Architecture As Living Act

This book, the first monograph on Leonardo Ricci's work, uses archive materials, some of which have never been published, to investigate the entire range of his activity by examining some of his most interesting projects, and putting them into the context of the current architectural panorama. His professional activity in the passionate climate of post-war reconstruction in Italy, his communitarian projects and experimental family residences, his book Anonymous (20th Century) in which he analyzed with an "existentialist" approach his work in the areas of painting, architecture, and urban planning, his visionary projects for "Earth-City" macrostructures, his innovative approach to the spatial organization of public institutions in his last projects, every step of Ricci's work was always coherently connected to a basic aim: to translate into an architectural form the dynamism of phenomena and the incessant flow of life. The book investigates Leonardo Ricci's practical and theoretical approach to architectural design, giving this exceptional figure the recognition he deserves within the panorama of Italian and international architecture following the Second World War.

Good architecture is no longer about simply designing a building as an isolated object, but about meeting head-on the forces that are shaping today’s world. Architecture Is a Social Act: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects [LOHA] addresses how the discipline can be used as a tool to engage in politics, economics, aesthetics, and smart growth by promoting social equity, human interaction, and cultural evolution. The book features 28 projects drawn across LOHA’s nearly 30-year history, a selection that underscores the direct connection between the development of consciously designed buildings and wider efforts to tackle issues that are relevant in a rapidly changing world. LOHA’s projects range from tiny Santa Monica storefronts to vast urban plans in Detroit, Michigan, and Raleigh, North Carolina. From activating main streets, to designing housing of all shapes and sizes, to bringing hope to the homeless, to developing strategic plans for the future growth of cities, all of the work featured is represented within a larger social framework. Each case study is evidence of LOHA’s mastery of scale, form, light, and space that gives people a true sense of place and belonging. Architecture Is a Social Act: Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects [LOHA] points the way ahead for both people and architecture. Features A collection of 28 projects completed over nearly three decades gives readers thorough insight – both visually and conceptually – into the work of LA and Detroit-based firm Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects. An important contribution in a post-pandemic world, the book’s main goal is to spark creative ideas and important questions about how architecture can be used in political engagement, smart growth and social structures, in order to improve our urban landscapes and elevate the human condition. Texts by O’Herlihy (Foreword), Frances Anderton (Introduction), Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne and Greg Goldin (project narratives and Afterword) are accompanied by illustrations and renderings by LOHA, and photography by Iwan Baan, Lawrence Anderson, Paul Vu, and others. The book is organized chronologically (starting in the 1990s and ending in 2020) and broken up into six sections, each representing a tipping point for the practice – periods in which LOHA’s work was launched in new directions that brought new sets of challenges, all of which parallel significant historical events. Readers will gain insight into the practice’s process when engaging a new project/site; understanding its history and context, and how it is informed by the culture and ecology of the people who live there.

Elegantly written and filled with lush, full-color photos, this is the first in-depth portrait of H.H. Richardson, the greatest American architect of the 19th century and a man whose magnetic, colorful personality was equal to his genius. 150 photos, 100 in full color.

This book offers a wealth of interdisciplinary approaches to urbanization strategies in architecture centered on growing concerns about the future of cities and their impacts on essential elements of architectural optimization, livability, energy consumption and sustainability. It portrays the urban condition in architectural terms, as well as the living condition in human terms, both of which can be optimized by mathematical modeling as well as mathematical calculation and assessment. Special features include: • new research on the construction of future cities and smart cities • discussions of sustainability and new technologies designed to advance ideas to future city developments Graduate students and researchers in architecture, engineering, mathematical modeling, and building physics will be engaged by the contributions written by eminent international experts from a variety of disciplines including architecture, engineering, modeling, optimization, and related fields.

A bold and unprecedented look at a cutting-edge movement in architecture Toward a Living Architecture? is the first book-length critique of the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Starting from the assertion that we should take generative architects’ rhetoric of biology and sustainability seriously, Christina Cogdell examines their claims from the standpoints of the sciences they draw on—complex systems theory, evolutionary theory, genetics and epigenetics, and synthetic biology. She reveals significant disconnects while also pointing to approaches and projects with significant potential for further development. Arguing that architectural design today often only masquerades as sustainable, Cogdell demonstrates how the language of some cutting-edge practitioners and educators can mislead students and clients into thinking they are getting something biological when they are not. In a narrative that moves from the computational toward the biological and from current practice to visionary futures, Cogdell uses life-cycle analysis as a baseline for parsing the material, energetic, and pollution differences between different digital and biological design and construction approaches. Contrary to green-tech sustainability advocates, she questions whether quartzite-based silicon technologies and their reliance on rare earth metals as currently designed are sustainable for much longer, challenging common projections of a computationally designed and manufactured future. Moreover, in critiquing contemporary architecture and science from a historical vantage point, she reveals the similarities between eugenic design of the 1930s and the aims of some generative architects and engineering synthetic biologists today. Each chapter addresses a current architectural school or program while also exploring a distinct aspect of the corresponding scientific language, theory, or practice. No other book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice. Based on the author’s years of field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this rare, field-building book does no less than definitively, unsparingly explain the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.

The Living Tradition of Architecture explores the depth of architecture as it takes flesh in the living tradition of building, dwelling and thinking. This is a timely appraisal of the field by some of its foremost contributors. Beyond modern misconceptions about tradition only relating to things past and conducive to a historicist vision, the essays in this volume reveal tradition as a living continuity and common ground of reference for architecture. This collection of essays brings together world-leading scholars, practicing architects and educators, Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Christian Frost, Dagmar Weston, Daniel Libeskind, David Leatherbarrow, Eric Parry, Gabriele Bryant, Joseph Rykwert, Karsten Harries, Kenneth Frampton, Mari Hvattum, Patrick Lynch, Robin Middleton, Stephen Witherford, and Werner Oechslin, in a single celebratory publication edited by José de Paiva and dedicated to Dalibor Vesely. This book provides a unique initiative reflecting the group’s understanding of the contemporary situation, revealing an ongoing debate of central relevance to architecture.

This book presents drawings created between 1972 and 1987 by Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind and Thom Mayne with Andrew Zago.

"Never before have so many buildings been constructed as today, and never has architecture had so many technological and design possibilities at its disposal. And yet there is a sense of unease about contemporary architecture. In their book, Sergei Tchoban and Vladimir Sedov show how in modern times we have lost the balance between outstanding works of architecture and the background structures that surround them, with every building striving to assert itself in relation to all the others - to drown them out if it can. Yet the modern age is certainly capable of developing a harmony of contrasts - it has everything it needs at its disposal. After taking the reader on a foray through 2,500 years of architectural history, the authors arrive at the anomaly of modernism. They show what contemporary architecture must take into account if it is to achieve a satisfactory overall architectural impression that is harmonious in an entirely new way"--Back cover.