The Minimum Dwelling


Book Description

Teige envisioned the minimum dwelling not as a reduced version of a bourgeois apartment or rural cottage, but as a wholly new dwelling type built with the cooperation of architects, sociologists, economists, health officials, physicians, social workers, politicians, and trade unionists.".




Loveless


Book Description




The Minimum Dwelling Revisited


Book Description

This book provides an intellectual history of the modernist "minimum dwelling", exploring how early modernism saw mass housing as a primary vehicle for achieving the utopian transformation of society. It reappraises the often-overlooked 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences (1929-31), addressing their engagement with the "minimum dwelling" and revealing them both as milestones in the organisation's annals and as seminal moments in the history of interwar modernism. In 1929, an eclectic international group of avant-garde modernist architects, including Ernst May, Mart Stam, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, met in Frankfurt for the second instalment of the CIAM conferences. They discussed a design programme for cost-effective, good-quality housing, seeking new approaches and processes to maximize quality and functionality while ensuring affordability for the wider population. In exploring the meaning and form of the 'minimum dwelling', they also re-defined dwelling as the hub of a new way of living, proposing a revolutionary multi-scalar approach to urban design based on the concept of the Existenzminimum ('optimally minimal housing'). Despite the two conferences falling short of the organizer's expectations, and being overshadowed by later instalments, the participating architects sanctioned a semantic shift from minimum as bare necessity to a very different, aspirational, kind of minimalism – transforming the entire conversation on mass low-cost dwelling in design, social and ethical terms. Split into two parts, The Minimum Dwelling Revisited first takes a genealogical approach to explore the provenance of the concept of "minimum dwelling" prior to the 2nd and 3rd CIAM conferences, it then traces the proceedings of the two conferences themselves. Addressing the origins of the "minimum dwelling" concept but also its legacies, and serving as a corrective to the overemphasis on 4th CIAM conference and the Athens Charter, the book is essential reading for scholars researching urban design during the Interwar period.




Minimum Dwelling


Book Description

A compendium of minimum dwelling spaces currently on the market: living spaces characterised by the free-flight of the imagination, the intelligent use of space, the exploration of materials, experimental locations, and the daring spirit of their creators.




Scope of Total Architecture


Book Description

Originally published in 1956, this book provides a non-technical analysis of contemporary building by on the of the world’s greatest architects. Published a few years after the end of WW2, it was an inspiring and constructive picture of what kind of living could lie ahead for Western industrial society. This book, the result of many year in the forefront of architectural experiment and achievement by the author, outlines in practical terms the road to improved existence through science, mass production in building and renewed emphasis on the individual.




Building and Dwelling


Book Description

A reflection on the past and present of city life, and a bold proposal for its future “Constantly stimulating ideas from a veteran of urban thinking.”—Jonathan Meades, The Guardian In this sweeping work, the preeminent sociologist Richard Sennett traces the anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. He shows how Paris, Barcelona, and New York City assumed their modern forms; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, and others; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellín, Colombia, to Google headquarters in Manhattan. Through it all, Sennett laments that the “closed city”—segregated, regimented, and controlled—has spread from the Global North to the exploding urban centers of the Global South. He argues instead for a flexible and dynamic “open city,” one that provides a better quality of life, that can adapt to climate change and challenge economic stagnation and racial separation. With arguments that speak directly to our moment—a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before—Sennett forms a bold and original vision for the future of cities.




Nesting


Book Description

Increasingly, technology seems to be de-materializing our world. Yet our ideas and experiences--both physical and cultural--remain fundamentally patterned by the complex material interplay of brain, body, and world. With support from pioneering research in the cognitive and neurosciences, Sarah Robinson combines philosophy, poetry, and personal narrative to offer a poignant study of the many ways in which our built environment shapes us as significantly as we have shaped it. Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind explores how our very being is sculpted by our interactions in an environment that we ourselves have fashioned, making us our own greatest artifact.




A Little House


Book Description

Villa le Lac, which was designated a World Heritage in 2016, was designed and built by Le Corbusier as Geneva lakeside home for his parents in 1925. Because of its spare arrangement of spaces, he referred to it as a “dwelling machine.” Even today it remains the modern prototype of the “small house” that fulfills all of the functions of a residence with a minimum of floor area and seamless transitions between spaces. For the first time, this book is appearing in three separate language editions, following the original edition in which Le Corbusier documented the history of the building: with photographs, sketches and a poetic text. Access to the original photographs allowed the quality of the illustrations in this edition to be improved significantly.




How Much House?


Book Description

The space we live in, reduced to a minimum, has been fascinating us for generations - the writer Thoreau lived in a self-built hut in the forest from 1845 -1847. In 1952, Le Corbusier built a hut at the Côte d'Azur for himself and his wife. Inspired by this, Urs Peter Flückiger, together with his students, built an ecologically and economically sustainable cabin in the Texan prairie. All three projects share the idea of minimal space and its relationship with the surrounding nature. In text, drawings, and photographs, this book analyses the three projects and shows parallels and similarities. Inspired by Tolstoy's story How Much Land Does A Man Need?, the author asks: "How much house does a man need?", thereby providing a pointed contribution to the current discussion on the requirement for housing.




Ian McHarg / Dwelling in Nature


Book Description

One of the legendary figures in twentieth-century landscape design, Ian McHarg transformed the fields of landscape architecture and planning through his personal methodology, his unique curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania, and his own inspired writing. In classic texts such as his landmark 1969 book Design with Nature, McHarg painted an incredibly rich and exuberant picture of the organic world while conjuring up a vision of a more wholesome and productive metropolis. In this new entry in the popular Conversations with Students series, we are proud to make McHarg's never-before-in-print lecture "Collaboration with Nature" available for the first time. Captured on tape in the 1970s, the lecture is the sequel to Design with Nature. This is a must-read for anyone in the fields of landscape architecture, environmental science, and urban planning.