The Projective Cast

Author: Robin Evans
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262550383
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 460

Book Description
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 that architects do not produce geometry, but rather consume it. In this long-awaited book, completed shortly before its author's death, 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. He shows that geometry does not always play a stolid and dormant role but, in fact, may be an active agent in the links between thinking and imagination, imagination and drawing, drawing and building. He suggests a theory of architecture that is based on the many transactions between architecture and geometry as evidenced in individual buildings, largely in Europe, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. From the Henry VII chapel at Westminster Abbey to Le Corbusier's Ronchamp, from Raphael's S. Eligio and the work of Piero della Francesca and Philibert Delorme to Guarino Guarini and the painters of cubism, Evans explores the geometries involved, asking whether they are in fact the stable underpinnings of the creative, intuitive, or rhetorical aspects of architecture. In particular he concentrates on the history of architectural projection, the geometry of vision that has become an internalized and pervasive pictorial method of construction and that, until now, has played only a small part in the development of architectural theory. Evans describes the ambivalent role that pictures play in architecture and urges resistance to the idea that pictures provide all that architects need, suggesting that there is much more within the scope of the architect's vision of a project than what can be drawn. He defines the different fields of projective transmission that concern architecture, and investigates the ambiguities of projection and the interaction of imagination with projection and its metaphors.

Translations from Drawing to Building

Author: Robin Evans
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262550277
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 294

Book Description
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. CONTENTS Towards Anarchitecture The Rights of Retreat and Rites of Exclusion: Notes Towards the Definition of Wall Figures, Doors and Passages Rookeries and Model Dwellings: English Housing Reform and the Moralities of Private Space Not to Be Used for Wrapping Purposes Translations from Drawing to Building The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique Mies van der Rohes Paradoxical Symmetries

Practice

Author: Stan Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135763755
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
Conversant in contemporary theory and architectural history, Stan Allen argues that concepts in architecture are not imported from other disciplines, but emerge through the materials and procedures of architectural practice itself. Drawing on his own experience as a working architect, he examines the ways in which the tools available to the architect affect the design and production of buildings. This second edition includes revised essays together with previously unpublished work. Allen’s seminal piece on Field Conditions is included in this reworked, revised and redesigned volume. A compelling read for student and practitioner alike.

Oblique Drawing

Author: Massimo Scolari
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262017749
Category : Axonometric projection
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates "anti-perspective" visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life. Scolari's generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history; parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of one-point perspective. Scolari analyzes the use of nonperspectival representations in pre-Renaissance images of machines and military hardware, architectural models and drawings, and illustrations of geometrical solids. He challenges Panofsky's theory of Pompeiian perspective and explains the difficulties encountered by the Chinese when they viewed Jesuit missionaries' perspectival religious images. Scolari vividly demonstrates the diversity of representational forms devised through the centuries, and shows how each one reveals something that is lacking in the others.

Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy

Author: P. J. E. Kail
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191614599
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
In his writings, Hume talks of our 'gilding and staining' natural objects, and of the mind's propensity to 'spread itself' on the world. This has led commentators to use the metaphor of 'projection' in connection with his philosophy: Hume is held to have taught that causal power and self are projections, that God is a projection of our fear, and that value is a projection of sentiment. By considering what it is about Hume's writing that occasions this metaphor, P. J. E. Kail spells out its meaning, the role it plays in Hume's work, and examines how, if at all, what sounds 'projective' in Hume can be reconciled with what sounds 'realist'. In addition to offering some highly original readings of Hume's central ideas, Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy offers a detailed examination of the notion of projection and the problems it faces.

Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science

Author: Alberto Perez-Gomez
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262660555
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Between the late Renaissance and the early nineteenth century, the ancient arts of architecture were being profoundly transformed by the scientific revolution. This important book, which won the 1984 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, traces the process by which the mystical and numerological grounds for the use of number and geometry in building gave way to the more functional and technical ones that prevail in architectural theory and practice today. Throughout, it relates the major architectural treatises of successive generations to the larger culture and the writings of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. The book leads the reader through the controversy that was generated by Claude Perrault in the seventeenth century. His writings began to cast doubt on the absolute aesthetic value of the classical orders and the "perfect" proportions that were architecture's legacy from Pythagorean times. Thus the once immutable "invisible" system lost its special status forever. The book focuses in particular on eighteenth-century developments in the science of mechanics and emerging techniques in structural analysis which slowly entered the architectural treatises and found their way into practice, often by way of civil and military engineers. And by the nineteenth century, the book notes, even architectural rendering and drawing were radically changed through the introduction of new descriptive and projective geometries. Tracing these fundamental changes in architectural intentions, Pérez-Gómez challenges many popular misconceptions about the theory and history of modern architecture. At the same time, he suggests an intangible loss, that of a culture's power to express through a building its total mathematical, mystical, and magical world-view.

Toward A Minor Architecture

Author: Jill Stoner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300281
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built. Architecture can no longer limit itself to the art of making buildings; it must also invent the politics of taking them apart. This is Jill Stoner's premise for a minor architecture. Her architect's eye tracks differently from most, drawn not to the lauded and iconic but to what she calls “the landscape of our constructed mistakes”—metropolitan hinterlands rife with failed and foreclosed developments, undersubscribed office parks, chain hotels, and abandoned malls. These graveyards of capital, Stoner asserts, may be stripped of their excess and become sites of strategic spatial operations. But first we must dissect and dismantle prevalent architectural mythologies that brought them into being—western obsessions with interiority, with the autonomy of the building-object, with the architect's mantle of celebrity, and with the idea of nature as that which is “other” than the built metropolis. These four myths form the warp of the book. Drawing on the literary theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Stoner suggests that minor architectures, like minor literatures, emerge from the bottoms of power structures and within the language of those structures. Yet they too are the result of powerful and instrumental forces. Provoked by collective desires, directed by the instability of time, and celebrating contingency, minor architectures may be mobilized within buildings that are oversaturated, underutilized, or perceived as obsolete. Stoner's provocative challenge to current discourse veers away from design, through a diverse landscape of cultural theory, contemporary fiction, and environmental ethics. Hers is an optimistic and inclusive approach to a more politicized practice of architecture.

Constructing a New Agenda

Author: A. Krista Sykes
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1616890827
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
This follow-up to Kate Nesbitt's best-selling anthology Theorizing a New Agenda collects twenty-eight essays that address architecture theory from the mid-1990s, where Nesbitt left off, through the present. Kristin Sykes offers an overview of the myriad approaches and attitudes adopted by architects and architectural theorists during this era. Multiple themes—including the impact of digital technologies on processes of architectural design, production, materiality, and representation; the implications of globalization and networks of information; the growing emphasis on sustainable and green architecture; and the phenomenon of the 'starchitect' and iconic architecture—appear against a background colored by architectural theory, as it existed from the 1960s on, in a period of transition (if not crisis) that centers around the perceived abyss between theory and practice. Theory's transitional state persists today, rendering its immediate history particularly relevant to contemporary thought and practice. While other collections of recent theoretical writings exist none attempt to address the situation as a whole, providing in one place key theoretical texts of the past decade and a half. This book provides a foundation for ongoing discussions surrounding contemporary architectural thought and practice, with iconic essays by Greg Lynn, Deborah Berke, Sanford Kwinter, Samuel Mockbee, Stan Allen, Rem Koolhaas, William Mitchell, Anthony Vidler, Micahel Hays, Reinhold Martin, Reiser + Umemoto, Glenn Murcutt, William McDonough, Micahael Braungart, Michael Speaks, and many more.

The Fabrication of Virtue

Author: Robin Evans
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521239554
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
First published in 1982, this book describes a new kind of prison architecture that developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book concentrates on architecture, but places it in the context of contemporary penal practice and contemporary thought. Beginning with an exploration on the eighteenth-century prisons before reform, the book goes on to consider two earlier kinds of imprisonment that were modified by eighteenth-century reformers. The theory and practice of prison design is covered in detail. The later parts of the book deals with alliance between architecture and reform, and with the connection between the utilitarian architecture of the reformed prisons and academic neo-classicism. The overall aim of the book is to show the profound change that was being wrought in the nature of architecture, which was exemplified in the reformed prisons. Architecture, one emblem of the social order, was now one of its fundamental instruments.

Architectural Topographies

Author: Tomà Berlanda
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317800818
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
Architectural Topographies is a critical dictionary for architects and landscape architects in which the graphic lexicon can be read from a beginning, the ground, to a conclusion, the specific case studies. Meant as a tool to help you recognise, analyse, choose, and invent solutions, the book's key words refer to the physical and material relationship between construction and ground; to where and how the link is built; to the criteria, methods, and tools used to know and transform the ground; and to the possible approaches to the place and their implications on the way the earth is touched. Fifty case studies by forty-six of the greatest architects of the previous hundred years are represented throughout in sectional drawings which place the buildings along the same ground plane to illustrate how the key words might be combined and to show each architect's position on their built work in relation to all the others. Includes projects by Alvar Aalto; Tadao Ando; Gunnar Asplund; Atelier Bow-Wow; João Batista Vilanova Artigas; Patrick Berger; Mario Botta; Marcel Breuer; Erik Bryggman; Gonçalo Byrne; David Chipperfield; Le Corbusier; Sverre Fehn; Aurelio Galfetti, Flora Ruchat, and Ivo Trumpy; Dick Van Gameren; Herzog and De Meuron; Steven Holl; Arne Jacobsen; Kengo Kuma; Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal; Adalberto Libera; Frank Lloyd Wright; Paulo Mendes da Rocha; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos; Glenn Murcutt; Juan Navarro Baldeweg; Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey; Jan Olav Jensen and Børre Skodvin; John Pawson; Giuseppe Perugini, Mario Fiorentino, and Nello Aprile; Renzo Piano; Georges-Henry Pingusson; Rudolph Schindler; Roland Simounet; Alvaro Siza; Luigi Snozzi; Alejandro de la Sota; Eduardo Souto de Moura; Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson; Fernando Tavora; Jørn Utzon; Livio Vacchini; Francesco Venezia, Roberto Collovà, and Marcella Aprile; Amancho Williams; and Peter Zumthor.