What happens to the landscape, to community, and to the population when vacated big box stores are turned into community centers, churches, schools, and libraries?
We are beset by unspoken rules. As a result, we learn to find consensus in nots and to seek refuge in don'ts. A taboo is a restriction invented and agreed upon by a social group that maintains stability (disciplinary order) but also induces transgressions (the possibility of an avant-garde). Taboos structure our thinking and frame our discussions. In architecture, taboos create an operative way of thinking about and making architecture through unspoken agreement.
In Mexican Modernity, Ruben Gallo tells the story of a second Mexican Revolution, a battle fought on the front of cultural representation. The new revolutionaries were not rebels or outlaws but artists and writers; their weapons were cameras, typewriters, radios, and other technological artifacts, and their goal was not to topple a dictator but to dethrone nineteenth-century aesthetics.
Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment.
Event-Cities 4 is the latest in the Event-Cities series from Bernard Tschumi, documenting recent built and theoretical projects in the context of his evolving views on architecture, urbanism, and design. Event-Cities 4 follows directly from the work of Event-Cities 3, which examined the interaction of architectural content, concept, and context. This volume takes the interaction a step further, looking at a series of projects for which program or context are insufficient as a generative conceptual strategy, hence requiring a different approach.
Combining formal argument with informal conversations and design proposals, Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else offers creative ideas for "thinking and acting architecture differently." What makes the book unique (apart from its lively graphic format) is the freshness of its voices—young architects and emerging practitioners who for the most part have not published before. Interwoven with their proposals are conversations among these new voices and more established authors and practitioners, including Sanford Kwinter, Sylvia Lavin, K.
I paused at the stoop and thought this could be the basis of a good book. The story of a young man who went deep into the bowels of the academy in order to understand architecture and found it had been on his doorstep all along. This had an air of hokeyness about it, but it had been a tough couple of days and I was feeling sentimental about the warm confines of the studio which had unceremoniously discharged me upon the world. —from Down Detour Road
It is often suggested that architecture is more "real" than the other arts, more grounded and definitive. Yet even the most fundamental and concrete elements of architecture are often designed to conceal. This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—embraces the paradoxical nature of the real, presenting it as a lens that magnifies the strategies and tactics of architecture, past, present, and future. How does architecture create real effects, change our built environment, and respond to crises?
At the close of the nineteenth century, industrialization and urbanization marked the end of the traditional understanding of society as rooted in agriculture. Urban Modernity examines the construction of an urban-centered, industrial-based culture—an entirely new social reality based on science and technology. The authors show that this invention of modernity was brought about through the efforts of urban elites—businessmen, industrialists, and officials—to establish new science- and technology-related institutions.
In Architecture or Techno-Utopia, Felicity Scott traces an alternative genealogy of the postmodern turn in American architecture, focusing on a set of experimental practices and polemics that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Scott examines projects, conceptual work, exhibitions, publications, pedagogical initiatives, and agitprop performances that had as their premise the belief that architecture could be ethically and politically relevant.
Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture.
Powerful photographs of the grand exteriors and crumbling interiors of America’s abandoned state mental hospitals.
Joan OckmanThe first comprehensive history of architecture education in North America, offering a chronological overview and a topical lexicon.
Parking lots as landscapes ripe for transformation: new uses for urban spaces traditionally considered banal and devoid of culture.
The basics of the profession and practice of architecture, presented in illustrated A-Z form.
A major proposal for a minor architecture, and for the making of spaces out of the already built.
What happens to the landscape, to community, and to the population when vacated big box stores are turned into community centers, churches, schools, and libraries?
