Kategoria BISAC: Architecture >> Criticism

For this new edition, editor Charles Jencks, has provided an entirely new definitive introductory essay 'What then is...

Precious spices and textiles, imported from distant trading posts in the eastern Mediterranean, stocked Venetian markets in the Middle Ages; but Venice's merchants imported more than material goods from the East--they acquired also a wealth of visual ideas and information from Muslim culture. This lively and richly illustrated book investigates the influence of oriental trade and travel on medieval Venice and its architecture.
Architectural historian Deborah Howard examines the experiences of Venetian merchants overseas, focusing on links with Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, as well as...

This collection contains studies written by art historian James Ackerman over the past decade. Whereas Ackerman's earlier work assumed a development of the arts as they responded to social, economic, political, and cultural change, his recent work reflects the poststructural critique of the presumption of progress that characterized Renaissance and modernist history and criticism. In this book he explores the tension between the authority of the past--which may act not only as a restraint but as a challenge and stimulus--and the potentially liberating gift of invention. He examines the...

De Re Aedificatoria, by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), was the first modern treatise on the theory and practice of architecture. Its importance for the subsequent history of architecture is incalculable, yet this is the first English translation based on the original, exceptionally eloquent Latin text on which Alberti's reputation as a theorist is founded.

The profession of architecture is increasingly characterized by divergent architectural ideas and divergent political, social, technological, and economic agendas. Much of current practice focuses on the process of architecture (its how) rather than its meaning, effect, or reason for being (its why). This issue of Perspecta--the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal--explores the practice of architecture after the breakdown of consensus. Designers, theoreticians, and scholars investigate an architectural landscape devoid of a dominant ideology or ethos. Their...

Earth Moves, Bernard Cache's first major work, conceptualizes a series of architectural images as vehicles for two important developments. First, he offers a new understanding of the architectural image itself. Following Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, he develops an account of the image that is nonrepresentational and constructive--images as constituents of a primary, image world, of which subjectivity itself is a special kind of image. Second, Cache redefines architecture beyond building proper to include cinematic, pictoral, and other framings.Complementary to this classification,...

Since Greek antiquity, the human body has been regarded as a microcosm of universal harmony. In this book, an international group of architects, architectural historians, and theorists examines the relation of the human body and architecture. The essays view well-known buildings, texts, paintings, ornaments, and landscapes from the perspective of the body's physical, psychological, and spiritual needs and pleasures. Topics include Greek temples; the churches of Tadao Ando in Japan; Renaissance fortresses and paintings; the body, space, and dwelling in Wright's and Schindler's houses in...

"Reading Structures" Founded in the early 1950s, Perspecta is the oldest and most distinguished of the student-edited American architectural journals that have appeared in recent decades. Perspecta 31 examines the relationship between architectural design and structural engineering through the processes and products of both disciplines. The contributing architects, engineers, and historians explore how structures reflect both the professions and the cultures that produce them. The authors' common approach to structure, which carefully considers context, reveals the politics, economic...