Book picks similar to
On Altering Architecture by Fred Scott
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European Architecture 1750-1890
Barry Bergdoll - 2000
Never before had the functional requirements and expressive capacities of architecture been tested so thoroughly and with such diversity of invention. Bergdoll traces this experimentation in a broad range of contexts, focusing in particular on the relation of architectural design to new theories of history, new categories of scientific inquiry, and the broadening audience for architecture in this period of transformation. Unlike traditional surveys with long lists of buildings and architects, the themes are elucidated by in-depth coverage of key buildings which in turn are situated in both their local and European context.
Bauhaus
Jeannine Fiedler - 2000
As a school that strove to combine applied art with both the fine arts and technology, the Bauhaus movement has outlasted all other trends in architecture and design. This volume provides insight into the historical, cultural, philosophical, political and pedagogical background of the 1930s, when the Bauhaus was founded. It also portrays the famous Bauhaus directors and teachers and describes their signature pedagogical methods. Finally, the authors take readers inside Individual workshops, where they can discover for themselves the unique wealth of forms and ideas that remain the hallmark of Bauhaus products. Through its contributions to current discourse on the Bauhaus as a "fixed star of the avant-garde," its wealth of pictorial material (some of which has never before been published), as well as the rich variety of topics it addresses, this book offers a comprehensive look at one of the most significant institutions in the history of modern art and culture.
How Designers Think
Bryan Lawson - 1980
This extended work is the culmination of forty years' research and shows the belief that we all can, and do, design, and that we can learn to design better. The creative mind continues to have the power to surprise and this book aims to nurture and extend this creativity. Neither the earlier editions, nor this book, are intended as authoritative prescriptions of how designers should think but provide helpful advice on how to develop an understanding of design.In this fourth edition, Bryan Lawson continues to try and understand how designers think, to explore how they might be better educated and to develop techniques to assist them in their task. Some chapters have been revised and three completely new chapters added. The book is now intended to be read in conjunction with What Designers Know which is a companion volume. Some of the ideas previously discussed in the third edition of How Designers Think are now explored more thoroughly in What Designers Know. For the first time this fourth edition works towards a model of designing and the skills that collectively constitute the design process.
Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays
Adolf Loos - 1997
Most deal with questions of design in a wide range of areas, from architecture and furniture, to clothes and jewellery, pottery, plumbing, and printing; others are polemics on craft education and training, and on design in general. Loos, the great cultural reformer and moralist in the history of European architecture and design was always a 'revolutionary against the revolutionaries'. With his assault on Viennese arts and crafts and his conflict with bourgeois morality, he managed to offend the whole country. His 1908 essay 'Ornament and Crime', mocked by an age in love with its accessories, has come to be recognised as a seminal work in combating the aesthetic imperialism of the turn of the century. Today Loos is recognised as one of the great masters of modern architecture.
Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use & Avoid
Marianne Cusato - 2007
She presents the definitive guide to what makes houses look and feel right, revealing the dos and don'ts of livable home design. Hundreds of elegant line drawings--rendering the varieties of architectural features and displaying “avoid” and “use” versions of the same elements side by side--make this an indispensable resource for designing and building a timelessly beautiful home.
The Storm of Creativity
Kyna Leski - 2015
Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer's block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In this book, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process.Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm; it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us--if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion; it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions; only when we realize what we don't know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence--with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects--propelling the process. We perceive and conceive; we look ahead without knowing where we are going; we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaud�'s Sagrada Familia.Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.The Creative ProcessUnlearningProblem MakingGathering and TrackingPropellingPerceiving and ConceivingSeeing AheadConnectingPausingContinuing
Cities For A Small Planet
Richard Rogers - 1993
As the world’s population has grown, our cities have burgeoned, and their impact on the environment worsened. Meanwhile, from the isolated, gated communities within Houston and Los Angeles, to the millions of residents of Bombay living in squalor, the city has failed to serve its ideal function—as the cradle of civilization, the engine of culture, and the inspiration for community and citizenship. In Cities for a Small Planet, Sir Richard Rogers, one of the world’s leading architects and the designer of the Pompidou Center in Paris, demonstrates how future cities could provide the springboard for restoring humanity’s harmony with its environment.Rogers outlines the disastrous impact cities have had and will continue to have on our world, from waste-saturated Tokyo Bay, to the massive plumes of pollution caused by London’s traffic, to the depleted water resources of Mexico City. He traces these problems to the underlying social and cultural values that create them—unchecked commercial zeal, selfish individualism, and a lack of community. Bringing to bear concepts such as that of “open-minded” space—places within cities that serve multiple functions such as markets, parks, and sidewalk cafes—he explains how urban design can be used to give citizens a sense of shared experience. The city built with comfortable and safe public space can bring diverse groups together and breed a sense of tolerance, awareness, identity, and mutual respect. He calls for a new theoretical shift in the way cities do business and interact with the environment, arguing that many products come to market and are sold without figuring their social or environmental cost.Rogers goes on to describe the city of the future: one that is sustainable within its own environment; that can make a positive impact on its surroundings; that encourages communication among its citizens; that is compact and focused around neighborhoods; and that is beautiful, a city whose buildings and spaces spark the creative potential of its inhabitants.As our population grows larger, our planet grows smaller. Cities for a Small Planet is a passionate and eloquent blueprint for the cities we must create in response, cities that provide for the needs of both their residents and the earth on which they live.
This is Home: The Art of Simple Living
Natalie Walton - 2018
It's about living simply – finding the essence of what makes you happy at home and creating spaces that reflect your needs and style. Filled with clever ideas and creative spaces it shows that you don't need a huge budget to create a beautiful home. This is Home provides examples and case studies of places with a global and timeless feel that haven't always been renovated in the traditional sense but are true homes.Featuring eight case studies from Australia, the US and Europe, and nearly 200 color photographs, This is Home will inspire you with beautiful, authentic places you want to be – today.Chapters include:The big picture: how to determine your decorating personality, and what's authentic for you.Starting over: let go of the past and create a home for the person you are today, with a focus on decision-making and the art of editing.Living for now: Work out a budget for your time and money using your values as a guide. Where you can spend and save when it comes to creating lasting interiors.The Art of ingenuity: Think creatively, not expensively, when it comes to making changes at home. Going beyond the usual suspects can help you to create a home that's distinctively yours.The poetry of space: Successful spaces are all about addition and subtraction, positive and negative. How to create balance within a room while reflecting your decorating style.The feel of a home: Create interiors that make you feel, and have an emotional connection. How to introduce decorative elements that make for authentic interiors.Surrounding spaces: Key ideas to consider when creating your place in relation to its environment - from the surrounding landscape to local community.Maintaining the focus: Ways to evolve what's important for you and keep focussed on your aesthetic and lifestyle.Happy renewal: How to keep your home fresh without exhausting or expensive overhauls.Rest and revive: How our homes can function as a place to rest our bodies, rejoice in our relationships and restore our values.
Collage City
Colin Rowe - 1978
The authors, rejecting the grand utopian visions of total planning and total design, propose instead a collage city which can accommodate a whole range of utopias in miniature.
Theory and Design in the First Machine Age
Reyner Banham - 1980
It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
Justin McGuirk - 2014
From Brazil to Venezuela, and from Mexico to Argentina, McGuirk discovers the people and ideas shaping the way cities are evolving. Ever since the mid twentieth century, when the dream of modernist utopia went to Latin America to die, the continent has been a testing ground for exciting new conceptions of the city. An architect in Chile has designed a form of social housing where only half of the house is built, allowing the owners to adapt the rest; Medellín, formerly the world’s murder capital, has been transformed with innovative public architecture; squatters in Caracas have taken over the forty-five-story Torre David skyscraper; and Rio is on a mission to incorporate its favelas into the rest of the city. Here, in the most urbanised continent on the planet, extreme cities have bred extreme conditions, from vast housing estates to sprawling slums. But after decades of social and political failure, a new generation has revitalised architecture and urban design in order to address persistent poverty and inequality. Together, these activists, pragmatists and social idealists are performing bold experiments that the rest of the world may learn from.Radical Cities is a colorful journey through Latin America—a crucible of architectural and urban innovation.
Architecture Theory Since 1968
K. Michael Hays - 1998
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 general importance in intellectual discourse.This anthology presents forty-seven of the primary texts of architecture theory, introducing each with an explication of the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear here in English for the first time.ContributorsDiana Agrest, Stanford Anderson, Archizoom, George Baird, Jennifer Bloomer, Massimo Cacciari, Jean-Louis Cohen, Beatriz Colomina, Alan Colquhoun, Maurice Culot, Jacques Derrida, Ignasi de Sol�-Morales, Peter Eisenman, Robin Evans, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Frampton, Mario Gandelsonas, Frank Gehry, J�rgen Habermas, John Hejduk, Denis Hollier, Bernard Huet, Catherine Ingraham, Fredric Jameson, Charles A. Jencks, Jeffrey Kipnis, Fred Koetter, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Sanford Kwinter, Henri Lefebvre, Daniel Libeskind, Mary McLeod, Alberto P�rez-G�mez, Jos� Quetglas, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Massimo Scolari, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Segrest, Jorge Silvetti, Robert Somol, Martin Steinmann, Robert A. M. Stern, James Stirling, Manfredo Tafuri, Georges Teyssot, Bernard Tschumi, Anthony Vidler, Paul Virilio, Mark Wigley
A Dictionary of Color Combinations
Sanzo Wada - 2011
Wada was ahead of his time in developing traditional and Western influenced colour combinations, helping to lay the foundations for contemporary colour research. Based on his original 6-volume work from the 1930s, this book offers 348 color combinations, as attractive and sensuous as the books own design.
Lessons for Students in Architecture
Herman Hertzberger - 1991
It presents a broad spectrum of subjects and designs, with practical experience and evaluation of the use of these buildings serving as a leitmotif. This immensely successful book has gone through many reprints and has also been published in Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Taiwanese, Dutch, Greek, Chinese, French, Polish and Persian. More than 750 illustrations give a broad insight into Hertzberger's 'library' and a stimulating impression of the influences and sources of inspiration of one of the Netherlands' major postwar architects.
The Situationist City
Simon Sadler - 1998
From 1957 to 1972 the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement's broadside attack on establishment institutions and values left its mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. But over time it tended to obscure Situationism's own founding principles. In this book, Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of Situationist thought, particularly as they applied to the form of the modern city.According to the Situationists, the benign professionalism of architecture and design had led to a sterilization of the world that threatened to wipe out any sense of spontaneity or playfulness. The Situationists hankered after the pioneer spirit of the modernist period, when new ideas, such as those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, still felt fresh and vital.By the late fifties, movements such as British and American Pop Art and French Nouveau Ralisme had become intensely interested in everyday life, space, and mass culture. The SI aimed to convert this interest into a revolution--at the level of the city itself. Their principle for the reorganization of cities was simple and seductive: let the citizens themselves decide what spaces and architecture they want to live in and how they wish to live in them. This would instantly undermine the powers of state, bureaucracy, capital, and imperialism, thereby revolutionizing people's everyday lives.Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind. The book is divided into three parts. The first, The Naked City, outlines the Situationist critique of the urban environment as it then existed. The second, Formulary for a New Urbanism, examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living. The third, A New Babylon, describes actual designs proposed for a Situationist City.