Understanding Architecture by
Intended both as an introductory text for students and professionals in the field as well as an accessible read for the general public, Primer on Architecture (working title) addresses the basic principles of architecture and uncovers its ongoing influence in contemporary culture. The volume is organized in a series of chapters based on key architectural themes--space, time, matter, gravity, light, silence, dwelling, ritual, memory, landscape, and place--with an introductory essay for each chapter that includes a wide variety of historical examples from around the world followed by more in depth analyses of key buildings that further exemplify the theme of a particular chapter. By combining a broad historical sweep with a jargon-free architectural study of space and the direct experience of architecture, this volume will be a unique introduction to architecture as a timeless and enduring art.
Architecture Design Notebook by
Architecture Design Notebook focuses on the process of design as pragmatic and non-theoretical. Dealing systematically with the core design curriculum, it clearly demonstrates the skills required for designing at undergraduate level. Providing students with fundamental maxims of design, and a framework within which they can approach their work, this book supports undergraduates as they learn to produce solutions to design challenges. This vital design companion underpins the cornerstone of an architectural undergraduates' studies - studio design projects. With over 100 sketches included, the book inspires student's design ideas. This updated edition includes new sections on green architecture, urban space typology, and the virtual building. A. Peter Fawcett is an architect and critic who combines teaching with sporadic practice; he is currently Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Nottingham and visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln. In recent years his work has been placed in architectural competitions and has been hung at the Royal Academy and Royal Ulster Academy.
The Architecture Portfolio Guidebook by
The Architecture Portfolio Guidebook shows you how to make portfolios for both academic and professional needs to provide reviewers exactly what they're looking for. In school, architecture curricula nurture the knowledge and skills to develop design work to varying levels of presentation. In the profession, those skills are further developed and applied in the creation of the built environment. In both contexts, a portfolio is a core component for admission and advancement. This book provides key strategies to: * develop an understanding of the unique needs of professional and academic organizations; * identify applicants' key differentiators; * highlight how applicants present themselves in their portfolios to address institutional needs; * create successful reinforcing documentation; * communicate using portfolios. Rather than proposing generic solutions, this book details the successful practices for portfolio creation by addressing portfolio creation academically and professionally. Supporting insights and examples from leading academics and architects from around the world reinforce the themes presented in this guidebook. An ideal read for students and professionals of architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, and urban design, looking to advance their studies and careers.
Fundamental Concepts of Architecture by
Architecture is an experience - with the intellect and with all our senses, in motion, and in use. But in order to actually discuss and assess it with relevance, a clarification of terms is essential in order to avoid the vagueness that often prevails when talking about architecture. This dictionary provides a vocabulary that allows the architecture discourse to go beyond the declaration of constructive relationships or the description of architectonic forms in familiar terms like "roof," "base," "wall," and "axis" or "proportion". The point is to describe the experience of architecture: how exactly does it contribute to the experience of a situation? For instance, the staging of an entrance situation, or the layout and visitor routes through a museum. From "context," through "guidance," "readability," "patina," "spatial structure," "symmetry" and "tectonics," to "width" (and "narrowness") or "window," the most important terms in architectural language are explained precisely and in detail.
Welcome to Your World by
One of the nation's chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world's best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people's experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America's population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction--almost all in urban areas--that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.
Snarkitecture by
The first monograph on Snarkitecture, a New York-based collaborative and innovative design studio with an introduction by Maria Cristina Didero Fast becoming one of the world's most sought-after studios, Snarkitecture has designed installations, architecture, products, and furniture for a diverse range of clients including COS, Kith, Calvin Klein, the New Museum, Kartell, and Beats by Dr. Dre. This book presents more than 70 of their projects and investigates how its founders, artist Daniel Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen, work at the interface between their disciplines to come up with some of the most beguiling and fascinating designs seen in recent years.
Architecture Beyond Experience by
Architecture Beyond Experience is a work in the service of one goal: the bringing about of a more relational, "posthuman" and yet humanist strain in architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much architectural production (and the larger economy's too), which is the making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences. The result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around it. The book argues that it's time to find a deeper basis for making and judging architecture, a basis which is not personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational from the start. It uses the word relational to describe an architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are beings. When architecture, they teach as well as protect; they tell us who we were and who we want to be; they exemplify, they deserve respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are social-relational values, values that both underlie and go beyond experiential ones (sometimes called "phenomenological"). Such relational values have been suppressed, in part because architects have joined the Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-center a profession.
Architecture Matters by
An illuminating introduction to the influence of architecture on the world, the environment, and human lives Architecture matters. It matters to cities, the planet, and human lives. How architects design and what they build has an impact that usually lasts for generations. The more we understand architecture--the deeper we probe the decisions and designs that go into making a building--the better our world becomes. Aaron Betsky, architect, author, curator, former museum director, and currently the dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, guides readers into the rich and complex world of contemporary architecture. Combining his early experiences as an architect with his extensive experience as a jury member selecting the world's most prominent and cutting-edge architects to build icons for cities, Betsky possesses rare insight into the mechanisms, politics, and personalities that play a role in how buildings in our societies and urban centers come to be. In approximately fifty themes, drawing on his inside knowledge of the architectural world, he explores a broad spectrum of topics, from the meaning of domestic space to the spectacle of the urban realm. Accessible, instructive, and hugely enjoyable, Why Architecture Matters will open the eyes of anyone dreaming of becoming an architect, and will bring a wry smile to anyone who already is.
Architecture by
THE CLASSIC ARCHITECTURAL REFERENCE, UPDATED WITH CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES AND INTERACTIVE RESOURCES For more than forty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has served as the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated and revised Fourth Edition features the fundamental elements of space and form and is designed to encourage critical thought in order to promote a more evocative understanding of architecture. Architecture: Form, Space, and Order distills complex concepts of design into a clear focus and brings difficult abstractions to life. The book explains form and space in relation to light, view, openings, and enclosures and explores the organization of space, and the elements and relationships of circulation, as well as proportion and scale. In addition, the text's detailed illustrations demonstrate the concepts presented and reveal the relationships between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultures. This edition includes an access card with a redemption code for the online Interactive Resource Center, which features thirty-five animations, flashcards of key architectural terms, and an image gallery showcasing hundreds of photos that enrich the book's content.
Radical Housing by
Radical Housing explores the planning, technical, financial, health-based and social background for developing multi-generational homes and co-living. Abundantly illustrated with case studies and plans from projects across the UK and abroad, this book inform sand inspires the delivery of alternative approaches to affordable and flexible housing, and is an essential text for architecture practitioners, students, and community groups.
Model Making for Architects by
Model making is a beautiful and skilful craft, and architectural model making is a vital part of the building process. The architectural model is often the first time that a building is visualized in 3D. It can capture the excitement of the architect's vision but can also reveal unforeseen difficulties.
Floor Plan Manual Housing by
The Floor Plan Manual Housing has for decades been a seminal work in the field of architecture. In its 5th, revised and expanded edition, approximately 160 international housing projects built after 1945 are documented and analyzed. The focus is on exemplary and transferrable projects, and on innovative and trendsetting concepts. The systematic representation of all projects allows the reader to compare and evaluate various floor plans - and to be inspired by the wealth of ideas and strategies for one's own design work. The introductory theoretical and historical essays have been newly written or updated, and offer a structured overview of the residential housing typology and its development.
What Can a Body Do? by
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets--nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider--or reconsider--the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it--from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture--Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body's stunning capacity for adaptation--rather than a rigid insistence on "normalcy"--look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.
Typology+ by
typology+ documents and analyzes roughly one hundred international housing structures. It uses diagrammatic drawings to elaborate a broad and varied range of residential types and present them systematically. In the process, it examines variants under the categories of access, space (ground plan and open space), and morphology, supplemented by detailed typological descriptions and the elaboration of the special qualities of each individual type. More general essays draw connections between the housing types and twentieth-century reference projects. All of the projects are newly drawn to uniform standards; every project is presented with its ground plan drawn to a scale of 1:200. Site maps, sections, elevations, and photographs illuminate the urban setting, the building structure and design, and the spatial and functional qualities of each residential structure. Thus, typology+ not only offers a broad range of sustainable approaches to apartment block construction, but also possibilities for using and transforming them in a practical planning context.
Living Complex by
Our cities are atrophying: What was once an open system inhabitable by all and that was about freedom and self-determination is becoming a zone in which architecture focuses only on comfort and security: a walk-in investment portfolio of luxury properties, offices and token patches of green. The masses, meanwhile, continue to live in the endless housing developments of the suburbs. Accommodation is characterised by a mania for barricades and comfort. The construction industry is booming - and builds the same houses over and over again. But do those buildings have anything to do with the way in which most people want to live today, considering dramatic demographic, technological and social change? Where does the dream of the detached house come from? Which ideal form of living are we taught by children's books, lifestyle magazines and DIY shops? Who benefits from us living the way we live? Niklas Maak shows how the interests of the construction industry, overextended policies mired in regulations and the habits of planners prevent us from rethinking construction, living arrangements and the city. This humorous, controversial and very well researched book is a precise economic analysis of the architectural world, a brilliant cultural history of living arrangements and a political manifesto for a new kind of architecture.
Houses by
The world's most innovative and influential architect-designed houses created since the early 20th century Throughout history, houses have presented architects the world over with infinite opportunities to experiment with new methods and materials for domestic living. Houses: Extraordinary Livingcelebrates the incredible diversity and beauty of the house as never before, from Modernist icons to feats of technological, material, and spatial innovation in the 21st century. Explore the creative imaginations of hundreds of internationally renowned architects past and present, as well as dozens of awe-inspiring houses by lesser-known and emerging talents.
Notations by
For Bernard Tschumi, "drawing is thinking" and "being with a piece of paper and a pen does not feel like working. It can be sheer bliss", he writes, "seeing thought materialise itself in front of your eyes through the almost unconscious mediation of your hand. It is a form of notation of the mind." This collection of previously unpublished drawings, diagrams, and other remnants of the architectural process provides new insight into well-known projects like the Parc de la villette and the New Acropolis Museum, as well as tracing a number of unbuilt pr oposals and speculations. Notations (Diagrams & Sequences) offers a unique view into the working process of Bernard Tschumi and his office.
Rescue and Reuse by
Historic buildings and places play an essential role in the everyday lives of the people of the UK, their cultural identity and the economy. They can inspire creativity and enterprise, bring communities together, and make people happier about where they live. This book explores how historic buildings across the UK have been brought back to life through the technical and enabling skills, creativity and sensitivity of architects. Exemplar projects explored through richly illustrated case studies demonstrate the value to society of re-using historic buildings and will inspire a new generation of architects to get involved with community heritage projects at a time of great opportunity. Drawing on interviews with architects and their community clients, this book explores the challenges that they face, how they are overcome, and the benefits that follow.
Housing+ by
High-quality residential structures are much more than merely a series of different floor plans. First and foremost, the urban apartment house mediates between the private refuge and the public space of the city. In the process, boundaries between inside and outside are negotiated on a wide variety of scales. Housing+ focuses on investigating spatial and architectural as well as social and communicative interfaces in residential construction. The publication is divided into four chapters - "Urban Planning," "The Ground Floor," "Building Structure," and "Façade" - to which sixty-seven international projects are assigned. These four thematic focuses are discussed comprehensively in the essays that introduce the chapters, and the individual projects are analyzed in brief under these same aspects. Comparable plans--drawn especially for this book--supplement the typological descriptions. The broad spectrum of projects selected covers urban apartment block construction from towers, block structures, row houses, and gaps between buildings, to housing complexes in outlying urban areas.
The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture by
Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of "pure," but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an "archipelago" of site-specific interventions.
The Architecture of Happiness by
The Architecture of Happiness is Alain de Botton''s exploration of the hidden links between buildings and our well being.
In The Architecture of Happiness, bestselling author Alain de Botton explores one of our most intense but often hidden love affairs- with our houses and their furnishings. He asks-
What makes a house truly beautiful?
Why are many new houses so ugly?
Why do we argue so bitterly about sofas and pictures - and can differences of taste ever be satisfactorily resolved?
To answer these questions and many more, de Botton looks at buildings across the world, from medieval wooden huts to modern skyscrapers; he examines sofas and cathedrals, tea sets and office complexes, and teases out a host of often surprising philosophical insights. The Architecture of Happiness will take you on a beguiling tour through the history and psychology of architecture and interior design, and will change the way you look at your home.
Form and Structure in Interior Architecture by
Form and Structure in Interior Architecture examines the basic ideas that underpin the design of interior space- From the establishment of a relationship between the existing building and the new components that inhabit it, to the design and positioning of significant elements within the space itself. Through a series of groundbreaking case studies from around the world, this book proposes a method of analysis, understanding and exploitation of the existing building. Studies of contemporary work engage and stimulate, while clear diagrams and explanations allow students to understand and relate to the works in the context of architecture and interiors as a wider field. The second edition includes a new chapter on sustainable interior architecture. This brings the book up to date by covering current thinking about the importance of sustainability in architectural design.
Context and Environment by
Basics Interior Architecture 02- Context & Environment proposes a method of design based on the interpretation, evaluation and utilization of physical factors, such as light and orientation, the contextual issues of the urban form and the subject of sustainability. It examines the ways each of these factors influences the form of the interior. The text is supported by detailed studies of contemporary work, alongside activities and resources.
Digital Monuments by
Digital Monuments radically explodes "iconic architecture" of the new millennium and its hijacking of the public imagination via the digital image. Hallucinatory constructions such as Rem Koolhaas's CCTV headquarters in Beijing, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Zaha Hadid's Performing Arts Centre in Abu Dhabi are all introduced to the world by immortal digital imagery that floods the internet--yet comes to haunt the actualised buildings. Like holograms, these "digital monuments," which violently push physics and engineering to their limits, flicker eerily between the real and the unreal--invoking fantasies of omnipotence, immortality and utopian cities. But this experience of iconic architecture as a digital dream on the ground conceals from the urban spectator the social reality of the buildings and the rigidity of their ideology. In 18 micro-essays, Digital Monuments exposes the stereotypes of iconic architecture while depicting the savagery of the industry, from the Greek and Spanish crises triggered by financialised iconic development to mass labour-deaths on construction sites in the UAE.
Caruso St John, 2013 2019 : la cualidad física del espacio = the physical quality of space by 
Domesticity at war by
In the immediate postwar years, a new type of modern architecture emerges. Beatriz Colomina presents domesticity as a potent new weapon in a changed architectural battlefield. This architecture becomes the property of the middle-class consumer bombarded with images of domestic bliss, a lifestyle campaign launched through recycled military techniques. The significance of architects like Charles and Ray Eames lies in their sensitivity to buildings and images both defining space. Colomina is Director of Princeton University's Architecture PhD program and acclaimed author of Privacy and Publicity and Sexuality and Space.
The Culture of Building by
The Culture of Building describes how the built world, including the vast number of buildings that are the settings for people's everyday lives, is the product of building cultures--complex systems of people, relationships, building types, techniques, and habits in which design and buildingare anchored. These cultures include builders, bankers, architects, developers, clients, contractors, craftspeople, building inspectors, planners, and many others. The product of these cultures, which operate building after building, is the built world of cities and settlements. In this book, HowardDavis uses historical, contemporary, and cross-cultural examples to describe the nature and influence of these cultures. He shows how building cultures reflect the general cultures in which they exist, how they have changed over history, how they affect the form of buildings and cities, and howpresent building cultures, which are responsible for the contemporary everyday environments, may be improved. Following the development of the idea of building cultures using several historical examples, the book lays out a framework that puts such topics as craft and professionalism, the vernacularand nonvernacular, and design and construction in common frameworks. Although the book ranges widely over different cultures and historical periods, it emphasizes the transformations that took place in architecture and building practice from the late eighteenth century to the present. Finally, thebook uses a series of contemporary examples that demonstrate the building culture as a living concept. These examples, which include built work as well as innovative processes that go beyond the work of architects alone, are described as the seeds that can help the emergence of a better build world.This beautiful book features over 260 color and black-and-white illustrations, most from the author's extensive collection of slides, and includes photographs, prints, and drawings from historical archives and contemporary architectural offices.
S, M, L, XL by
S,M,L,XLpresents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society. The book's title is also its framework: projects and essays are arranged according to scale. While Small and Medium address issues ranging from the domestic to the public, Large focuses on what Koolhaas calls "the architecture of Bigness." Extra-Large features projects at the urban scale, along with the important essay "What Ever Happened to Urbanism?" and other studies of the contemporary city. Running throughout the book is a "dictionary" of an adventurous new Koolhaasian language -- definitions, commentaries, and quotes from hundreds of literary, cultural, artistic, and architectural sources.
Hans Scharoun and the Development of Small Apartment Floor Plans by
Built between 1954 and 1959, Stuttgart's Romeo and Julia tower blocks defied the staggering banality of postwar German housing with bold colors and jagged triangular balconies. Designed by Hans Scharoun (1893-1972) toward the end of a career dedicated to experimentation and the development of a new and democratic style of architecture, Romeo and Julia constitute the most daring and original attempts to recalibrate the "dwelling process." Drawing on a vast trove of previously unpublished materials held in the archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Markus Peter and Ulrike Tillmann offer unprecedented insight into Scharoun's design process. His writings and lectures of several decades show him weaving together the diverse strands of research that were to form the basis for his floor plans. Inherently curious and undeterred by contradictions and complexity, Scharoun was unflagging in his efforts to build on his understanding of what housing is about. Romeo and Julia, with their innovative and socially responsive organization of space, thus mark the culmination of the architect's profound and long-standing engagement with a fundamental human need. Alongside reproductions of original plans and drawings, the book features copious excerpts from Scharoun's unpublished writings, as well as newly commissioned photographs by Swiss architectural photographer Georg Aerni that capture the towers' expressive presence.
Mimesis by
Mimesis is a polemical monograph that presents the creative processes of one of London's most critically acclaimed architectural practices in its theoretical and cultural context. The work of Lynch architects is remarkably diverse for a relatively small practice, ranging from large urban buildings to product design and academic research. Essays by Patrick Lynch, Peter Carl and Alexandra Stara situate the practice's recent buildings in London's Victoria Street alongside their earlier projects within a tradition of decorum and urban depth. The texts establish the continuing relevance of the classical concept of mimesis in modern culture, and reveal the communicative role that memory, history and typology play in the contemporary architectural imagination. Mimesis also explores the vital role that physical creative work and craft play in design, recovering the critical grounds for a poetics of Civic Architecture.The book also foregrounds Lynch Architects' collaborative practice with artists and designers including Rut Blees Luxemburg and Timorous Beasties. Also featured are some of the practices' early celebrated works such as Marsh View, Norfolk.
Jutaku: Japanese Houses by
Quirky, surprising and entertaining - with more than 400 houses, Jutaku is architecture at the speed of Japan. Frenetic. Pulsating. Disorienting. Japan's contemporary culture is constantly in flux. In stark contrast to the centuries old imperial architecture of Kyoto, recent Japanese architectural practices have ushered in an era of continuous experimentation. With 500 houses, one house per page, one image per house, Jutaku: Japanese Housesis a fast-paced, "quick hit" shock to the system that shines a Harajuku-bright neon light on the sheer volume, variety and novelty of contemporary Japanese residential architecture. Featuring the work of many of Japan's most famous architects including Shigeru Ban, Sou Fujimoto, Toyo Ito, Kengo Kuma, Jun Igarishi, Shuhei Endo and dozens of up and coming and completely unknown young architects, Jutakuis organized geographically taking readers on a bullet train journey across Japan's architectural landscape. Essential reading for architects, designers and fans of contemporary Japanese culture.
Inside out by
Founded in 2004 by Koichi Suzuno and Shinya Kamuro, Torafu Architects works extensively within a broad scope on a diverse range of products, from architectural to interior design, exhibition and spatial installations, product design, and film-making. The projects are free from the hierarchy of cities, architecture, furniture, and things, undertaken with the view that everything is equal. This collection presents 47 works, including the most recent, and enables us to gain an appreciation of their future potential, which continues to create new value. Past works, born from the offices distinctive perspective and ideas, have been reworked based on the eight keywords they value.
Buckminster Fuller Inc by
Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (12/71895 - 1/7/1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. He published more than 30 books, coining or popularising terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularised the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. (Wikipedia) 'Bucky Inc.' offers a deep exploration of Richard Buckminster Fuller's work and thought to shed new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world. It shows that Fuller's entire career was a multi-dimensional reflection on the architecture of radio. He always insisted that the real site of architecture is the electromagnetic spectrum. His buildings were delicate mobile instruments for accessing the invisible universe of overlapping signals. Every detail was understood as a way of tuning into hidden waves. Architecture was built in, with, for and as radio. 'Bucky Inc.' rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth-century. It draws extensively on Fuller's archive to follow his radical thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastic to prosthetics, and data to deep-space. It shows how the critical arguments and material techniques of arguably the single most exposed designer of the last century were overlooked at the time but have become urgently relevant today. 150 illustrations
Thinking Architecture by
Architecture that is meant to have a sensuous connection to life calls for thinking that goes far beyond form and construction. In his texts, Peter Zumthor articulates what motivates him to design his buildings, which appeal to the visitor's heart and mind in so many different ways and possess a compelling and unmistakable presence and aura. Now in its third edition, this book has been expanded to include two new essays: ,,Architecture and Lanscape" deals with the relationship between the structure and its surroundings, with the secret of the successful placement and topographical integration of architecture. In ,,The Leis Houses", Peter Zumthor describes the genesis of two wooden houses in the town of Leis in the Swiss canton of Graubünden, thus thematizing the special challenge of integrating contemporary architecture into a traditional architectural context.
