Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour at Acadia Summer Arts Program


Book Description

The founder of the Acadia Summer Arts Program, Marion Boulton Stroud, asked Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour to design and construct houses and other structures for the camp. The architects took as inspiration Maine's indigenous architecture, such as shingle houses and lobster shacks.




Graphic Design for Architects


Book Description

Graphic Design for Architects is a handbook of techniques, explanations and examples of graphic design most relevant to architects. The book covers a variety of scales of graphic design, everything from portfolio design and competition boards, to signage and building super-graphics – to address every phase of architectural production. This book combines and expands on information typically found in graphic design, information design, and architectural graphics books. As architectural communication increases to include more territory and components of a project, it is important for designers to be knowledgeable about the various ways in which to communicate visually. For instance, signage should be designed as part of the process – not something added at the end of a project; and the portfolio is a manifestation of how the designer works, not just an application to sell a design sensibility. In thinking about architecture as a systematic and visual project, the graphic design techniques outlined in this book will help architects process, organize and structure their work through the lens of visual communication. Each chapter is titled and organized by common architectural modes of communication and production. The chapters speak to architects by directly addressing projects and topics relevant to their work, while the information inside each chapter presents graphic design methods to achieve the architects’ work. In this way, readers don’t have to search through graphic design books to figure out what’s relevant to them – this book provides a complete reference of graphic techniques and methods most useful to architects in getting their work done.




Architecture as Signs and Systems


Book Description

The observer-designer-theorists who analyzed the Las Vegas strip as an archetype in "Learning from Las Vegas" now turn their iconoclastic vision onto their own remarkable partnership and the rule-breaking architecture it has spawned for this fascinating retrospective of their life work.




Complexity


Book Description

Digitalization has transformed the discourse of architecture: that discourse is now defined by a wealth of new terms and concepts that previously either had no meaning, or had different meanings, in the context of architectural theory and design. Its concepts and strategies are increasingly shaped by influences emerging at the intersection with scientific and cultural notions from modern information technology. The series Context Architecture seeks to take a critical selection of concepts that play a vital role in the current discourse and put them up for discussion. When Vitruvius described the architect as a "uomo universale," he gave rise to the architect’s conception of him- or herself as a generalist who shapes a complex reality. The architectural concept of complexity, however, failed to keep pace with industrial and social reality, becoming instead an increasingly formal and superficial notion that could ultimately be applied to almost anything. Against it, architectural modernism set the watchword of simplification: "less is more." In this situation, Robert Venturi reintroduced the notion of complexity into architectural discourse: his goal was not just to restore the complexity of architectonic forms and their history but also to explore the concrete reality of the existing built environment. Today it is complexity studies, with their starting point in physics, that define the current approach to the concept of complexity. They have established a new connection between the natural sciences and information technology and have thus become a central premise of computer-based approaches to design.




Architecture and the Smart City


Book Description

Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart.’ From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: ‘Histories and Futures’, ‘Agency and Control’, ‘Materialities and Spaces’ and ‘Networks and Nodes’. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment. The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like.




The Ordinary


Book Description

Rem Koolhaas : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Denise Scott Brown : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Yoshiharu Tsukamoto : in conversation with Enrique Walker -- Enrique Walker : retroactive manifestoes




A View from the Campidoglio


Book Description

These seventeen essays span thirty-two years in the careers of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In these careers one can see the inextricable blending of the building of buildings and the building of words. They "look, analyze, synthesize through writing, synthesize through design, then look again." Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published in 1966, has been acknowledged as the most important thinking and writing on architecture since Le Corbusier. It provided a theoretical base for architects to transform architectural design from Modern to contemporary. A leading exponent of the Postmodern, the firm of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown has been in the forefront of new approaches in architecture and design, combining traditional with modern. And their writing has been viewed as "brilliant and liberating." Paul Goldberger, in The New York Times, says of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown: "They merge a kind of childlike delight with an adult's ironic sensibility, bringing to architecture an attitude not altogether different from that which Lewis Carroll brought to literature." -- from book cover.




Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture


Book Description

This new collection of writings in a variety of genres argues for a genericarchitecture defined by iconography and electronics, an architecture whose elemental qualitiesbecome shelter and symbol.




Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture


Book Description

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.




The Civil War in Georgia


Book Description

"A project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia"