Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech PDF Download

Author: Todd Gannon
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606065300
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

Author: Reyner Banham
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
ISBN: 1580935400
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A long-sought reprint of this classic of architectural history and criticism, surveying a movement that would inspire architects, fantasists, and filmmakers alike. It is an architectural concept as alluring as it is elusive, as futuristic as it is primordial. Megastructure is what it sounds like: a vastly scaled edifice that can contain potentially countless uses, contexts, and adaptations. Theorized and briefly experimented with in built form in the 1960s, megastructures almost as quickly went out of fashion in the profession. But Reyner Banham's 1976 book compiled the origin stories and ongoing mythos of this visionary movement, seeking to chart its lively rise, rapid fall, and ongoing meaning. Now back in print after decades and with original editions fetching well over $100 on the secondary market, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past is part of the recent surge in attention to this quixotic form, of which some examples were built but to this day remains--decades after its codification--more of a poetic idea than a real architectural type. Banham, among the most gifted and incisive architectural critics and historians of his time, sought connections between theoretical origins in Le Corbusier's more starry-eyed drawings to the flurry of theories by the Japanese Metabolist architects, to less intentional examples in military architecture, industry, infrastructure, and the emerging instances in pop culture and art. Had he written the book a few years later he would find an abundance of examples in speculative art and science fiction cinema, mediums where it continues to provoke wonder to this day. A long-sought study by an author who combined imagination, wit, and pioneering scholarship, the republication of Megastructure is an opportunity for scholars and laypeople alike to return to the origins of this fantastic urban idea.

Author: Mack Scogin
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568985213
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Some buildings are famous. Others deserve to be, but in their modesty remain satisfied to stand simply as excellent works of architecture. Such is the case with Ohio State University School or Architecture's recently completed Knowlton School of Architecture. Designed by the internationally respected firmMack Scogin Merrill Elam, Knowlton manages to project both a monumental physicality and a sense of subdued elegance. Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects/Knowlton Hall provides acomprehensive look at this impressive new work using sketches, models, renderings, working drawings, and photographs. As with all of the books in the Source Books in Architecture series, it is accompanied by commentaries from the architects and critics who explore both the technical andcontextual elements of the work.

Author: Todd Gannon
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568987200
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
The basic form of the American sports stadium has not changed much in the last century. But in an unexpected and controversial act of daring, the Arizona Cardinals football team selected awarding-winning architect and intellectual provocateur Peter Eisenman to design their stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Opened in the summer of 2006, Eisenman's latest work rejects all traditional and staid notions of the sports stadium. Inspired by and sectioned like a barrel cactus, its shell is composed of huge, steel paraboloid sections. The domed stadium boasts a steel-and-fabric retractable roof that allows lightto penetrate when closed while maintaining an airy feel inside. The most ground-breaking feature of the design is its grass roll-out field, which remains outside the stadium until game time, when it is rolled in on steel wheel sets powered by small electric motors. Eisenman Architects, the eighth volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark of excellence in civic and sports architecture.

Author: Zaha Hadid
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568985367
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. It is the heart of the BMW factory complexthe dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation and motion. With an audacious and abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the BMW Central Building challenges the notion of building as static and is definitive evidence of architecture as art. Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at this instant modern masterpiece.

Author: Bernard Tschumi
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
ISBN: 9781568983820
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
"Including an exhaustive presentation of sketches, models, computer renderings, working drawings, and photographs of the construction process and the finished work, this book documents the project at a level of detail that allows complete and careful study from its conception to its completion. This in-depth graphic presentation is accompanied by commentaries from the architect, as well as series editors Jeffery Kipnis and Todd Gannon, that further explore both the cultural and technical significance of this important building."--BOOK JACKET.

Author: Richard J. Williams
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144205
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Reyner Banham (1922–88) was a prolific, iconoclastic critic of modern architecture, cities, and mass culture in Britain and the United States, and his provocative writings are inescapable in these areas. His 1971 book on Los Angeles was groundbreaking in what it told Californians about their own metropolis, and architects about what cities might be if freed from tradition. Banham’s obsession with technology, and his talent for thinking the unthinkable, mean his work still resonates now, more than thirty years after his death. This book explores the full breadth of his career and his legacy, dealing not only with his major books, but a wide range of his journalism and media outputs, as well as the singular character of Banham himself.

Author: Todd Gannon
Publisher: Wexner Center
ISBN: 9781881390527
Category : Architecture, Domestic
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Summary: The Miller House, completed in 1992 in Lexington, Kentucky, stands as architect José Oubrerie's signal accomplishment in the United States. Oubrerie is among the last members of Le Corbusier's Paris atelier.

Author: Reyner Banham
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520923200
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
Few twentieth-century writers on architecture and design have enjoyed the renown of Reyner Banham. Born and trained in England and a U.S. resident starting in 1976, Banham wrote incisively about American and European buildings and culture. Now readers can enjoy a chronological cross-section of essays, polemics, and reviews drawn from more than three decades of Banham's writings. The volume, which includes discussions of Italian Futurism, Adolf Loos, Paul Scheerbart, and the Bauhaus as well as explorations of contemporary architecture by Frank Gehry, James Stirling, and Norman Foster, conveys the full range of Banham's belief in industrial and technological development as the motor of architectural evolution. Banham's interests and passions ranged from architecture and the culture of pop art to urban and industrial design. In brilliant analyses of automobile styling, mobile homes, science fiction films, and the American predilection for gadgets, he anticipated many of the preoccupations of contemporary cultural studies. Los Angeles, the city that Banham commemorated in a book and a film, receives extensive attention in essays on the Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Museum, Forest Lawn cemetery, and the ubiquitous freeway system. Eminently readable, provocative, and entertaining, this book is certain to consolidate Banham's reputation among architects and students of contemporary culture. For those acquainted with his writing, it offers welcome surprises as well as familiar delights. For those encountering Banham for the first time, it comprises the perfect introduction.

Author: Jeffrey Kipnis
Publisher: Source Books in Architecture
ISBN: 9781580930796
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Morphosis/Diamond Ranch High School presents a detailed story of the design and construction of a single building, Diamond Ranch High School by avant-garde California architecture firm Morphosis. The volume opens with an interview with Thom Mayne, founder and principal of Morphosis and winner of the 2005 Pritzker Prize. The interview outlines Mayne's working methods and chronicles his development as an architect from his years as a student through the realization of such influential projects as the widely published Crawford House. The presentation of Diamond Ranch High School, a state-of-the-art public school in Pomona, California, offers a level of detail not normally found in architectural monographs. Here every crucial architectural decision is extensively illustrated with conceptual sketches, key working drawings, and photographs of the project under construction and after completion.