Foucault for Architects

Author: Gordana Fontana-Giusti
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135010080
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Book Description
From the mid-1960s onwards Michel Foucault has had a significant impact on diverse aspects of culture, knowledge and arts including architecture and its critical discourse. The implications for architecture have been wide-ranging. His archaeological and genealogical approaches to knowledge have transformed architectural history and theory, while his attitude to arts and aesthetics led to a renewed focus on the avant-garde. Prepared by an architect, this book offers an excellent entry point into the remarkable work of Michel Foucault, and provides a focused introduction suitable for architects, urban designers, and students of architecture. Foucault’s crucial juxtaposition of space, knowledge and power has unlocked novel spatial possibilities for thinking about design in architecture and urbanism. While the philosopher's ultimate attention on the issues of body and sexuality has defined our understanding of the possibilities and limits of human condition and its relation to architecture. The book concentrates on a number of historical and theoretical issues often addressed by Foucault that have been grouped under the themes of archaeology, enclosure, bodies, spatiality and aesthetics in order to examine and demonstrate their relevancy for architectural knowledge, its history and its practice.

Space, Knowledge and Power

Author: Stuart Elden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317051904
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 423

Book Description
Michel Foucault’s work is rich with implications and insights concerning spatiality, and has inspired many geographers and social scientists to develop these ideas in their own research. This book, the first to engage Foucault’s geographies in detail from a wide range of perspectives, is framed around his discussions with the French geography journal Hérodote in the mid 1970s. The opening third of the book comprises some of Foucault’s previously untranslated work on questions of space, a range of responses from French and English language commentators, and a newly translated essay by Claude Raffestin, a leading Swiss geographer. The rest of the book presents specially commissioned essays which examine the remarkable reception of Foucault’s work in English and French language geography; situate Foucault’s project historically; and provide a series of developments of his work in the contemporary contexts of power, biopolitics, governmentality and war. Contributors include a number of key figures in social/spatial theory such as David Harvey, Chris Philo, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, John Agnew, Thomas Flynn and Matthew Hannah. Written in an open and engaging tone, the contributors discuss just what they find valuable - and frustrating - about Foucault’s geographies. This is a book which will both surprise and challenge.

Deleuze & Guattari for Architects

Author: Andrew Ballantyne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134103158
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 137

Book Description

Derrida for Architects

Author: Richard Coyne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136723463
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
Jacques Derrida’s thinking is radical, provocative, controversial, and even difficult. This book looks afresh at Derrida’s thinking in relation to architecture. It simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. As well as a review of Derrida’s interaction with architecture, it is also a careful consideration of the implications of his thinking, particularly on the way architecture is practiced.

Benjamin for Architects

Author: Brian Elliott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136846360
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description
A concise, coherent account of the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s writings to architects, considering figures of modern art and architecture in detail, and locating Benjamin’s critical work within the context of contemporary architecture and urbanism.

Discipline and Punish

Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307819299
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Heterotopia and the City

Author: Michiel Dehaene
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134100132
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Book Description
Heterotopia, literally meaning ‘other place’, is a rich concept in urban design that describes a space that is on the margins of ordered or civil society, and one that possesses multiple, fragmented or even incompatible meanings. The term has had an impact on architectural and urban theory since it was coined by Foucault in the late 1960s but it has remained a source of confusion and debate since. Heterotopia and the City seeks to clarify this concept and investigates the heterotopias which exist throughout our contemporary world: in museums, theme parks, malls, holiday resorts, gated communities, wellness hotels and festival markets. With theoretical contributions on the concept of heterotopia, including a new translation of Foucault’s influential 1967 text, Of Other Space and essays by well-known scholars, the book comprises a series of critical case studies, from Beaubourg to Bilbao, which probe a range of (post)urban transformations and which redirect the debate on the privatization of public space. Wastelands and terrains vagues are studied in detail in a section on urban activism and transgression and the reader gets a glimpse of the extremes of our dualized, postcivil condition through case studies on Jakarta, Dubai, and Kinshasa. Heterotopia and the City provides a collective effort to reposition heterotopia as a crucial concept for contemporary urban theory. The book will be of interest to all those wishing to understand the city in the emerging postcivil society and post-historical era. Planners, architects, cultural theorists, urbanists and academics will find this a valuable contribution to current critical argument.

Merleau-Ponty for Architects

Author: Jonathan Hale
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317291999
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
The philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) has influenced the design work of architects as diverse as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, as well as informing renowned schools of architectural theory, notably those around Dalibor Vesely at Cambridge, Kenneth Frampton, David Leatherbarrow and Alberto Pérez-Gómez in North America and Juhani Pallasmaa in Finland. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the value of people’s experience of the world gained through their immediate bodily engagement with it remains greater than the value of understanding gleaned through abstract mathematical, scientific or technological systems. This book summarizes what Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has to offer specifically for architects. It locates architectural thinking in the context of his work, placing it in relation to themes such as space, movement, materiality and creativity, introduces key texts, helps decode difficult terms and provides quick reference for further reading.

Imperfect Health

Author: Margaret Campbell
Publisher: Lars Muller Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
'Imperfect Health' looks at the complexity of today's health problems juxtaposed with a variety of proposed architectural and urban solutions. Essays by Margaret Campbell, David Gissen, Carla C. Keirns, and Sarah Schrank deal with different aspects of the topic of health in the context of architecture.

Bhabha for Architects

Author: Felipe Hernandez
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135146632
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 155

Book Description
This introductory book, specifically for architects, focuses on the work of critic Homi K. Bhabha, who's work has been used as a means to analyse architectural practices in previously colonised contexts. This title reveals how his work contributes to architectural theory and the study of contemporary architectures in general, not only in colonial and postcolonial contexts.