Architects and art lovers everywhere will enjoy this remarkable collection of interviews from sixteen of the world's most celebrated, thoughtful, and innovative architects who have designed many of the world's greatest museums. Spanning generations, geographies, and methods of architectural practice, these architects share the complex and fascinating process of creating spaces for art. Building Culture includes interviews with:
This lively compendium reveals intensely varied architectural philosophies from a diverse group of established and up-and-coming professionals. Engaging personal recollections of relationships with artists and curators, along with 80 captivating images, provide further insight into the design process and timeless inspiration for architecture students, artists, museum professionals, and anyone fascinated by architectural design, public space, and museum culture.
For the Swiss-born architect and city planner Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965), architecture constituted a noble art, an exalted calling in which the architect combined plastic invention, intellectual speculation, and higher mathematics to go beyond mere utilitarian needs, beyond style, to achieve a pure creation of the spirit which established emotional relationships by means of raw materials.
The first major exposition of his ideas appeared in Vers une Architecture (1923), a compilation of articles originally written by Le Corbusier for his own avant-garde magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The present volume is an unabridged English translation of the 13th French edition of that historic manifesto, in which Le Corbusier expounded his technical and aesthetic theories, views on industry, economics, relation of form to function, the mass-production spirit, and much else. A principal prophet of the modern movement in architecture, and a near-legendary figure of the International School, he designed some of the twentieth century's most memorable buildings: Chapel at Ronchamp; Swiss dormitory at the Cité Universitaire, Paris; Unité d'Habitation, Marseilles; and many more.
Le Corbusier brought great passion and intelligence to these essays, which present his ideas in a concise, pithy style, studded with epigrammatic, often provocative, observations: American engineers overwhelm with their calculations our expiring architecture. Architecture is stifled by custom. It is the only profession in which progress is not considered necessary. A cathedral is not very beautiful . . . and Rome is the damnation of the half-educated. To send architectural students to Rome is to cripple them for life.
Profusely illustrated with over 200 line drawings and photographs of his own works and other structures he considered important, Towards a New Architecture is indispensable reading for architects, city planners, and cultural historians―but will intrigue anyone fascinated by the wide-ranging ideas, unvarnished opinions, and innovative theories of one of this century's master builders.
Sixteen of the acerbic historian's essays and book chapters have been selected by the book's contributors, ranging from classics such as 'The Great Gizmo' to lesser-known texts, such as 'The Wall', an intimate confession he penned at the hospital shortly before his death. Each is accompanied by a contemporary response that contextualises Banham's text, drawing out reflections on what the critic's work means today.
Point Line Plane is architectural theory, but written as narrative, full of intriguing vignettes, such as the fact that in Ancient Rome windows were fitted with slices of marble because glass was so expensive. It's written in a very Japanese form: a series of mini essays that circle around a theme and is aimed at a highly literate audience.
Seventy-two related essays across four sections set out Kuma's rejection of the architecture of volume and mass that categorized the twentieth century in favor of a more ad hoc architecture that can be easily disassembled and, by drawing on tried and tested practices of the past, touch the earth more lightly.
Periurban Cartographies looks through the prism of the almost
urban to consider what a city is or could be. In doing so, the book
challenges assumptions and reconsiders design practices.
The research reported upon in this study draws on thick
description of everyday life and diffuse power in periurban Gangetic
West Bengal/Kolkata. It does so in the hope of enriching our
understanding of incremental modes of political empowerment and
the futures they make. The intention is to not just communicate the
transformations at work in creating a particular kind of urban, but
also to point to connections that make us rethink the ways in which
change happens.