A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Aesthetics and Technology in Building: The Twenty-First-Century Edition introduces Nervi's ideas about architecture and engineering to a new generation of students and admirers. More than 200 photographs, details, drawings, and plans show how Nervi put his ideas into practice. Expanding on the seminal 1961 Norton Lectures at Harvard, Nervi analyzes various functional and construction problems. He also explains how precast and cast-in-place concrete can answer demands for economy, technical and functional soundness, and aesthetic perfection. Throughout, he uses his major projects to show how these now-iconic buildings emerged from structural truths and far-sighted construction processes.
This new edition features dozens of added images, a new introduction, and essays by Joseph Abram, Roberto Einaudi, Alberto Bologna, Gabriele Neri, and Hans-Christian Schink on Nervi's life, work, and legacy.
Making innovative use of the distilling lens of the architectural model, Architecture’s Model Environments is a novel and far-reaching exploration of the many dialogues buildings have with their environmental surroundings. Expanding on histories of building technology, the book sheds new light on how physical models, conventionally understood as engineering experimentation devices, enable architectural design speculation. The book begins with a catalog of ten original model prototypes—of wind tunnels, water tables, and filling boxes—and is the first of its kind to establish an architectural approach to fabricating such environmental models. Subsequent chapters feature three precedent models that have been largely overlooked within the wider oeuvres of their authors: French polymath Étienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnels, Hungarian-American architects Victor and Aladár Olgyay’s thermoheliodon, and Scottish chemist and building ventilation expert David Boswell “The Ventilator” Reid’s test tube convection experiments. Moving between historic moments and the present day, between case studies and original prototypes, the book reveals the potent ability of models, as both physical artifacts and mental ideals, to reflect prevailing cultural views about the world and to even reshape those views.
The much-praised Cultural Quarters returns in a revised edition, offering new case studies and new chapters on the economics of cultural quarters and the importance of historical buildings. This definitive text provides a conceptual context for cultural quarters through a detailed discussion of urban design and planning. Drawing on several case studies (from Bolton, Birmingham, Ireland and Vienna), Cultural Quarters positions the emergence of specific cultural areas within a historical and social context and explores the economics of maintaining the respective districts. The book offers a concise illustration of how cultural practice is maintained and expanded within an urban environment.
Experiments with Body Agent Architecture proposes the notion of body agents: non-ideal, animate, and highly specific figures integrated with design to enact particular notions of embodied subjectivity in architecture. Body agents present opportunities for architects to increase imaginative and empathic qualities in their designs.
Beginning with narrative writing from the viewpoint of a body agent who finds himself uncomfortably inhabiting a digital milieu, the book combines speculative historical fiction and original design experiments. It focuses on the process of creating multimedia design experiments, moving from the design of the body itself as an original prosthetic to architectural proposals emanating from the body.
A fragmented history of the figure in architecture is charted and woven into the designs, with chapters examining Michelangelo’s enigmatic figures in his drawings for the New Sacristy in the early sixteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s physically ephemeral putti adorning chapels and churches in the seventeenth century, and Austrian artist-architect Walter Pichler’s personal and prescient figures of the twentieth century.
A critique of prominent architects’ approach to digitally driven design and labor practices over the past two decades
With the advent of revolutionary digital design and production technologies, contemporary architects and their clients developed a taste for dramatic, unconventional forms. Seeking to amaze their audiences and promote their global brands, “starchitects” like Herzog & de Meuron and Frank Gehry have reaped substantial rewards through the pursuit of spectacle enabled by these new technologies. This process reached a climax in projects like Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and the “Bilbao effect,” in which spectacular architectural designs became increasingly sought by municipal and institutional clients for their perceived capacity to enhance property values, which author Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the “rent of form.”
Analyzing many major international architectural projects of the past twenty years, Arantes provides an in-depth account of how this “architecture of exception” has come to dominate today’s industry. Articulating an original, compelling critique of the capital and labor practices that enable many contemporary projects, Arantes explains how circulation (via image culture), consumption (particularly through tourism), the division of labor, and the distribution of wealth came to fix a certain notion of starchitecture at the center of the industry.
Significantly, Arantes’s viewpoint is not that of Euro-American capitalism. Writing from the Global South, this Brazilian theorist offers a fresh perspective that advances ideas less commonly circulated in dominant, English-language academic and popular discourse. Asking key questions about the prevailing logics of finance capital, and revealing inconvenient truths about the changing labor of design and the treatment of construction workers around the world, The Rent of Form delivers a much-needed reevaluation of the astonishing buildings that have increasingly come to define world cities.
Cities are growing at unprecedented rates. Most continue to sprawl into the countryside. Some are only now adopting policies that attempt to control air pollution from vehicles, reduce water pollution from urban runoff, and repair fragmented urban ecosystems. Can good urban design and sound environmental design coincide at a neighborhood level to create healthy communities?
Absolutely, and the strategies presented by Cynthia Girling and Ronald Kellett in Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods illustrate how to weave together contemporary thinking in urban planning with open space planning and urban ecology. Drawing from eighteen case studies, these green neighborhoods are the best examples of how the natural environment can play integral roles in neighborhoods.
Green neighborhoods offer a mix of housing types in order to serve a broad cross-section of people with a finely-grained variety of land uses and services, all close to home. In ecologically sound communities, the urban landscape is a functioning part of the whole ecosystem. Wooded areas, meandering streams, wetlands, and open spaces are planned and engineered to clean the air and the water. Skinnier streets and practical pathways weave into a functional, economical network to provide a range of equally good transportation choices, from walking to mass transit, that move people efficiently and economically.
This book moves beyond identifying problems to demonstrate proven methods and models that solve multiple, complex problems in concert. With innovative ideas and practical advice, Skinny Streets and Green Neighborhoods is a guide for today's planners, architects, engineers, and developers to design better neighborhoods and a more natural metropolis.
T-Squared has three primary aims. First, it illuminates the extensive and explicit relationship between the research that shapes art, architecture, and design practices and the studio prompts and assignments that are developed by faculty for students engaging the creative disciplines. Second, it demonstrates that pedagogical inquiry and invention can be a (radical) research endeavor that can also become an evolutionary agent for faculty, students, institutions, and communities. Third, it makes available to a larger audience a set of innovative ideas and exercises that have until now been known to limited numbers of students and faculty, hidden behind the walls of studio courses and institutions.
An interdisciplinary collection with its origins in the 2018 National Conference on the Beginning Design Student, this book will appeal to anyone interested in design thinking and process.
Urban Design Governance takes a deep dive into the governance of urban design around Europe. It examines interventions in the means and processes of designing the built environment as devised by public authorities and other stakeholders across the continent, paying particular attention to the use of soft powers and allied financial mechanisms to influence design quality in the public interest. In doing so, the book traces the scope, use, and effectiveness of the range of informal, non-regulatory urban design governance tools that governments, municipalities, and others have at their disposal.
The authors note that urban design is viewed as an interface between different disciplines. They describe the field as "peacefully overrun, invaded, and occupied" by city planners, architects, engineers, and landscape architects (with developers and politicians frequently joining in). They suggest that environmental concerns demand the consideration of ecology and sustainability issues in urban design. It is, after all, the urban designer who helps to orchestrate human relationships with other living organisms in the built environment.
The overall objective of the book is to reinforce the role of the urban designer as an honest broker and promoter of design processes and as an active agent of social creativity in the production of the public realm.
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