by Bill Hubbard, Jr (1995)
To speak comprehensively about building today requires that we think about building in three different ways - as an instance of architectural order, as an embodiment of values about living, and as an instrument for bringing about results. With this insight, Bill Hubbard offers architects a useful new way of thinking about the work they do. He looks at all of the groups with an interest in a work of architecture - owners, inhabitants, customers, community groups, critics and historians, architecture schools - and presents a conceptual framework in which those disparate interests are not just given a place but are honored for providing different perspectives on the building. Recalling a time when a building could be encompassed by a single way of thinking, Hubbard reviews how political, economic, and philosophical movements have fostered new roles for buildings and provided new ways of thinking about them. How can these ways of thinking talk to each other, much less have a conversation that can produce a building? To find a language for such conversation is the task Hubbard takes on, through an exploration of the concept of a sense of place. In the book's closing chapters Hubbard describes the varieties of place that we can feel, and proposes a way to characterize such feelings and render them usable by designers. In so doing, he raises a fundamental question about the practice of architecture; he proposes that theory for practice founded on the idea of creating a sense of place is not a radical departure for architects because the acts of creating place are the acts architects do, for themselves, in their daily lives.
K. Michael Hays
"This long-awaited anthology presents forty-seven of the primary texts of contemporary architecture theory, introducing each by detailing the concepts and categories necessary for its understanding and evaluation. It also presents twelve documents of projects or events that had major theoretical repercussions for the period. Several of the essays appear here in English for the first time."--Jacket.
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is one of the foremost painters of his generation. A great deal has been written about the bewildering heterogeneity of his work over the past 30 years, his seemingly willful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation and his use of a variety of methods of applying paint to canvas. And Richter himself is the master of the paradoxical statement. Although he has emphasized that he is foremost a painter and has never been a theorist, throughout his career he has issued provocative and memorable statements. Over seven years in preparation, this book makes available a selection of Richter's texts, many translated for the first time. These texts come from all periods of his career, beginning with a letter he wrote to a film company promoting the first group show of German Pop Art in 1963, in which he was a participant. There are public statements about specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics, and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods, and sources of his works from various periods. The writings are accompanied by 87 biographical illustrations from the artist's personal collection.
Geoff Pywell
The last half century has witnessed a profound confrontation with representation, the problem of the "real," and theater has provided much of the energy for this investigation. This is hardly surprising. No other medium has as its most apparent force the unsettling of perceptual realities; it is these experiences that form the core of Staging Real Things. When the real is placed alongside the apparently real each is charged by the other and the frames of experience that distinguish actual from aesthetic reality are broken down. The fracturing of apprehension is seen in the figure of the actor who is suddenly visibly astride worlds, and in the supposedly ordinary scenic elements employed in certain plays that refuse to be fully absorbed by either reality or aesthetics. This work concentrates on the actual and the aesthetic cohabiting on the special province of the stage without undue fuss but with tremendous force. Within such moments lies true theater, the tension between seeming and being stretched to a point of "cruelty.". Works discussed achieve their startling effects independent of any thematic or stylistic connection. They include, for example, a chapter on David Storey's The Contractor. Take a real tent and erect it on stage and suddenly the surface naturalism is jeopardized by the work beyond the acting that the actors have to perform. The enclosure of the fiction that naturalism aims for is here reopened without overt display. Theater then is the location where art most fruitfully rubs up against life, because life is the last thing that we expect to witness there, where the ironical, the maintenance of constant doubt and true ignorance, is given the most room. Some of the more modern experiments that deal with the mimetic contract in ways that herald a renewed sense of the possibilities of the stage are by Spalding Gray who, through his monologues, has come to typify what may be termed the speculative actor. He has managed to create a theatrical persona that enacts the basic philosophical attitude of disinterested wonder and then grafts it onto the self that playwrights like Beckett, for instance, have given up for lost. The modernist disenchantment so evident in plays like Not I re-emerges in this peculiar interstice between real and real into new illumination through actors like Gray who find positive enrichment in the performance of self that is more real than the self to whom original experience occurs. This is a beguiling ironic presence; the most vital "ghostliness" that fits acting best. . Also discussed are the experiments of the avant-garde group Squat, who challenged representation through constant redefinition of real behavior, and Kroetz's Request Concert, wherein the apparently uneventful and mundane becomes riveting through our human engagement with private, undramatic, but perceptually "real" human actions.
Eva Hagberg
Twenty-five recent residential projects from around the United States take the concept of "green living" to the next architectural level. Going beyond the simple use of sustainable materials, these houses are designed to frame a very particular vision of nature for their owners that brings them as close as possible to nature while remaining indoors. Featured are dynamic designs by today's most energetic architectural firms including ARO, Tod Williams/Billie Tsien, Diller Scofidio + Renfro as well as up-and-coming smaller firms. Houses vary in scale, complexity, and site to give a broad survey of the potential of this cutting-edge approach. Show More Show Less.