Architecture: Architecture Reading List

The processes used by Cecil Balmond are explained in detail in 'Informal'. This highly illustrated volume explores eight exemplary projects undertaken by Balmond, one of the most innovative structural engineers in the world.

it has an unrivalled consistency of argument... this book makes a substantial contribution to present knowledge and provides a clear window on the one art form you cannot ignore.

Eminent scholar Alan Colquhoun provides a fascinating analysis of international modernism in the world of architecture, and the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement. Exploring the evolution of the movement from Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the megastructures of the 1960s, Colquhoun assesses the triumphs and failures of the era, along with the movement's main architects and their roles as acknowledged masters.

Featuring the most important essays of Peter Eisenman, an innovator in the architectural world for more than thirty years, this handsome book charts the author's evolving ideas about contemporary architectural practice and theory.

Through a series of competitions, speculative commissions, and built work, FOA's first monograph is structured to reflect the development of their specific attitude and as a compendium of the technical arsenal that they use to within their practice. With the spirit of scientific classification, the genesis of an architectural project is identified within a series of phylum, actualized and simultaneously virtualized, in their specific application to the unique conditions of a project's location. Phylogenesis also includes a collection of texts from several critics who investigate related topics that touch upon different aspects of FOA's discourse.

The first section of the book consists of six rigorously argued essays that investigate the language of modernism, language and drawing, "masculine and feminine" architecture, language metaphors, science in architecture, and the social properties of architecture. The second part provides a vocabulary of key words, providing rich analyses of critical terms such as Character, Form, History, and Space. Each investigation locates a word's modern meaning within a framework of historical enquiry and theoretical discussion, setting out clearly the term's invention and treatment by architects, historians, philosophers, critics, and the people who actually use buildings. This wholly original study changes and enriches the way we think and talk about architecture, and will prove indispensable to anyone concerned with architecture and culture in the modern era.

The third edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best of publications on the city. It has been extensively updated to reflect the latest thinking on globalization, information technology and urban theory. Classic writings from such authors as Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs and Le Corbusier, meet the best contemporary writings of Peter Hall, Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells among others.

Architects Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto have been generating some of the most provocative thinking in the field for nearly twenty years. With Atlas of Novel Tectonics, Reiser+Umemoto hone in on the many facets of architecture and illuminate their theories with great thought and simplicity. The Atlas is organized as an accumulation of short chapters that address the workings of matter and force, material science, the lessons of art and architectural history, and the influence of architecture on culture (and vice versa). Reiser+Umemoto see architectural design as a series of problem situations, and each chapter is an argument devoted to a specific condition or case. Influenced by a wide range of fields and phenomenaBrillat-Savarin's classic. The Physiology of Taste is one of their primary models the authors provide a cross-section of thinking and inspiration. The result is both an elucidation of the concepts that guide Reiser+Umemoto through their own design process and a series of meditations on topics that have formed their own sense as architects.Atlas of Novel Tectonics offers an entirely fresh perspective on subjects that are generally taken for granted, and does so with a welcome punch and energy.

An overview of the works by the influential postwar architects features their major projects from the 1940s to the mid 1990s, including the Hunstanton Secondary School, the Golden Lane Housing, Sheffield University, and the Economist Group.

Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City is a book of New York architect Stan Allen's writings and projects that propose new architectural strategies for the contemporary city. Organized in the form of a user's manual, it juxtaposes speculative texts outlining Allen's general principles with specific projects created by his office. The book's title refers to this interplay of practice and theory, evoking not only the points of activity and the paths of movement found in a contemporary city but also the points of speculation and lines of argument in theoretical discourse. Projects include the Cardiff Bay Opera House, Wales; the Korean-American Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Museo del Prado, Madrid; and White Columns Gallery, New York. Each project is accompanied by explanatory text as well as numerous drawings, models, photographs, and computer renderings. K. Michael Hays contributes an introductory essay; R. E. Somol writes the postscript.

Christine Boyer faces head-on the crisis of the city in the late twentieth century, taking us on a fascinating journey through theaters and museums, panoramas and maps, buildings and institutions that are used to construct a new reading of the city as a system of representation, a complex cultural entity. Boyer brings together elements and concepts from geography, critical theory, architecture, literature, and painting in a synthetic and readable work that is broad in its reach and original in its insights. What finally emerges is a sense of the city reinvigorated with richness and potential. The City of Collective Memory describes a series of different visual and mental models by which the urban environment has been recognized, depicted, and planned. Boyer identifies three major "maps": one common to the traditional city -- the city as a work of art; one characteristic of the modern city -- the city as panorama; and one appropriate to the contemporary city -- the city as spectacle. It is a richly illustrated and documented study that pays considerable attention to the normally hidden and unspoken codes that regulate the order imposed on and derived from the city. A wide range of secondary historical literature and theoretical work is considered, with evident debts to structuralist analysis of urban form represented by Aldo Rossi, as well to much post-structuralist criticism from Walter Benjamin to the present.

The past decade has been witness to a remarkable resurgence of interest in landscape. While this recovery invokes a return of past traditions and ideas, it also implies renewal, invention, and transformation.Recovering Landscape collects a number of essays that discuss why landscape is gaining increased attention today, and what new possibilities might emerge from this situation. Themes such as reclamation, urbanism, infrastructure, geometry, representation, and temporality are explored in discussions drawn from recent developments not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands, France, India, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this collection, all leading figures in the field of landscape architecture, include Alan Balfour, Denis Cosgrove, Georges Descombes, Christophe Girot, Steen Hoyer, David Leatherbarrow, Bart Lootsma, Sebastien Marot, Anuradha Mathur, Marc Treib, and Alex Wall.

It has been said that Peter Eisenman considers architecture a form of shock therapy; whatever his intent, Peter Eisenman has indeed created one of the most controversial bodies of work of any contemporary American architect. Eisenman's architecture, along with the complex, genre-straddling theories upon which it is built, is active and polemical, and his buildings--whether executed or not--are ingenious essays on the way humans and inert materials occupy and control space. Eisenman combines a theoretical background and a remarkable academic pedigree with a bold, uncompromising design sensibility that places him along the country's most revered architects. Diagram Diaries is an unprecedented illustrated chronicle that showcases Eisenman's work to date from his earliest house designs to the heralded Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, through current commissions such as the Memorial for the Victims of the Holocaust in Vienna. This volume is more than a straightforward survey of the architect's work, however; it is by its very nature an engaging exploration of the process of design. Essays and detailed descriptions are built along a central

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.

In the discussion of architecture, there is a prevailing sentiment that, since 1968, cultural production in its traditional sense can no longer be understood to rise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but must now be constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures.

In its 11-year history, Oppositions, the journal of the New York-based Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), set the agenda, introduced key players and published seminal pieces on the theorization of architecture in the late 20th century.

"J. B. Jackson, a pioneer in the field of landscape studies, here takes us on a tour of American landscapes past and present, showing how our surroundings reflect important changes in our culture" "Because we live in urban and industrial environments that are constantly evolving, says Jackson, time and movement are increasingly important to us, place and permanence less so. We no longer gain a feeling of community from where we live or assemble but from common work hours, habits, and customs. Jackson examines the new vernacular landscape of trailers, parking lots, trucks, loading docks, and suburban garages, which all reflect this emphasis of motility and transience; he redefines roads as scenes of work and leisure and social intercourse - as places rather than as means of getting to places; he argues that pubic parks are now primarily for children, older people, and nature lovers, while more mobile or gregarious people seek recreation in shopping malls, in the street, and in sports arenas; he discusses the form and function of dwellings in New Mexico, from prehistoric Pueblo villages to mobile homes; and he criticizes the tendency of some environmentalists to venerate nature instead of interacting with it and learning to share it with others." "Written with Jackson's customary lucidity and elegance, this book reveals his passion for vernacular culture, his insights into a style of life that blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, between middle and working classes, and between public and private spaces."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Since its original publication in 1978, Delirious New York has attained mythic status. Back in print in a newly designed edition, this influential cultural, architectural, and social history of New York is even more popular, selling out its first printing on publication. Rem Koolhaas's celebration and analysis of New York depicts the city as a metaphor for the incredible variety of human behavior. At the end of the nineteenth century, population, information, and technology explosions made Manhattan a laboratory for the invention and testing of a metropolitan lifestyle -- "the culture of congestion" -- and its architecture. "Manhattan," he writes, "is the 20th century's Rosetta Stone . . . occupied by architectural mutations (Central Park, the Skyscraper), utopian fragments (Rockefeller Center, the U.N. Building), and irrational phenomena (Radio City Music Hall)." Koolhaas interprets and reinterprets the dynamic relationship between architecture and culture in a number of telling episodes of New York's history, including the imposition of the Manhattan grid, the creation of Coney Island, and the development of the skyscraper. Delirious New York is also packed with intriguing and fun facts and illustrated with witty watercolors and quirky archival drawings, photographs, postcards, and maps. The spirit of this visionary investigation of Manhattan equals the energy of the city itself.

S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society. The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a "dictionary" of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language -- definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.

Ito's exhibition Blurring Architecture: Contemplations on Architecture and the Media... ambitiously utilizes six different media in six separate galleries to create lived experiences of unrealized projects and buildings: reproduction, drawing, simulation, model, photography and text.--Surface

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.

First published in 1960, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age has become required reading in numerous courses on the history of modern architecture and is widely regarded as one of the definitive books on the modern movement. It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.

For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond "style," to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established "emotional relationships by means of raw materials." The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the "mass-production spirit," and much else. A principal prophet of the "modern" movement in architecture, and a near-legendary figure of the "International School," he designed some of the twentieth century's most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cité Universitaire, Paris; Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles; and many more. Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: "American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture." "Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary." "A cathedral is not very beautiful . . ." and "Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life." Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians―but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions, and innovative theories of one of this century's master builders.

With the publication of The Image of the City in 1959, Kevin Lynch embarked upon the process of exploring city form. Good City Form is both a summation and an extension of his vision, a high point from which he views cities past and possible. First published in hardcover under the title A Theory of Good City Form.

This collection of an important architectural theorist's essays considers and compares designs by Palladio and Le Corbusier, discusses mannerism and modern architecture, architectural vocabulary in the 19th century, the architecture of Chicago, neoclassicism and modern architecture, and the architecture of utopia.

The present volume offers eloquent testimony that many of the master builders of this century have held passionate convictions regarding the philosophic and social basis of their art. Nearly every important development in the modern architectural movement began with the proclamation of these convictions in the form of a program or manifesto. The most influential of these are collected here in chronological order from 1903 to 1963. Taken together, they constitute a subjective history of modern architecture; compared with one another, their great diversity of style reveals in many cases the basic differences of attitude and temperament that produced a corresponding divergence in architectural style. In point of view, the book covers the aesthetic spectrum from right to left; from programs that rigidly generate designs down to the smallest detail to revolutionary manifestoes that call for anarchy in building form and town plan. The documents, placed in context by the editor, are also international in their range: among them are the seminal and prophetic statements of Henry van de Velde, Adolf Loos, and Bruno Taut from the early years of the century; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 annunciation of Organic Architecture; Gropius's original program for the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar in 1919; "Towards a New Architecture, Guiding Principles" by Le Corbusier; the formulation by Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner of the basic principles of Constructivism; and articles by R. Buckminster Fuller on universal architecture and the architect as world planner. Other pronouncements, some in flamboyant style, including those of Erich Mendelsohn, Hannes Meyer, Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, El Lissitzky, and Louis I. Kahn. There are also a number of collective or group statements, issued in the name of movements such as CIAM, De Stijl, ABC, the Situationists, and GEAM.Since the dramatic effectiveness of the manifesto form is usually heightened by brevity and conciseness, it has been possible to reproduce most of the documents in their entirety; only a few have been excerpted.

Written from a neo-Marxist point of view by a prominent Italian architectural historian, Architecture and Utopia leads the reader beyond architectural form into a broader understanding of the relation of architecture to society and the architect to the workforce and the marketplace. It discusses the Garden Cities movement and the suburban developments it generated, the German-Russian architectural experiments of the 1920s, the place of the avant-garde in the plastic arts, and the uses and pitfalls of seismological approaches to architecture, and assesses the prospects of socialist alternatives.

Reyner Banham was a pioneer in arguing that technology, human needs, and environmental concerns must be considered an integral part of architecture. No historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering on the design of buildings and on the minds of architects. In this revision of his classic work, Banham has added considerable new material on the use of energy, particularly solar energy, in human environments. Included in the new material are discussions of Indian pueblos and solar architecture, the Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings, and the environmental wisdom of many current architectural vernaculars.

A milestone in modern thought, Space, Time and Architecture has been reissued many times since its first publication in 1941 and translated into half a dozen languages. In this revised edition of Mr. Giedion's classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations. The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new material on the later development of Frank Lloyd Wright and the more recent buildings of Walter Gropius, particularly his American Embassy in Athens. In his discussion of Le Corbusier, Mr. Giedion provides detailed analyses of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Le Corbusier's only building in the United States, and his Priory of La Tourette near Lyons. There is a section on his relations with his clients and an assessment of his influence on contemporary architecture, including a description of the Le Corbusier Center in Zurich (designed just before his death], which houses his works of art. The chapters on Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto have been brought up to date with examples of their buildings in the sixties. There is an entirely new chapter on the Danish architect Jorn Utzon, whose work, as exemplified in his design for the Sydney Opera House, Mr. Giedion considers representative of post-World War II architectural concepts. A new essay, Changing Notions of the City, traces the evolution of the structure of the city throughout history and examines current attempts to deal with urban growth, as shown in the work of such architects as Jose Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, and Fumihiko Maki. Mr. Sert's Peabody Terrace is discussed as an example of the interlocking of the collective and individual spheres. Finally, the conclusion has been enlarged to include a survey of the limits of the organic in architecture.

An introduction to the work of one of the most important architects of the 20th century.

First published in 1948, "Mechanization Takes Command" is an examination of mechanization and its effects on everyday life. A monumental figure in the field of architectural history, Sigfried Giedion traces the evolution and resulting philosophical implications of such disparate innovations as the slaughterhouse, the Yale lock, the assembly line, tractors, ovens, and comfort as defined by advancements in furniture design. A groundbreaking text when originally published, Giedion s pioneering work remains an important contribution to architecture, philosophy, and technology studies. "