Automatic Architecture


Book Description

In the 1960s and ’70s, architects, influenced by recent developments in computing and the rise of structuralist and poststructuralist thinking, began to radically rethink how architecture could be created. Though various new approaches gained favor, they had one thing in common: they advocated moving away from the traditional reliance on an individual architect’s knowledge and instincts and toward the use of external tools and processes that were considered objective, logical, or natural. Automatic architecture was born. The quixotic attempts to formulate such design processes extended modernist principles and tried to draw architecture closer to mathematics and the sciences. By focusing on design methods, and by examining evidence at a range of scales—from institutions to individual buildings—Automatic Architecture offers an alternative to narratives of this period that have presented postmodernism as a question of style, as the methods and techniques traced here have been more deeply consequential than the many stylistic shifts of the past half century. Sean Keller closes the book with an analysis of the contemporary condition, suggesting future paths for architectural practice that work through, but also beyond, the merely automatic.




Architecture After Modernism


Book Description

Since the Modern Movement began to be challenged in the late 1960s, architecture has followed a number of widely divergent paths. In this thoughtful and eloquent book, Diane Ghirardo examines the architectural world of the last quarter-century and its theories in the crucial context of social and political issues. Within a survey of a broad range of buildings, she focuses on specific 'megaprojects' as paradigms for discussion. In the realm of public space, she argues, the key questions are raised by the Disney empire and its amusement parks; in domestic space, by the IBA in Berlin, with projects ranging from new structures to rehabilitation and residents' self-build. When it comes to reconfiguring the urban sphere, the megaproject is London's Docklands, the most ambitious and politically sensitive development in postwar Britain. Her text ranges world-wide, and she considers the work of lesser-known designers and women architects as well as famous international stars.




Architecture After Richardson


Book Description

Over the years, their commissions included scores of city and country residences for the elite of both regions as well as major institutional and business buildings such as those at Harvard and Radcliffe, the Cambridge City Hall, and Pittsburgh's Duquesne Club and Carnegie Institute.




The Story of Post-Modernism


Book Description

In The Story of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, the authority on Post-Modern architecture and culture, provides the defining account of Post-Modern architecture from its earliest roots in the early 60s to the present day. By breaking the narrative into seven distinct chapters, which are both chronological and overlapping, Jencks charts the ebb and flow of the movement, the peaks and troughs of different ideas and themes. The book is highly visual. As well as providing a chronological account of the movement, each chapter also has a special feature on the major works of a given period. The first up-to-date narrative of Post-Modern Architecture - other major books on the subject were written 20 years ago. An accessible narrative that will appeal to students who are new to the subject, as well as those who can remember its heyday in the 70s and 80s.




Post-modernism


Book Description

Describes the return to a new classical style within art and architecture. Includes 350 illustrations of paintings, sculpture, and architecture.







Architecture, from Prehistory to Post-modernism


Book Description

History of buildings, groups of buildings, the styles in which they were built, and the architects responsible for them from Stonehenge to the present.




The New Paradigm in Architecture


Book Description

This book explores the broad issue of Postmodernism and tells the story of the movement that has changed the face of architecture over the last forty years. In this completely rewritten edition of his seminal work, Charles Jencks brings the history of architecture up to date and shows how demands for a new and complex architecture, aided by computer design, have led to more convivial, sensuous, and articulate buildings around the world.




Radical Post-Modernism


Book Description

In this latest issue of Architectural Design the guest editors are drawn, like the content, from contrasting tastes and generations. Charles Jencks, the definer of Post-Modernism for thirty years, discusses some issues that have re-emerged today, while the young group of British architects, FAT, argues for a particular version of RPM. An interview between Rem Koohaas and Charles Jencks discusses the influence of Post-Modernism while investigations of street art, graffiti and the 1980 Venice Biennale show that communication is at the heart of this radical strain of architecture. This issue brings together an unlikely and exciting pairing of guest-editors: internationally acclaimed critic Charles Jencks, whose name became synonymous with Post-modernism in the 80s, and the dynamic architectural group, FAT. Features work by: ARM, Atelier Bow Wow, Édouard François, FOA, Rem Koolhaas, John and Valerio Olgiati.




A Second Modernism


Book Description

An account of architecture's postwar ambition to transform itself into a research-oriented and technologically complex discipline of design expertise. After World War II, a second modernism emerged in architecture—an attempt, in architectural scholar Joan Ockman's words, “to transform architecture from a 'soft' aesthetic discipline into a 'hard,' objectively verifiable field of design expertise.” Architectural thought was influenced by linguistic, behavioral, computational, mediatic, cybernetic, and other urban and behavioral models, as well as systems-based and artificial intelligence theories. This nearly 1,000-page book examines the “techno-social” turn in architecture, taking MIT's School of Architecture and Planning as its exemplar. In essays and interviews, prominent architectural historians and educators examine the postwar “research-industrial” complex, its attendant cult of expertise, and its influence on life and letters both in America and abroad. Paying particular attention to the ways that technological thought affected the culture of the humanities, the social sciences, and architectural design, the book traces this shift toward complexity as it unfolded, from classroom practices to committee deliberations, from the challenges of research to the vicissitudes of funding. Looking closely at the ways that funded research drew academics towards a “problem-solving” and relevance-seeking mentality and away from the imported Bauhaus model of intuition and aesthetics, the book reveals how linguistics, information sciences, operations research, computer technology, and systems theory became part of architecture's expanded toolkit. This is a history not just of a school of architecture but of the research-oriented era itself. It offers a thoroughgoing exploration of the ways that policies, politics, and pedagogy transformed themselves in accord with the exponential growth of institutional power.