A Moment in Architecture

A Moment in Architecture PDF Author: Gautam Bhatia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
For the uninitiated, looking at Indian architecture is like viewing a forest. Obscured by the profusion, at first the eye sees only dense vegetation, in a state of confusion, conflict and chaos. Only when the focus narrows to a single tree, a shrub, a blade of grass, does the forest s variety become discernible and an order emerges. Behind the unseemly mess of an Indian city, behind Mughal portals and inside step wells, in old mountain houses and dark temple interiors, lies another picture of Indian architecture. The author of this book, an architect himself, takes the reader on a personal journey through its labyrinths, providing insights into structures that dot our lives. He casts his gaze sometimes lovingly, sometimes despairingly on buildings as diverse as the stone citadel of Jaisalmer, Rashtrapati Bhavan and the facades of Greater Kailash, on a step well at Adalaj, a Corbusier church, a Frank Lloyd Wright house. In so doing, he lays bare ideas and facts about these buildings, while reflecting on the sensory and meditative qualities of experiencing each of them. Written from the vantage point of a practising professional, the book is an intimate autobiography of architecture.A Delhi-based practising architect, Gautam Bhatia graduated in Fine Arts and did his postgraduation in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of several national and international awards for his architectural work and writings.. . . The sparkle of the writing is shadowed throughout by architectural drawings, a few photographs, quick sketches of buildings and, intriguingly, a range of drawings . . . recording bitter-sweet fantasies of the distortion, destruction and demise of architecture.Inside Outside

A Moment in Architecture

A Moment in Architecture PDF Author: Gautam Bhatia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the uninitiated, looking at Indian architecture is like viewing a forest. Obscured by the profusion, at first the eye sees only dense vegetation, in a state of confusion, conflict and chaos. Only when the focus narrows to a single tree, a shrub, a blade of grass, does the forest s variety become discernible and an order emerges. Behind the unseemly mess of an Indian city, behind Mughal portals and inside step wells, in old mountain houses and dark temple interiors, lies another picture of Indian architecture. The author of this book, an architect himself, takes the reader on a personal journey through its labyrinths, providing insights into structures that dot our lives. He casts his gaze sometimes lovingly, sometimes despairingly on buildings as diverse as the stone citadel of Jaisalmer, Rashtrapati Bhavan and the facades of Greater Kailash, on a step well at Adalaj, a Corbusier church, a Frank Lloyd Wright house. In so doing, he lays bare ideas and facts about these buildings, while reflecting on the sensory and meditative qualities of experiencing each of them. Written from the vantage point of a practising professional, the book is an intimate autobiography of architecture.A Delhi-based practising architect, Gautam Bhatia graduated in Fine Arts and did his postgraduation in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of several national and international awards for his architectural work and writings.. . . The sparkle of the writing is shadowed throughout by architectural drawings, a few photographs, quick sketches of buildings and, intriguingly, a range of drawings . . . recording bitter-sweet fantasies of the distortion, destruction and demise of architecture.Inside Outside

Architecture

Architecture PDF Author: Isabel Kühl
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN: 9783791346540
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From the pyramids to the Guggenheim Museum, discover how these groundbreaking strucktures changed the course of architecture through the ages. Architecture evolves in response to man's technological advances and environmental demands. Driven by these developments, architects can be seen as the most innovative of artists. Identifies the most important advancements in the field of architecture, and demonstrates how these innovations influenced the development of architecture. Chapters focus on topics such as monuments to the dead and places of worship; domes; pillars and arches; towers from Pisa to Eiffel; stadia and theaters; palaces and skyscrapers.

A Second Modernism

A Second Modernism PDF Author: Arindam Dutta
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 026201985X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An account of architecture's postwar ambition to transform itself into a research-oriented and technologically complex discipline of design expertise. After World War II, a second modernism emerged in architecture—an attempt, in architectural scholar Joan Ockman's words, “to transform architecture from a 'soft' aesthetic discipline into a 'hard,' objectively verifiable field of design expertise.” Architectural thought was influenced by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, cybernetic, and other urban and behavioral models, as well as systems-based and artificial intelligence theories. This nearly 1,000-page book examines the “techno-social” turn in architecture, taking MIT's School of Architecture and Planning as its exemplar. In essays and interviews, prominent architectural historians and educators examine the postwar “research-industrial” complex, its attendant cult of expertise, and its influence on life and letters both in America and abroad. Paying particular attention to the ways that technological thought affected the culture of the humanities, the social sciences, and architectural design, the book traces this shift toward complexity as it unfolded, from classroom practices to committee deliberations, from the challenges of research to the vicissitudes of funding. Looking closely at the ways that funded research drew academics towards a “problem-solving” and relevance-seeking mentality and away from the imported Bauhaus model of intuition and aesthetics, the book reveals how linguistics, information sciences, operations research, computer technology, and systems theory became part of architecture's expanded toolkit. This is a history not just of a school of architecture but of the research-oriented era itself. It offers a thoroughgoing exploration of the ways that policies, politics, and pedagogy transformed themselves in accord with the exponential growth of institutional power.

Mental Architecture: Building The Mind One Moment At A Time

Mental Architecture: Building The Mind One Moment At A Time PDF Author: Howard Blumenfeld
Publisher: Bay Company Books, Incorporated
ISBN: 9780578556468
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This book explores the true nature of reality and brain-based experience in a dynamic and diverse world. We unravel the mysteries behind your conscious mind, including the tendency to see faces in inanimate objects, the subjective nature of time perception, and the significant limitations mathematical models and measurement systems impose in accurately describing the world around us. We also examine the physical and social challenges imposed by different perspectives and challenge the notion of objectivity. The discussion then turns further inward with a focus on what it means to be "normal" and if it is possible to have a stable identity in a body subject to the continual forces of aging and time. Every decision we make is called into question, leaving us to wonder what choices we have control over and which ones we do not. There are powerful messages of hope and humanity throughout the book, with a direct embrace of individuality, diversity, and natural beauty. Anyone who reads it will discover a renewed sense of self and purpose, and will never look at the world or themselves in the same way.

Elements of Architecture

Elements of Architecture PDF Author: Rem Koolhaas
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836556149
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 2528

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Book Description
"Une mine d'or à parcourir encore et toujours, un de ces livres qui fournira aux bâtisseurs actuels et futurs de notre monde tout le savoir dont ils ont besoin pour aborder les questions actuelles et celles auxquelles ils seront confrontés". ArchDaily Architecture is a compelling mixture of stability and flux. In its solid forms, time and space collide, amalgamating distant influences, elements that have been around for over 5, 000 years and others that were (re-)invented yesterday. Elements of Architecture focuses on the fragments of the rich and complex architectural collage. Window, facade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, stair, escalator, elevator : The book seeks to excavate the micro-narratives of building detail. The result is no single history, but rather the web of origins, contaminations, similarities, and differences in architectural evolution, including the influence of technological advances, climactic adaptation, political calculation, economic contexts, regulatory requirements, and new digital regimes. Derived from Koolhaas' exhaustive and much-lauded exhibition at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, this is an essential toolkit to understanding the pieces, parts, and fundamentals that comprise structure around the globe. Designed by Irma Boom, the book contains essays from Rem Koolhaas, Stephan Trueby, Manfredo di Robilant, and Jeffrey Inaba; interviews with Werner Sobek and Tony Fadell (of Nest); and an exclusive photo essay by Wolfgang Tillmans.

Imagining the Modern

Imagining the Modern PDF Author: Rami el Samahy
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN: 1580935230
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Imagining the Modern explores Pittsburgh's ambitious modern architecture and urban renewal program that made it a gem of American postwar cities, and set the stage for its stature today. In the 1950s and '60s an ambitious program of urban revitalization transformed Pittsburgh and became a model for other American cities. Billed as the Pittsburgh Renaissance, this era of superlatives--the city claimed the tallest aluminum clad building, the world's largest retractable dome, the tallest steel structure--developed through visionary mayors and business leaders, powerful urban planning authorities, and architects and urban designers of international renown, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, Mies van der Rohe, SOM, and Harrison & Abramovitz. These leaders, civic groups, and architects worked together to reconceive the city through local and federal initiatives that aimed to address the problems that confronted Pittsburgh's postwar development. Initiated as an award-winning exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2014, Imagining the Modern untangles this complicated relationship with modern architecture and planning through a history of Pittsburgh's major sites, protagonists, and voices of intervention. Through original documentation, photographs and drawings, as well as essays, analytical drawings, and interviews with participants, this book provides a nuanced view of this crucial moment in Pittsburgh's evolution. Addressing both positive and negative impacts of the era, Imagining the Modern examines what took place during the city's urban renewal era, what was gained and lost, and what these histories might suggest for the city's future.

Automatic Architecture

Automatic Architecture PDF Author: Sean Keller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649652X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
In the 1960s and ’70s, architects, influenced by recent developments in computing and the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist thinking, began to radically rethink how architecture could be created. Though various new approaches gained favor, they had one thing in common: they advocated moving away from the traditional reliance on an individual architect’s knowledge and instincts and toward the use of external tools and processes that were considered objective, logical, or natural. Automatic architecture was born. The quixotic attempts to formulate such design processes extended modernist principles and tried to draw architecture closer to mathematics and the sciences. By focusing on design methods, and by examining evidence at a range of scales—from institutions to individual buildings—Automatic Architecture offers an alternative to narratives of this period that have presented postmodernism as a question of style, as the methods and techniques traced here have been more deeply consequential than the many stylistic shifts of the past half century. Sean Keller closes the book with an analysis of the contemporary condition, suggesting future paths for architectural practice that work through, but also beyond, the merely automatic.

The Architect

The Architect PDF Author: Francesca Hughes
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581653
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of womento the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction ofthe orders that pervade architectural production and consumption. At a moment when the architectural profession is beginning to shift from its traditionally male domination, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice examines how the introduction of women to the main body of architecture might bring about a reconstruction of the orders that pervade architectural production and consumption. In a collection of autobiographical essays in which practice is both the site and the vehicle for change, twelve American and European architects reflect on the nature of critical practice and its relation to architecture. The contributors were chosen not only for the distinguished quality of their work, but also for the range of architectural practices they collectively encompass--from the intersection of theory and philosophy to the intersection of building process and industry. Together, they present a compelling and provocative critique of architectural culture. All show a willingness to transgress the various mediums and territories of architecture, to recover and reopen certain discussions lost in the architectural discourse they have inherited.

Horror in Architecture

Horror in Architecture PDF Author: Joshua Comaroff
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452970254
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
A new edition of this extensive visual analysis of horror tropes and their architectural analogues Horror in Architecture presents an unflinching look at how horror genre tropes manifest in the built environment. Spanning the realms of art, design, literature, and film, this newly revised and expanded edition compiles examples from all areas of popular culture to form a visual anthology of the architectural uncanny. Rooted in the Romantic and Gothic treatment of horror as a serious aesthetic category, Horror in Architecture establishes incisive links between contemporary horror media and its parallel traits found in various architectural designs. Through chapters dedicated to distorted and monstrous buildings, abandoned spaces, extremes of scale, and other structural peculiarities, and featuring new essays on insurgent natures, blobs, and architectural puppets, this volume brings together diverse architectural anomalies and shows how their unsettling effects deepen our fascination with the unreal. Intended for both horror fans and students of visual culture, Horror in Architecture turns a unique lens on the relationship between the human body and the artificial landscapes it inhabits. Extensively illustrated with photographs, film stills, and diagrams, this book retrieves horror from the cultural fringes and demonstrates how its attributes permeate the modern condition and the material world.

Architecture Post Mortem

Architecture Post Mortem PDF Author: Dr David Bertolini
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472407245
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.