Kategoria BISAC: Architecture >> Criticism

As San Juan nears the 500th anniversary of its founding, Arleen Pabon-Charneco explores the urban and architectural developments that have taken place over the last five centuries, transforming the site from a small Caribbean enclave to a sprawling modern capital.

As the oldest European settlement in the United States and second oldest in the Western Hemisphere, San Juan is an example of the experimentation that took place in the American "borderland" from 1519 to 1898, when Spanish sovereignty ended. The author also investigates post-1898 examples to explore how...

Once regarded a secondary consideration, in recent years, materiality has emerged as a powerful concept in architectural discourse and practice. Prompted in part by developments in digital fabrication and digital science, the impact of materiality on design and practice is being widely reassessed and reimagined.

Materiality and Architecture extends architectural thinking beyond the confines of current design literatures to explore conceptions of materiality across the field of architecture. Fourteen international contributors use elucidate the problems and...

Image, Text, Architecture brings a radical and detailed analysis of the modern and contemporary architectural media, addressing issues of architectural criticism, architectural photography and the role of journal editors. It covers examples as diverse as an article by British artist Paul Nash in The Architectural Review, 1940, an early project by French architects Lacaton & Vassal published in the journal 2G, 2001, and recent photography by Hisao Suzuki for the Spanish journal El Croquis. At the intersection of image and text the book also reveals the role of the utopian impulse...

Architecture of Resistance investigates the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author reinterprets the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to...

The introduction of iron and later steel construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart for the first time the global reach of iron s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and...

The usual history of architecture is a grand narrative of soaring monuments and heroic makers. But it is also a false narrative in many ways, rarely acknowledging the personal failures and disappointments of architects. In Bleak Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin investigates the underside of architecture, the stories of losers and unfulfillment often ignored by an architectural criticism that values novelty, fame, and virility over fallibility and rejection.

As architectural criticism promotes increasingly narrow values, dismissing certain styles wholesale and subjecting...

Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Perez-Gomez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected -- attuned -- to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Perez-Gomez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding.

Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on...

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the starchitecture system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007 8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a disinterested position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an...

The Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, Greg Lynn and Alejandro Zaera-Polo shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought.
Analysing architectural...

Once regarded a secondary consideration, in recent years, materiality has emerged as a powerful concept in architectural discourse and practice. Prompted in part by developments in digital fabrication and digital science, the impact of materiality on design and practice is being widely reassessed and reimagined."

Materiality and Architecture" extends architectural thinking beyond the confines of current design literatures to explore conceptions of materiality across the field of architecture. Fourteen international contributors use elucidate the problems and possibilities of...