Nine Problems in the Form of a Pavilion


Book Description

CCreated as part of the 2008 tenth anniversary celebrations of the Design Research Laboratory at the Architectural Association School of Architecture.




The Evolution of Computation in Architecture


Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive overview of the pioneering works, events, and people that contributed to the paradigm shift defined by computation in architecture. Only recently has computation fostered profound new ways of designing, fabricating, constructing, and thinking about architecture. While the profession sits at the end of the beginning of this historically transformative shift, it is now possible to look back upon the rapidly maturing landscape of projects, influencers, and tools that have finally begun to catch up with the visionary thinking of the past. Readers are guided through the fascinating and fast-paced historical timeline of the development of computation in architecture. Beginning with an account of the pioneering futuristic thinkers, the authors then guide the reader through the birth of computation, the appropriation of tools and the impact of experimentation on the profession, leading into the legitimacy of research and how paradigms have been expanded. The examples and influences are presented in a way that they can be understood and built upon. This book is a must-read for students of computation in architecture as well as researchers and practicing architects thinking about how the tools we use and the ways we design our buildings and environments with them can truly impact our lives.




The Architect's Portfolio


Book Description

The creation of a successful portfolio is a vital skill needed by architectural students and professionals alike. In a highly competitive global market the accomplished representation of the architect?s work must be able to turn opportunities into triumphs. This book offers a fresh step-by-step approach to achieving a reflective, attractive and successful representation of one?s work. Structured in four stages it takes the reader through each step needed in the creation of a successful portfolio, from understanding yourself and your market, to planning, designing and producing it. Illustrated throughout in full color, the book includes case study portfolios from the USA, UK, Europe and Asia which demonstrate the steps in the process for both practitioners and students, from sketch trials to full-colour stage lay-outs. These contributions come from architects all over the world, providing terrific insight into current practices and inspiration and ideas. This is essential reading for anyone putting together an architectural portfolio.




Handbook of Research on Visual Computing and Emerging Geometrical Design Tools


Book Description

Visual computing and descriptive geometry are multidisciplinary fields addressing the handling of images, 3D models, and other computer graphics. These ideas are experiencing a revival due to emergent technologies and applications available to developers. Based in traditional forms of design and architecture, these fields are currently experiencing a bounty of new research based on old principles. The Handbook of Research on Visual Computing and Emerging Geometrical Design Tools seeks to add to this knowledge base by considering these technologies from a designer’s perspective rather than reiterating the principles of computer science. It combines aspects of geometry and representation with emerging tools for CAD, generation, and visualization while addressing the digital heritage of such fields. This book is an invaluable resource for developers, students of both graphic and computer-generated design, researchers, and designers.




Informed Form Generation


Book Description

Over the past decades we witnessed a tremendous shift in the principles of architectural design based on the advancement of computer aided design and manufacturing. Computation in architecture came with a whole new set of techniques as well as theories that did change the way we build and design today. This research investigates ways to embed computational simulation and optimisation into architectural design processes at an early, conceptual stage. Simulation and optimization are not seen as a post-design strategy to improve performance aspects of a well-developed design, but rather as design strategies in their own rights. Therefore, design approaches employing simulation and optimization were developed, tested and discussed. Conditions and prerequisites for successfully embedding simulation and optimization into architectural design processes were formulated and benefits were derived. Design approaches that use digital simulation and optimization are characterised by not favouring rational form finding above intuitive form making, or vice versa – they rather support informed design decisions. Therefore, Informed Form Generation is established as a design approach within this thesis. It is not one specific, universally applicable process, but rather comprises a category of approaches and constitutes an attitude.




Immortal Sovereign of Ninth Heavens


Book Description

In the Tian Yuan Continent, there were countless sects. There were all sorts of talented people who were fighting for victory! The genius of Xue Yu had appeared out of nowhere! Cultivating the unparalleled divine art, fusing with the soul of a heaven defying dragon, battling the heroes of all four sides, and breaking through the Nine Heavens Devil Seal! Hand in hand with a beautiful woman, battling in the Nine Prefectures. Once a roaming dragon appeared, who could contend against it? 




Architecture


Book Description

A superb visual reference to the principles of architecture Now including interactive CD-ROM! For more than thirty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has been the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated Third Edition features expanded sections on circulation, light, views, and site context, along with new considerations of environmental factors, building codes, and contemporary examples of form, space, and order. This classic visual reference helps both students and practicing architects understand the basic vocabulary of architectural design by examining how form and space are ordered in the built environment.? Using his trademark meticulous drawing, Professor Ching shows the relationship between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultural boundaries. By looking at these seminal ideas, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order encourages the reader to look critically at the built environment and promotes a more evocative understanding of architecture. In addition to updates to content and many of the illustrations, this new edition includes a companion CD-ROM that brings the book's architectural concepts to life through three-dimensional models and animations created by Professor Ching.




Experiencing Architecture, second edition


Book Description

A classic examination of superb design through the centuries. Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience. In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use, resulting in “a remarkably suitable comeliness.” While we cannot return to a former age, Rasmussen notes, we can still design spaces that are beautiful and useful by seeking to understand architecture as an art form that must be experienced. An understanding of good design comes not only from one's professional experience of architecture as an abstract, individual pursuit, but also from one's shared, everyday experience of architecture in real time—its particular use of light, color, shape, scale, texture, rhythm and sound. Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered “what instrument the architect plays on.”




Maintenance Architecture


Book Description

An inventive examination of a crucial but neglected aspect of architecture, by an architect writing to architects. Maintenance plays a crucial role in the production and endurance of architecture, yet architects for the most part treat maintenance with indifference. The discipline of architecture values the image of the new over the lived-in, the photogenic empty and stark building over a messy and labored one. But the fact is: homes need to be cleaned and buildings and cities need to be maintained, and architecture no matter its form cannot escape from such realities. In Maintenance Architecture, Hilary Sample offers an inventive examination of the architectural significance of maintenance through a series of short texts and images about specific buildings, materials, and projects. Although architects have seldom choose to represent maintenance—imagining their work only from conception to realization—artists have long explored subjects of endurance and permanence in iconic architecture. Sample explores a range of art projects—by artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Jeff Wall, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—to recast the problem of maintenance for architecture. How might architectural design and discourse change as a building cycle expands to include “post-occupancy”? Sample looks particularly at the private home, exhibition pavilion, and high-rise urban building, giving special attention to buildings constructed with novel and developing materials, technologies, and precise detailing in relation to endurance. These include Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House (1929), the Lever House (1952), the U.S. Steel Building (1971), and the O-14 (2010). She considers the iconography of skyscrapers; maintenance workforces, both public and private; labor-saving technology and devices; and contemporary architectural projects and preservation techniques that encompass the afterlife of buildings. A selection of artworks make the usually invisible aspects of maintenance visible, from Martha Rosler's Cleaning the Drapes to Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's The Kiss.




The Problem of Context


Book Description

The apparently simple notion that it is contextualization and invocation of context that give form to our interpretations raises important questions about context definition. Moreover, different disciplines involved in the elucidation and interpretation of meanings construe context indifferent ways. How do these ways differ? And what analytical strategies are adopted in order to suggest that the relevant context is "self-evident"? The notion of context has received less attention than is due such a central, key concept in social anthropology, as well as in other related disciplines. This collection of contributions from a group of leading social anthropologists and anthropological linguists addresses the question of how the idea of context is constructed, invoked, and deployed in the interpretations put forward by social anthropologists. The ethnographic focus embraces peoples from regions such as Bali, Europe, Malawi, and Zaire. Primarily theoretical in its aims, the work also draws on expertise from anthropological linguistics and philosophy in order to set the issue as much in a comparative disciplinary perspective as in a comparative cross-cultural one.