Architecture theory since 1968

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Massimo Cacciari

"Massimo Cacciari, one of the most influential social philosophers in Italy today, is the founder of the trend of criticism known as "negative thought" that focuses on the failure of traditional logic to explicate the problems of modernity. This book, which introduces his writings to an English-speaking audience, provides a striking social and philosophical account of the twentieth-century metropolis. Patrizia Lombardo's extensive introduction situates Cacciari's thought within the milieu of Italian political activism and philosophy between the 1960s and the 1980s, from his collaboration on the leftist journal Contropiano to his long association with Manfredo Tafuri.". "Cacciari studies the relation between philosophy and modern architecture and applies the thinking of avant-garde architects, artists, and writers to the social and political problems raised by technological society. He begins by defining the modern metropolis, using the terms and ideas of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, but revealing where their frameworks are limited. He then examines the work of Adolf Loos and other architects and designers in early twentieth-century Vienna, showing how their architecture and criticism expose the alienation and utopianism in notions of the organic city. Cacciari demonstrates how architecture intersects with the city and the state but also with the interior of the private dwelling and with its resistance to the external world. Bringing together philosophy, sociology, urbanism, labor history, economics, and aesthetics, he helps us comprehend via these disciplines a crucial period in the history of modernity."--BOOK JACKET.

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Bill Hubbard, Jr

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.

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[exhibition curated by Tim Wilcox

"This book brings together for the first time Sean Scully's images of the walls of Aran, revealing the unexpected yet monumental beauty of these centuries-old structures that meander across the austere and exposed landscape. In form and spirit, the photographs of the walls, with their horizontal and vertical shards of limestone, shed light on Scully's own sensibilities as an artist, revealing a creative process expressed through abstract shapes yet rooted in the material world. They also capture the stillness and serenity of this rugged, timeless place on the edge of Europe."--Jacket.

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Brad Collins

"Featuring the international residential, corporate, educational, and institutional work that has positioned the firm among the world's architectural elite, this look at Gwathmey Siegel's thirty-five-year career is unprecedented in its scope and detail. The twenty-six projects documented here with full-color photography, drawings, and insightful project descriptions - including the seminal Gwathmey Residence and Studio (1965), the controversial renovation and addition to Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum (1992), and the David Geffen Company Building in Beverly Hills (2000) - document the evolution of the firm's work from the highly disciplined modernism of their earliest houses to the investigative collage assemblages of their most recent work. This volume reveals the complete Gwathmey Siegel design philosophy and certifies why their work, along with that of Richard Meier, Robert A. M. Stern, Frank Gehry, and Michael Graves, is among American architecture's most important."--BOOK JACKET.