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...

To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another--architecture and philosophy--can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space--the destitute, the homeless, the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities.Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our...

Robert Harbison reads architecture as one would read poetry for meaning. Meaning, he finds, resides especially in those works of architecture that are unnecessary, having outlived their physical functions or never having been intended to have any. Gardens, monuments, historic fortifications, and ruins are among the examples he uses to reveal the secret meanings of this architecture "freed from function."Robert Harbison has lectured widely on architecture at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, the University of Toronto, Stanford University, Cornell University, and the Architectural...

In this book, Robert Harbison offers a novel interpretation of what architectural theory might look like. The title is an echo of Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Like the poem, Harbison's work is a composite structure built of oblique meanings and astonishing shifts that add up to an engaging portrait--in this case a portrait of architecture in which use, symbol, and metaphor coexist.The chapter titles indicate Harbison's themes, all of which bear parallel, implied, or tangential relations to architecture: Sculpture, Machines, the Body, Landscape, Models,...

Like all of Robert Harbison's works, Eccentric Spaces is a hybrid, informed by the author's interests in art, architecture, fiction, poetry, landscape, geography, history, and philosophy. The subject is the human imagination -- and the mysterious interplay between the imagination and the spaces it has made for itself to live in: gardens, rooms, buildings, streets, museums and maps, fictional topographies, and architectures. The book is a lesson in seeing and sensing the manifold forms created by the mind for its own pleasure.

Palaces and haunted houses, Victorian parlors,...

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. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes -- post-structuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric -- has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architectures...

Does fame empower architecture or undermine it? Does the star power or cult status of an architect enhance the art or dilute it? This issue of Perspecta -- the oldest and most distinguished student-edited, university-based American architecture journal -- examines the inner workings of fame as it relates to architecture though media and culture. It looks at how the commodification of architecture affects the design process -- whether fame emphasizes all the wrong aspects of architecture or provides the only way an architect can produce truly ambitious projects. How does architecture...

This collaboration between two distinguished architects and former colleagues is a joyous celebration of admired places and a thoughtful consideration of the role that design has played in giving these places their memorable qualities. It is also an invitation to readers to inhabit the chambers of the book with their own imaginations to join in the making of the Memory Palace proposed. The authors' informal, witty, and anecdotal style extends to the illustrations -- the freehand travel sketches, line drawings, and watercolors of places they have remembered and enjoyed. Chambers for a...