1998

In its 11-year history, Oppositions, the journal of the New York-based Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), set the agenda, introduced key players and published seminal pieces on the theorization of architecture in the late 20th century. This text collects essays from 26 issues of Oppositions. Contributions from architects, theorists and historians such as Aldo Rossi, Alan Colquhom, Leon Krier, and Denise Scott Brown, amongst others, are included.

1992

Nowhere, Mark Wigley asserts, are the stakes higher for deconstruction than in architecture—architecture is the Achilles’ heel of deconstructive discourse, the point of vulnerability upon which all of its arguments depend. In this book Wigley redefines the question of deconstruction and architecture. By locating the architecture already hidden within deconstructive discourse, he opens up more radical possibilities for both architecture and deconstruction, offering a way of rethinking the institution of architecture while using architecture to rethink deconstructive discourse. . . .

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

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.

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.

1960

First published in 1960, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age has become required reading in numerous courses on the history of modern architecture and is widely regarded as one of the definitive books on the modern movement. It has influenced a generation of students and critics interested in the formation of attitudes, themes, and forms which were characteristic of artists and architects working primarily in Europe between 1900 and 1930 under the compulsion of new technological developments in the first machine age.

2011

How computer technologies and digital fabrication techniques give architects unprecedented tools for crafting performance and aesthetics through cross-disciplinary collaboration. . . . Boat, airplane, and automobile design tools and software are now applied to architectural projects using robotics and high-strength, low-weight, carbon fiber composites. Greg Lynn’s studio and Mark Foster Gage’s seminar at Yale with participants Frank Gehry, Lise Ann Couture, Chris Bangle, and Greg Foley, among others generated a lively dialogue invigorating the future of design.

2011

Kissing Architecture explores the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of contemporary art. In this fresh, insightful, and beautifully illustrated book, renowned architectural critic and scholar Sylvia Lavin develops the concept of “kissing” to describe the growing intimacy between architecture and new types of art—particularly multimedia installations that take place in and on the surfaces of buildings—and to capture the sensual charge that is being designed and built into architectural surfaces and interior spaces today.

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. . . .