The Language of Space

The Language of Space

This unique guide provides a systematic overview of the idea of architectural space.

Bryan Lawson provides an ideal introduction to the topic, breaking down the complex and abstract terms used by many design theoreticians when writing about architectural space. 

Instead, our everyday knowledge is reintroduced to the language of design. Design values of 'space' are challenged and informed to stimulate a new theoretical and practical approach to design.

This book views architectural and urban spaces as psychological, social and partly cultural phenomena. They accommodate, separate, structure, facilitate, heighten and even celebrate human spatial behaviour.
 

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Architectural Design and Ethics

Architectural Design and Ethics

 Tools for Survival


Architectural Design and Ethics offers both professional architects and architecture students a theoretical base and numerous suggestions as to how we might rethink our responsibilities to the natural world and design a more sustainable future for ourselves.

As we find ourselves on the steep slope of several exponential growth curves – in global population, in heat-trapping atmospheric gases, in the gap between the rich and poor, and in the demand for finite resources, Fisher lays down a theory of architecture based on ethics and explores how buildings can and do provide both social and moral dimensions. 

The book also has practical goals, demonstrating how architects can make better and more beautiful buildings whilst nurturing more responsible, sustainable development.

Architectural Design and Ethics will prove an invaluable text not only to those in the architecture field, but to anyone simply interested in the ethical issues surrounding our built environment.

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Architecture and Cubism

Architecture and Cubism

(Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture)

 A fundamental tenet of the historiography of modern architecture holds that cubism forged a vital link between avant-garde practices in early twentieth-century painting and architecture. 

This collection of essays, commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, takes a close look at that widely accepted but little scrutinized belief. In the first historically focused examination of the issue, the volume returns to the original site of cubist art in pre-World War I Europe and proceeds to examine the historical, theoretical, and socio-political relationships between avant-garde practices in painting, architecture, and other cultural forms, including poetry, landscape, and the decorative arts. 

The essays look at works produced in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia during the early decades of the twentieth century.Together, the essays show that although there were many points of intersection -- historical, metaphorical, theoretical, and ideological -- between cubism and architecture, there was no simple, direct link between them. 

Most often the connections between cubist painting and modern architecture were construed analogically, by reference to shared formal qualities such as fragmentation, spatial ambiguity, transparency, and multiplicity; or to techniques used in other media such as film, poetry, and photomontage. 

Cubist space itself remained two-dimensional; with the exception of Le Corbusier work, it was never translated into the three dimensions of architecture.

 Cubism's significance for architecture also remained two-dimensional -- a method of representing modern spatial experience through the ordering impulses of art.Copublished with the Canadian Centre for Architecture/CentreCanadien d'Architecture

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AD - Theoretical Meltdown

AD - Theoretical Meltdown 

 (2009-0102)

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Inmaterial Architecture

Immaterial Architecture
Jonathan Hill
Edi Routledge

This fascinating argument from Jonathan Hill presents the case for the significance and importance of the immaterial in architecture.
Architecture is generally perceived as the solid, physical matter that it unarguably creates, but what of the spaces it creates? This issue drives Hill's explorative look at the immaterial aspects of architecture. The book discusses the pressures on architecture and the architectural profession to be respectively solid matter and solid practice and considers concepts that align architecture with the immaterial, such as the superiority of ideas over matter, command of drawing and design of spaces and surfaces.
Focusing on immaterial architecture as the perceived absence of matter, Hill devises new means to explore the creativity of both the user and the architect, advocating an architecture that fuses the immaterial and the material and considers its consequences, challenging preconceptions about architecture, its practice, purpose, matter and use.
This is a useful and innovative read that encourages architects and students to think beyond established theory and practice.

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Gender Space Architecture

Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction
Publisher: Routledge | edition 1999 | PDF | 448 pages | 2 mb

This significant reader brings together for the first time the most important essays concerning the intersecting subjects of gender, space and architecture. Carefully structured and with numerous introductory essays, it guides the reader through theoretical and multi-disciplinary texts to direct considerations of gender in relation to particular architectural sites, projects and ideas. This collection marks a seminal point in gender and architecture, both summarizing core debates and pointing toward new directions and discussions for the future.
 

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