possible with a locally sourced building stone, the Wissahickon schist. The simple stone structures of Germantown's origins as...

An expanded edition on the master of Modernism, Le Corbusier, by award-winning architectural historian William J. R. Curtis.Originally published in 1996 to critical fanfair, scholar William J.R. Curtis has re-issued his classic text with extensive new scholarship and contemporary research that continues the high...

10 x 10_3 = the 100 best architects you've never heard of. That's about to change. The work shown in this volume is ambitious, inventive, and ground breaking. These are the architects to watch out for, this is the architecture shaping our cities and...

He was the most iconoclastic of architects, and at the height of his career his output of writings about architecture was as prolific and visionary as his architecture itself. Frank Lloyd Wright pioneered a bold new kind of architecture, one in which the spirit...

From its earliest days as a royal settlement fronting the pyramids of Giza to its current manifestation as the largest metropolis in Africa, Cairo has forever captured the urban pulse of the Middle East. In Cairo: Histories of a City, Nezar AlSayyad narrates the...

Harry Francis Mallgrave combines a history of ideas about architectural experience with the latest insights from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary biology to make a powerful argument about the nature and future of architectural design. Today, the sciences have granted us...

Based on analysis of historical, philosophical, and semiotic texts, Architecture in Black presents a systematic examination of the theoretical relationship between architecture and blackness. Now updated, this original study draws on a wider range of case studies, highlighting the racial techniques that can legitimize...

""The Nature of Gothic"" is a book written by John Ruskin that explores the Gothic architecture and its artistic principles. In the book, Ruskin discusses the characteristics of Gothic architecture, including its use of pointed arches, ribbed vaults, and flying buttresses. He also delves...

This book examines the work of three seminal Nordic architects - Alvar Aalto, J rn Utzon and Sverre Fehn - from a phenomenological perspective, utilising the methodology of 'paradigm' (or 'in the manner of''). Roger Tyrrell explains how the approach of each architect is...

How much do you know about Greek architecture? Roman? Gothic? The Renaissance? Modernism? Perhaps more importantly, do you know how these are connected or how one style evolved to become another? Or what happened historically during each of these periods? Architectural History Retold is...

Why Architects Matter examines the key role of research- led, ethical architects in promoting wellbeing, sustainability and innovation. It argues that the profession needs to be clear about what it knows and the value of what it knows if it is to work successfully...

How Drawings Work cheekily explains that what architects make is information that enables other people to make buildings. That information comes in a variety of forms: drawings by hand and computer, models both physical and virtual, and words as needed. The book reflects in...

Now that information technologies are fully embedded into the design studio, Instabilities and Potentialities explores our post-digital culture to better understand its impact on theoretical discourse and design processes in architecture. The role of digital technologies and its ever-increasing infusion of information into the...

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,...

This collection of previously unpublished essays from a diverse range of well-known scholars and architects builds on the architectural tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics as developed by Dalibor Veseley and Joseph Rykwert and carried on by David Leatherbarrow, Peter Carl and Alberto P駻ez-Gez.Taking an interdisciplinary...

Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry...

Vitruvius' Ten Books of Architecture was the fountainhead of architectural theory in the Italian Renaissance. Offering theoretical and practical solutions to a wide variety of architectural issues, this treatise did not, however, address all of the questions that were of concern to early modern...

Examining the complex social and material relationships between architecture and ecology which constitute modern cultures, this collection responds to the need to extend architectural thinking about ecology beyond current design literatures. This book shows how the 'habitats', 'natural milieus', 'places' or 'shelters' that construct...

This innovative edited collection charts the rise, fall and possible futures of the word primitive. The word primitive is fundamental to the discipline of architecture in the west, providing a convenient starting point for the many myths of architecture's origins. Since the almost legendary...

In Behind the Postcolonial Abidin Kusno shows how colonial representations have been revived and rearticulated in postcolonial Indonesia. The book shows how architecture and urban space can be seen, both historically and theoretically, as representations of political and cultural tendencies that characterize an emerging...

Brought together for the first time - the seminal writing on architecture by key philosophers and cultural theorist of the twentieth century.Issues around the built environment are increasingly central to the study of the social sciences and humanities. The essays offer a refreshing take...

A classic of architectural history and theory, Heavenly Mansions interprets architecture as a reflection of the age in which it flowers, and traces the alternating themes of fantasy and functionalism as exemplified in various styles and in the works of a number of influential...

Brings to life the masters of twentieth-century architecture and art, sharing anecdotes and memories of Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, Jackson Pollock, and others.Author: Peter BlakeISBN-10: 0393315037ISBN-13: 9780393315035Publisher: W. W. Norton & CompanyLanguage: EnglishPublished: 09/01/1996Pages: 372Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.46lbsSize: 9.25h x 6.79w x...

The U.S. Capitol, the building that houses the legislative branch of our government and a landmark that attracts 3-5 million visitors each year, has its origins in an architectural competition devised by George Washington. The winning design, submitted by William Thornton, combined "grandeur, simplicity,...

What is style in architecture? "Style is like a feather in a woman's hat, nothing more," said Le Corbusier, expressing most modern architects' low regard for the subject. But Witold Rybczynski disagrees, and in The Look of Architecture, he makes a compelling case for...

Saints and Spectacle examines the origins and reception of the Middle Byzantine program of mosaic decoration. This complex and colorful system of images covers the walls and vaults of churches with figures and compositions seen against a dazzling gold ground. The surviving eleventh-century churches...

Covering all regions of France--from Avignon's Palace of the Popes to Versailles' Petit Trianon--and all periods of French architecture--from the Roman theater at Orange to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris--this volume examines more than 60 of France's most important architectural landmarks. Writing in...

A revelatory account of the complex and evolving relationship of Renaissance architects to classical antiquity Focusing on the work of architects such as Brunelleschi, Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo, this extensively illustrated volume explores how the understanding of the antique changed over the course of...

The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum,...

In the late 19th century, a centuries-old preference for highly ornamented architecture gave way to a budding Modernism of clean lines and unadorned surfaces. At the same moment, everyday objects--cups, saucers, chairs, and tables--began to receive critical attention. Alina Payne addresses this shift, arguing...

A critical look at the life, work, and influence of the important and award-winning Spanish architect Rafael Moneo The Spanish architect Rafael Moneo (b. 1937) has won numerous awards (including the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize), yet this publication is the first to offer a...

Sebastiano Serlio introduced the principles of classical design to northern Europe and was the most important architectural writer and theorist of the sixteenth century. However, his writings have been inaccessible to English language readers until now. This distinguished translation of Serlio's treatise, complete with...

Once too numerous to attract attention, the log buildings of Texas now stand out for their rustic beauty. This book preserves a record of the log houses, stores, inns, churches, schools, jails, and barns that have already become all too few in the Texas...

In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to...

A vision of architecture that includes sculpture, machines, and technology and encapsulates the history of the human species.According to Paul Shepheard, architecture is the rearranging of the world for human purposes. Sculpture, machines, and landscapes are all architecture-every bit as much as buildings are....

This ode to the spirit of place consists of an exchange of letters in which one author recalls and the other responds to the elements considered essential to the art of successful place-making. Each of the book's chapters forms a chamber, and each chamber...

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...

Over the course of this century, nature has increasingly been relegated to the province of environmentalists while cities and towns have been turned over to developers and planners. Norman Crowe seeks to overcome this division into the respective realms of specialists by recognizing the...

Theorizes an architectural ethos of extreme self-reflection and finality from a Lacanian perspective.While it is widely recognized that the advanced architecture of the 1970s left a legacy of experimentation and theoretical speculation as intense as any in architecture's history, there has been no general...

The meaning and function of camps, from Scout Jamborees and RV Clubs to FEMA trailers and GTMO.What is a camp? In August 2005, television news showed viewers an estimated 20,000 Katrina evacuees camped out in the Superdome, Cindy Sheehan protesting the Iraq War on...

A fascimile edition of the long-out-of-print large-format edition designed by design icon Muriel Cooper.Upon its publication by the MIT Press in 1972, Learning from Las Vegas was immediately influential and controversial. The authors made an argument that was revolutionary for its time--that the billboards...

In Grammars of Approach, Cynthia Wall offers a close look at changes in perspective in spatial design, language, and narrative across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that involve, literally and psychologically, the concept of "approach." In architecture, the term "approach" changed in...

In Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images, Edward Dimendberg offers the first comprehensive treatment of one of the most imaginative contemporary design studios. Since founding their practice in 1979, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have integrated architecture, urban design, media art, and the...

Blier illuminates the extraordinary architecture of the Batammaliba people of Western Africa, revealing these buildings as texts through which we can read the beliefs, psychology, traditions, and social concerns of their inhabitants. In doing so, she explores the role of vernacular architecture as an...

In Dubai, a luxury apartment block is built in the shape of a giant iPod. In China, President Xi Jinping denounces the trend of constructing "bizarre" new buildings in wacky shapes and colors. In Cincinnati, celebrity architect Zaha Hadid is paid millions to design...

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents...

What makes the places we inhabit extraordinary? Why are some urban spaces more vital and restorative? Wonderful landscapes, inspiring works of architecture and urban design, and the numinous experiences that accompany them have been an integral dimension of our culture. Up-lifting spaces, dramatic use...