Architects Today


Book Description

This volume offers both an introduction to and an insight into key contemporary architects as well as giving a snapshot of the varied nature of architecture today. For each architect there are details of their life and work and illustrations of their most representative and iconic buildings.




Architecture Today


Book Description

A guide to the prominent architectural movements of the last 25 years.




Architecture Today


Book Description

Presents exciting contemporary commercial and industrial design projects by thirty professional architects from around the world.




Key Modern Architects


Book Description

Key Modern Architects provides an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the work of the most significant architects of the modern era. Fifty short chapters introduce fifty key architects, from Le Corbusier to Aldo Van Eyck to Zaha Hadid, exploring their most influential buildings and developing a critique of each architect's work within a broader cultural and historical context. The selection represents the most influential architects working from 1890 to the present, those most likely to be taught on survey courses in modern architectural history, along with some lesser-known names with an equal claim to influence. Emphasis is placed on a critical and interpretative approach, allowing the student to position each architect in a cultural and intellectual context quickly and easily. Artistic, technical, social, and intellectual developments are brought to the fore – built and unbuilt projects, writings and influences. This approach brings to light the ideology behind architectural work, offering insights into each architect's working practice. - Helps students to develop a critical approach to understanding modern architectural history. - One chapter per architect – meaning chapters may be read individually as a concise resource for the study of an architect, or together as a coherent book-length history of the whole period of modern architecture. - Chapters are supported by boxed lists of each architect's most significant projects, along with suggestions for further reading as a springboard to further study and research. Combining the clarity and accessibility of a textbook with in-depth reading and a critical approach, Key Modern Architects provides an invaluable resource for both the classroom and for independent study in architectural and art history.




Never Modern


Book Description

In this exceptional book on the London based studio 6a architects, architecture critic Irenee Scalbert looks at the role of narrative, history, appropriation and craft in the work of Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald. The book traces an architectural approach avoiding style, signature, theory and even concept in favour of metis, an ancient form of intelligence combining 'flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, varied skills, and experience.' Structured around notions of situation, intervention, making, comedy, bricolage, chance and anthropology, the text is mirrored in a visual essay of archive photographs, artworks, film stills and recent projects by the practice.




Swatt Architects


Book Description

Focuses on unique living spaces sensitively designed to blend with their surroundings. Innovative design by a highly regarded firm of architects.




Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture


Book Description

The Modern movement began in the 1920s when a small group of young architects felt all that had gone before should be rejected and that architectural design should start afresh. This fresh start, they declared, should be based on modern technology and a new, modern approach to life. Their innovations became the 20th century's dominant movement in architecture, crystallizing into the international style of the 1920s and '30s. In "Exploding the Myths of Modern Architecture, " Malcolm Millais explores the forces and factors that led to the emergence of the Modern movement, arguing that it was based on completely false premises. Millais offers a rarely heard perspective on the Modern movement, explaining its failures and how the well-meaning "revolutionaries" behind it gained and maintained power.




Modern Architecture


Book Description

This new account of international modernism explores the complex motivations behind this revolutionary movement and assesses its triumphs and failures. The work of the main architects of the movement such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe is re-examined shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters. Alan Colquhoun explores the evolution of the movement fron Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the megastructures of the 1960s, revealing the often contradictory demands of form, function, social engagement, modernity and tradition.




Modern Architecture and Climate


Book Description

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings, and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.




Privacy and Publicity


Book Description

Through a series of close readings of two major figures of the modern movement, Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier, Beatriz Colomina argues that architecture only becomes modern in its engagement with the mass media, and that in so doing it radically displaces the traditional sense of space and subjectivity. Privacy and Publicity boldly questions certain ideological assumptions underlying the received view of modern architecture and reconsiders the methodology of architectural criticism itself. Where conventional criticism portrays modern architecture as a high artistic practice in opposition to mass culture, Colomina sees the emerging systems of communication that have come to define twentieth-century culture—the mass media—as the true site within which modern architecture was produced. She considers architectural discourse as the intersection of a number of systems of representation such as drawings, models, photographs, books, films, and advertisements. This does not mean abandoning the architectural object, the building, but rather looking at it in a different way. The building is understood here in the same way as all the media that frame it, as a mechanism of representation in its own right. With modernity, the site of architectural production literally moved from the street into photographs, films, publications, and exhibitions—a displacement that presupposes a new sense of space, one defined by images rather than walls. This age of publicity corresponds to a transformation in the status of the private, Colomina argues; modernity is actually the publicity of the private. Modern architecture renegotiates the traditional relationship between public and private in a way that profoundly alters the experience of space. In a fascinating intellectual journey, Colomina tracks this shift through the modern incarnations of the archive, the city, fashion, war, sexuality, advertising, the window, and the museum, finally concentrating on the domestic interior that constructs the modern subject it appears merely to house.