2013
Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the “subjective”—the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception—and the political. . . . By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in today’s ornamental revival. . . .
2012
Now almost 20 years old, the digital turn in architecture has already gone through several stages and phases. Architectural Design (AD) has captured them all—from folding to cyberspace, nonlinearity and hypersurfaces, from versioning to scripting, emergence, information modelling and parametricism. . . . This anthology of AD’s most salient articles is chronologically and thematically arranged to provide a complete historical timeline of the recent rise to pre-eminence of computer-based design and production. . . .
2012
An autobiographical look at the work of a seminal modernist architect. This is the first comprehensive treatment of the architecture of Bernard Tschumi. Part monograph, part architectural theory, and part story, the book narrates a three-decade journey through a personal history of architecture and architectural ideas, intertwining theory, practice, and hypothetical projects with forty built works. From Tschumi’s many written works, such as Architecture and Disjunction and The Manhattan Transcripts to such renowned projects as the Parc de la Villette in Paris. . . .
2012
“Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it,” writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, “is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate.” For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. . . .
2011–12
Author Patrik Schumacher offers innovative treatment that enriches architectural theory with a coordinated arsenal of concepts facilitating both detailed analysis and insightful comparisons with other domains, such as art, science and politics. He explores how the various modes of communication comprising architecture depend upon each other, combine, and form a unique subsystem of society that co-evolves with other important autopoietic subsystems like art, science, politics and the economy. . . .
2012
Architecture has always relied on mathematics to achieve visual harmony, structural integrity, and logical construction. Now digital tools and an increasing interest in physics have given architects the means to describe and build spatial constructs that would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. This carefully researched survey of 46 international projects offers an overview of how different strategies are being employed through accessible illustrations and clear text. Each section presents case studies of projects by globally recognized architects in diagrams, photographs, and texts.
2012
This compilation of texts written since 1986 reveals a parallel activity to Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s professional life. The book is like a sniper’s log, a register of events for the purpose of accumulating experience for future missions, be it academic or professional, trying to identify tendencies and to assess performances, rather than to establish truth. Written for different media and formats (professional magazines, speaking engagements, and academic presentations), the texts are thread together as part of a biographical experience that reveals that theory is here primarily instrumental and seeks efficiency rather than truth. . . .
2011
In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. . . .
2011
Digital technologies have changed architecture—the way it is taught, practiced, managed, and regulated. But if the digital has created a “paradigm shift” for architecture, which paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two examples of identicality crucial to the shaping of architectural modernity: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti’s invention of architectural design, according to which a building is an identical copy of the architect’s design; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds.
2011
With an introduction and critical headnotes explaining the importance of each text, Mark Foster Gage offers a framework for a provocative history of ideas about beauty as they relate to contemporary thinking on architecture and design. In a world increasingly defined by sumptuous visuality, the concepts of beauty and visual sensation are not mere intellectual exercises but standards that define the very nature of design practice across disciplines and that are essential to the emerging worlds of design and architecture in the twenty-first century.
