Critical Practices in Architecture PDF Download

Author: Jonathan Bean
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527544958
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 422

View

Book Description
This book embraces the idea that in today’s complex world, multiple, emerging perspectives are critical to the design fields, the environment, and society. It also brings authors into conversation to focus on the built environment from the perspective of critical practice. The authors take as a starting point Jane Rendell’s ground-breaking work, which defines critical spatial practice as “self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the world.” In opposition to conventional conceptions of architectural education and work, this book reflects how socially engaged architects, landscape architects, designers, urbanists, and artists take up critical spatial practice. Bridging ideas from multiple countries and approaches to design scholarship, each chapter seeks to find places of convergence for the multiple strands that form around themes of practice, equality, methods, theory, ethics, pedagogy, and representation. Rendell’s foreword and postscript provide context for these themes and suggest a way forward in today’s challenging, changing times.

Author: Jane Rendell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134120028
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 369

View

Book Description
Critical Architecture examines the relationship between critical practice in architecture and architectural criticism. Placing architecture in an interdisciplinary context, the book explores architectural criticism with reference to modes of criticism in other disciplines - specifically art criticism - and considers how critical practice in architecture operates through a number of different modes: buildings, drawings and texts. With forty essays by an international cast of leading architectural academics, this accessible single source text on the topical subject of architectural criticism is ideal for undergraduate as well as post graduate study.

Author: George Elvin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471998494
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 274

View

Book Description
Endorsed by The American Institute of Architects, this work is about integrated practice in architecture, which is the collaborative design, construction, and life-cycle management of buildings.

Author: Stan Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135763755
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 281

View

Book Description
Conversant in contemporary theory and architectural history, Stan Allen argues that concepts in architecture are not imported from other disciplines, but emerge through the materials and procedures of architectural practice itself. Drawing on his own experience as a working architect, he examines the ways in which the tools available to the architect affect the design and production of buildings. This second edition includes revised essays together with previously unpublished work. Allen’s seminal piece on Field Conditions is included in this reworked, revised and redesigned volume. A compelling read for student and practitioner alike.

Author: Nadir Lahiji
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429885067
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

View

Book Description
In this manifesto, the author takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.

Author: Diana Agrest
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 218

View

Book Description
In Architecture from Without Agrest explores the symbolic dimension of architecture from the perspective of the modern city through a remarkable range of subjects.

Author: Gretchen Coombs
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315526352
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 363

View

Book Description
Undesign brings together leading artists, designers and theorists working at the intersection of art and design. The text focuses on design practices, and conceptual approaches, which challenge the traditional notion that design should emphasise its utility over aesthetic or other non-functional considerations. This publication brings to light emerging practices that consider the social, political and aesthetic potential of "undesigning" our complex designed world. In documenting these new developments, the book highlights the overlaps with science, engineering, biotechnology and hacktivism, which operate at the intersection of art and design.

Author: Thomas A. Dutton
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816628092
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 346

View

Book Description
Reconstructing Architecture was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. To create architecture is an inherently political act, yet its nature as a social practice is often obscured beneath layers of wealth and privilege. The contributors to this volume question architecture's complicity with the status quo, moving beyond critique to outline the part architects are playing in building radical social movements and challenging dominant forms of power. The making of architecture is instrumental in the construction of our identities, our differences, the world around us-much of what we know of institutions, the distribution of power, social relations, and cultural values is mediated by the built environment. Historically, architecture has constructed the environments that house the dominant culture. Yet, as the essays in Reconstructing Architecture demonstrate, there exists a strong tradition of critical practice in the field, one that attempts to alter existing social power relations. Engaging the gap between modernism and postmodernism, each chapter addresses an oppositional discourse that has developed within the field and then reconstructs it in terms of a new social project: feminism, social theory, environmentalism, cultural studies, race and ethnic studies, and critical theory. The activists and scholars writing here provide a clarion call to architects and other producers of culture, challenging them to renegotiate their political allegiances and to help reconstruct a viable democratic life in the face of inexorable forces driving economic growth, destroying global ecology, homogenizing culture, and privatizing the public realm. Reconstructing Architecture reformulates the role of architecture in society as well as its capacity to further a progressive social transformation. Contributors: Sherry Ahrentzen, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Bradford C. Grant, California Polytechnic State U, San Luis Obispo; Richard Ingersoll, Rice U; Margaret Soltan, George Washington U; Anthony Ward, U of Auckland, New Zealand. Thomas A. Dutton is an architect and professor of architecture at Miami University, Ohio. He is editor of Voices in Architectural Education (1991) and is associate editor of the Journal of Architectural Education. Lian Hurst Mann is an architect and editor of Architecture California. A founding member of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, she is editor of its bilingual quarterly Ahora Now and a coauthor of Reconstructing Los Angeles from the Bottom Up (1993).

Author: Matt Malpass
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472575199
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 168

View

Book Description
Critical Design is becoming an increasingly influential discipline, affecting policy and practice in a range of fields. Matt Malpass's book is the first to introduce critical design as a field, providing a history of the discipline, outlining its key influences, theories and approaches, and explaining how critical design can work in practice through a range of contemporary examples. Critical Design moves away from traditional approaches that limit design's role to the production of profitable objects, focusing instead on a practice that is interrogative, discursive and experimental. Using a wide range of examples from contemporary practice, and drawing on interviews with key practitioners, Matt Malpass provides an introduction to critical design practice and a manifesto for how a radical and unorthodox practice might provide design answers in an age of austerity and ecological crisis.

Author: Stan Allen
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9789057010729
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 230

View

Book Description
Essays by Stan Allen. Commentary by Diana Agrest. Foreword by Saul Ostrow. Architect and theorist Stan Allen examines how different modes of representation affect architectural practice, how, for example, the choice of axonometric, orthographic, or perspective representation reflects complex preconceptions about space, visuality, and design. In addition, he analyzes the role of media in architecture. Diana Agrest situates Allen's work in the wider context of semiotic and structuralist debate on paradigms of representation.