Anthropology for Architects

Anthropology for Architects PDF Author: Ray Lucas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474241514
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
What can architects learn from anthropologists? This is the central question examined in Anthropology for Architects – a survey and exploration of the ideas which underpin the correspondence between contemporary social anthropology and architecture. The focus is on architecture as a design practice. Rather than presenting architectural artefacts as objects of the anthropological gaze, the book foregrounds the activities and aims of architects themselves. It looks at the choices that designers have to make – whether engaging with a site context, drawing, modelling, constructing, or making a post-occupancy analysis – and explores how an anthropological view can help inform design decisions. Each chapter is arranged around a familiar building type (including the studio, the home, markets, museums, and sacred spaces), in each case showing how anthropology can help designers to think about the social life of buildings at an appropriate scale: that of the individual life-worlds which make up the everyday lives of a building's users. Showing how anthropology offers an invaluable framework for thinking about complex, messy, real-world situations, the book argues that, ultimately, a truly anthropological architecture offers the potential for a more socially informed, engaged and sensitive architecture which responds more directly to people's needs. Based on the author's experience teaching as well as his research into anthropology by way of creative practice, this book will be directly applicable to students and researchers in architecture, landscape, urban design, and design anthropology, as well as to architectural professionals.

Anthropology for Architects

Anthropology for Architects PDF Author: Ray Lucas
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474241514
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
What can architects learn from anthropologists? This is the central question examined in Anthropology for Architects – a survey and exploration of the ideas which underpin the correspondence between contemporary social anthropology and architecture. The focus is on architecture as a design practice. Rather than presenting architectural artefacts as objects of the anthropological gaze, the book foregrounds the activities and aims of architects themselves. It looks at the choices that designers have to make – whether engaging with a site context, drawing, modelling, constructing, or making a post-occupancy analysis – and explores how an anthropological view can help inform design decisions. Each chapter is arranged around a familiar building type (including the studio, the home, markets, museums, and sacred spaces), in each case showing how anthropology can help designers to think about the social life of buildings at an appropriate scale: that of the individual life-worlds which make up the everyday lives of a building's users. Showing how anthropology offers an invaluable framework for thinking about complex, messy, real-world situations, the book argues that, ultimately, a truly anthropological architecture offers the potential for a more socially informed, engaged and sensitive architecture which responds more directly to people's needs. Based on the author's experience teaching as well as his research into anthropology by way of creative practice, this book will be directly applicable to students and researchers in architecture, landscape, urban design, and design anthropology, as well as to architectural professionals.

Architectural Anthropology

Architectural Anthropology PDF Author: Marie Stender
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000398382
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book prompts architects and anthropologists to think and act together. In order to fully grasp the relationship between human beings and their built environments and design more livable and sustainable buildings and cities in the future, we need new cross-disciplinary approaches combining anthropology and architecture. This is neither anthropology of architecture, nor ethnography for architects, but a new approach beyond these positions: Architectural Anthropology. The anthology gathers contributions from leading researchers from various Nordic universities, architectural schools, and architectural firms as well as prominent international scholars like Tim Ingold, Albena Yaneva, and Sarah Pink – all exploring, developing, and innovating the cross-disciplinary field between anthropology and architecture. Several contributions are co-written by architects and anthropologists, merging approaches from the two disciplines in order to fully explore the dynamics of lived space. Through a broad range of empirical examples, methodological approaches, and theoretical reflections, the anthology provides inspiration and tools for scholars, students, and practitioners working with lived space. The first part focusses on homes, walls, and boundaries, the second on urban space and public life, and the third on processes of creativity, participation, and design.

Architecture and Anthropology

Architecture and Anthropology PDF Author: Adam Jasper
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351106279
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Both architecture and anthropology emerged as autonomous theoretical disciplines in the 18th-century enlightenment. Throughout the 19th century, the fields shared a common icon—the primitive hut—and a common concern with both routine needs and ceremonial behaviours. Both could lay strong claims to a special knowledge of the everyday. And yet, in the 20th century, notwithstanding genre classics such as Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects or Paul Oliver’s Shelter, and various attempts to make architecture anthropocentric (such as Corbusier’s Modulor), disciplinary exchanges between architecture and anthropology were often disappointingly slight. This book attempts to locate the various points of departure that might be taken in a contemporary discussion between architecture and anthropology. The results are radical: post-colonial theory is here counterpoised to 19th-century theories of primitivism, archaeology is set against dentistry, fieldwork is juxtaposed against indigenous critique, and climate science is applied to questions of shelter. This publication will be of interest to both architects and anthropologists. The chapters in this book were originally published within two special issues of Architectural Theory Review.

Architects

Architects PDF Author: Thomas Yarrow
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501738518
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
What is creativity? What is the relationship between work life and personal life? How is it possible to live truthfully in a world of contradiction and compromise? These deep and deeply personal questions spring to the fore in Thomas Yarrow's vivid exploration of the life of architects. Yarrow takes us inside the world of architects, showing us the anxiety, exhilaration, hope, idealism, friendship, conflict, and the personal commitments that feed these acts of creativity. Architects rethinks "creativity," demonstrating how it happens in everyday practice. It highlights how the pursuit of good architecture, relates to the pursuit of a good life in intimate and individually specific ways. And it reveals the surprising and routine social negotiations through which designs and buildings are actually made.

Making

Making PDF Author: Tim Ingold
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136763678
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Making creates knowledge, builds environments and transforms lives. Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture are all ways of making, and all are dedicated to exploring the conditions and potentials of human life. In this exciting book, Tim Ingold ties the four disciplines together in a way that has never been attempted before. In a radical departure from conventional studies that treat art and architecture as compendia of objects for analysis, Ingold proposes an anthropology and archaeology not of but with art and architecture. He advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or ‘correspond’, with one another in the generation of form. Making offers a series of profound reflections on what it means to create things, on materials and form, the meaning of design, landscape perception, animate life, personal knowledge and the work of the hand. It draws on examples and experiments ranging from prehistoric stone tool-making to the building of medieval cathedrals, from round mounds to monuments, from flying kites to winding string, from drawing to writing. The book will appeal to students and practitioners alike, with interests in social and cultural anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art and design, visual studies and material culture.

Living House

Living House PDF Author: Roxana Waterson
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 146290601X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 624

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Book Description
The Living House is a pioneering work by respected anthropologist Roxana Waterson that has become a classic in its field. It is first book of its kind to present a detailed picture of houses within the complex social and symbolic fabric of indigenous South-East Asian peoples. The main focus of the book is on Indonesia, but in tracing historical links between architectural forms across the region, it reveals a much wider field of inquiry--covering all of the Austronesian peoples and cultures extending as far afield as Madagascar, Japan and the Pacific islands to New Zealand and Hawaii. As it probes the centrally significant role of houses within South-East Asian social systems, The Living House reveals new insights into the kinship systems, gender symbolism and cosmological principles of the peoples who build them, ultimately uncovering fundamental themes concerning the concepts of life force and life processes inherent in all of these cultures. A vivid picture is produced of how people shape buildings and buildings shape people--how rules about layout and spatial usage impact social relationships. The book concludes with a consideration of present-day changes affecting the fates of indigenous cultures and architectures throughout the region. This book will be of tremendous interest to architects and historians, and anyone interested in the indigenous art and cultures of South-East Asia.

The Construction of Equality

The Construction of Equality PDF Author: Jennifer Mack
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452955018
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An industrial city on the outskirts of Stockholm, Södertälje is the global capital of the Syriac Orthodox Christian diaspora, an ethnic and religious minority group fleeing persecution and discrimination in the Middle East. Since the 1960s, this Syriac community has transformed the standardized welfare state spaces of the city’s neighborhoods into its own “Mesopotälje,” defined by houses with Mediterranean and other international influences, a major soccer stadium, and massive churches and social clubs. Such projects have challenged principles of Swedish utopian architecture and planning that explicitly emphasized the erasure of difference. In The Construction of Equality, Jennifer Mack shows how Syriac-instigated architectural projects and spatial practices have altered the city’s built environment “from below,” offering a fresh perspective on segregation in the European modernist suburbs. Combining architectural, urban, and ethnographic tools through archival research, site work, participant observation (among residents, designers, and planners), and interviews, Mack provides a unique take on urban development, social change, and the immigrant experience in Europe over a fifty-year period. Her book shows how the transformation of space at the urban scale—the creation and evolution of commercial and social districts, for example—operates through the slow accumulation of architectural projects. As Mack demonstrates, these developments are not merely the result of the grassroots social practices usually attributed to immigrants but instead are officially approved through dialogues between residents and design professionals: accredited architects, urban planners, and civic bureaucrats. Mack attends to the tensions between the “enclavization” practices of a historically persecuted minority group, the integration policies of the Swedish welfare state and its planners, and European nativism.

Arthur Erickson

Arthur Erickson PDF Author: David Stouck
Publisher: D & M Publishers
ISBN: 1771000120
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1

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Book Description
Arthur Erickson, Canada's pre-eminent philosopher architect, was renowned internationally for his innovative approach to landscape, his genius for spatial composition, and his epic vision of architecture for people. Among his most celebrated large-scale works are three that helped to define Vancouver's urban landscape: Simon Fraser University, on Burnaby Mountain; the Robson Square complex at the heart of the city; and the exquisite Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Travel was key to Erickson's creative process; floating high above the clouds on extended airline flights, he made preliminary drawings on vellum with his fine-point black felt-tip pen, designing influential works not only for other parts of Canada-including Toronto's widely admired Roy Thomson Hall--but for sites in the U.S., Britain, and the Middle and Far East. Erickson worked chiefly in concrete, which he called "the marble of our times," and wherever they appear, his buildings move the spirit with their poetic freshness and their mission to inspire. But he was also a controversial figure, more than once attracting the ire of his fellow architects, and his professional achievements were tarnished by the excesses of a complicated personal life that resulted in a series of tawdry bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that recalls a Greek tragedy, Canada's great architect-a handsome, elegant man who lived like a millionaire and counted among his close friends Pierre Trudeau and Elizabeth Taylor-eventually became homeless and penniless. This first full biography of Erickson, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-four, traces the architect's life from its modest origins to his emergence on the world stage. Author David Stouck, acclaimed for his earlier biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross, demonstrates here once again why his work has been praised as imaginative, incisive and compelling. Grounded in interviews with Erickson and his family, friends and clients, as well as the resources of extensive public archives, TITLE is both an intimate portrait of the man and a stirring account of how Erickson made his buildings work. Beautifully written and superbly researched, it is also a provocative look at the phenomenon of cultural heroes and the nature of what we call "genius."

A Pattern Language

A Pattern Language PDF Author: Christopher Alexander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190050357
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 1216

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Book Description
You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Culture and Architecture

Culture and Architecture PDF Author: Leo Hanson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781516550708
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Culture and Architecture: An Integrated History is a brief survey of architectural history, from its pre-historic origins to the present day. It looks at the great works of architecture not only for their aesthetic values, but for their integral relationships with cultures and civilizations. Without their stories, history, and mythology, these monuments are merely brick, stone, mortar, and glass. Designed to be used in a single semester, but adaptable for a full year, Culture and Architecture is organized into five major time divisions that are introduced with a brief historical summary. Chapters begin with a timeline, and include photographs and drawings of the most important works during that period. Culture and Architecture is an ideal course book for students in foreign studies, art, anthropology, history, or anyone interested in architecture and culture. Leo Hansen is an adjunct professor in the School of Architecture, a department of the College of Design and Social Inquiry at Florida Atlantic University. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame (1978) and a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree from the University of Miami (2003), for which he received an Award of Academic Merit. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians and the American Institute of Architects.