Inessential Colors

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers' natural signs, military engineers' conventions, and, finally, painters' affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public. Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice. Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.

Colours make the map: they affect the map’s materiality, content, and handling. With a wide range of approaches, 14 case studies from various disciplines deal with the colouring of maps from different geographical regions and periods. Connected by their focus on the (hand)colouring of the examined maps, the authors demonstrate the potential of the study of colour to enhance our understanding of the material nature and production of maps and the historical, social, geographical and political context in which they were made. Contributors are: Diana Lange, Benjamin van der Linde, Jörn Seemann, Tomasz Panecki, Chet Van Duzer, Marian Coman, Anne Christine Lien, Juliette Dumasy-Rabineau, Nadja Danilenko, Sang-hoon Jang, Anna Boroffka, Stephanie Zehnle, Haida Liang, Sotiria Kogou, Luke Butler, Elke Papelitzky, Richard Pegg, Lucia Pereira Pardo, Neil Johnston, Rose Mitchell, and Annaleigh Margey.

Batchelor coins the term "chromophobia"--A fear of corruption or contamination through color--in a meditation on color in western culture. Batchelor analyzes the history of, and the motivations behind, chromophobia, from its beginnings through examples of nineteenth-century literature, twentieth-century architecture and film to Pop art, minimalism and the art and architecture of the present day. He argues that there is a tradition of resistance to colour in the West, exemplified by many attempts to purge color from art, literature and architecture. Batchelor seeks to analyze the motivations behind chromophobia, considering the work of writers and philosophers who have used color as a significant motif, and offering new interpretations of familiar texts and works of art.

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

Leading scholars historicize and theorize technology’s role in architectural design Although the question of technics pervades the contemporary discipline of architecture, there are few critical analyses on the topic. Design Technics fills this gap, arguing that the technical dimension of design has often been flattened into the broader celebratory rhetoric of innovation. Bringing together leading scholars in architectural and design history, the volume’s contributors situate these tools on a broader epistemological and chronological canvas. The essays here construct histories—some panoramic and others unfolding around a specific episode—of seven techniques regularly used by the designer in the architectural studio today: rendering, modeling, scanning, equipping, specifying, positioning, and repeating. Starting with observations about the epistemological changes that have unfolded in the discipline in recent decades but seeking to offer a more expansive meaning for technics, the volume casts new light on concepts such as form, experience, and image that have played central roles in historical architectural discourses. Among the questions addressed: How was the concept of form immanent in practices of scanning since the late nineteenth century? What was the historical relationship between rendering and experience in Enlightenment discourses? How did practices of specifying reconfigure the distinction between intellectual and manual labor? What kind of rationality is inherent in the designer’s constant clicking of the mouse in front of her screen? In addressing these and other questions, this engaging and timely collection thereby proposes technics as a site for historical and philosophical reflection not only for those engaged in architectural design but also for any scholar working in the humanities today. Contributors: Lucia Allais, Edward Eigen, Orit Halpern, John Harwood, Matthew C. Hunter, and Michael Osman.

The body has become an increasingly significant concept in recent years and this Reader offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories surrounding the issue. This broad consideration of the body presents an engagement with a range of social concerns, from the processes of racialization to the vagaries of fashion and performance art, enacted as surgery on the body. Individual sections cover issues such as: the body and social (dis)order bodies and identities bodily norms bodies in health and dis-ease bodies and technologies. Containing an extensive critical introduction, contributions from key figures such as Butler, Sedgwick, Martin Scheper-Huges, Haraway and Gilroy, and a series of introductions summarizing each section, this Reader offers students a valuable practical guide and a thorough grounding in the fascinating topic of the body.

This book investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today and textile furnishings have long been used in interiors. Beyond its use as a material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. The essays edited and compiled here, work across disciplines to provide new insights into the enduring relationship between textiles and architecture. The contributors critically explore the spatial and material qualities of textiles as well as cultural and political significance of textile artifacts, patterns, and metaphors in architecture. Textile in Architecture is organized into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political, religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors” explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. Including cases from Morocco, Samoa, France, India, the UK, Spain, the Ancient Andes and the Ottoman Empire, this is essential reading for any student or researcher interested in textiles in architecture through the ages.

Architects draw for a variety of purposes; they draw to assimilate places and precedents, to generate ideas, to develop a concept into a consistent project in a team, to communicate ideas and solutions to patrons and clients, and to guide building contractors during the construction stages, as well as to produce further elaborations in order to publish their project in a treatise, a journal or their own portfolio. Most importantly, architects draw to think and to manage complexity in a visual way. By taking into account innovative and interdisciplinary uses of architectural drawing in the design process, both historical and current, the collection of chapters and interviews in this book frames a new critical perspective and a uniquely contextual appreciation of drawing as a way to encourage spatial thinking and practice in architecture and urbanism. The authors take the discussion to a new level of philosophical sophistication, while also considering drawing in relation to a series of specific engagements with urban development, planning, and architecture.