Lives In Architecture

Peter Cook has been a pivotal figure within the architecture world for over half a century. He first came to international renown in the 1960s as a founder of the radical, experimental group Archigram, winners of the 2002 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He is also former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, and Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London). Suffused with Peter’s infectious energy, enthusiasm and charm, this intriguing memoir explores major themes in architecture through the lens of his life and work. Taking the reader on a journey through his colourful and wide-ranging career, it touches on his early years and architectural education, his relationships with key figures within the architecture community and his work teaching and lecturing internationally. It also provides an inside account of his leadership of the Bartlett, for which he is frequently credited as a central figure in rescuing the reputation of a once-ailing, now world-famous, school of architecture. Featuring full-colour images of his most famous drawings, including Archigram’s ‘Plug-in City’, and built works, such as the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and the Vienna Economics and Business University’s Department of Law and Central Administration Buildings, this book is a window into the life of one of architecture’s most celebrated rebels.

Terry Farrell is one of Britain's most influential architects of the twenty-first century. Offering a compelling personal account of his life in architecture as an influential postmodern designer, architect-planner and principal of a leading global practice, this autobiography includes anecdotes and invaluable insights into Terry's life and work from the 1940s to the present day. An inside view of what it's like to be an architect at the top of his profession, this book also highlights what it takes to develop a successful international practice. Offers the inside view of what it is like to be an architect at the top of his profession, including insights into the defining projects and watershed moments of Sir Terry Farrell's career Provides the inside story on some of Terry Farrell's most significant buildings and projects, including Charing Cross Station, The MI6 Building, Alban Gate and Beijing South Railway Station Abundantly illustrated with over 80 images, including personal photos and images of key buildings.

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.

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.

This exhibition catalog accompanies the inaugural exhibition at the new UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific FIlm Archive building, designed by Diller Scofido + Renfro. Over 150 works of art in a wide range of media, as well as scientific illustrations and architectural drawings and models, explore the ways that architecture--as concept, metaphor, and practice--illuminates various aspects of life experience.

This book addresses the complex relationship between architecture and public life. It’s a study of architecture and urbanism as cultural activity that both reflects and gives shape to our social relations, public institutions and political processes. Written by an international range of contributors, the chapters address the intersection of public life and the built environment around the themes of authority and planning, the welfare state, place and identity and autonomy. The book covers a diverse range of material from Foucault’s evolving thoughts on space to land-scraping leisure centres in inter-war Belgium. It unpacks concepts such as ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ alongside themes of self-organisation and authorship. Architecture and Collective Life reflects on urban and architectural practice and historical, political and social change. As such this book will be of great interest to students and academics in architecture and urbanism as well as practicing architects.

Beyond Live/Work: the architecture of home-based work explores the old but neglected building type that combines dwelling and workplace, the ‘workhome’. It traces a previously untold architectural history illustrated by images of largely forgotten buildings. Despite having existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years in every country across the globe this dual-use building type has long gone unnoticed. This book analyses the lives and premises of 90 contemporary UK and US home-based workers from across the social spectrum and in diverse occupations. It generates a series of typologies and design considerations for the workhome that will be useful for design professionals, students, policy-makers and home-based workers themselves. In the context of a globalising economy, more women in work than ever before and enabling new technologies, the home-based workforce is growing rapidly. Demonstrating how this can be a socially, economically and environmentally sustainable working practice, this book presents the workhome as the house of the future.

The first in-depth biographical study of the brilliant but elusive architect who fundamentally redefined twentieth-century architecture. Now ranked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, Louis I. Kahn brought a reverence for history back into modern architecture while translating it into a uniquely contemporary idiom. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with colleagues, coworkers, clients, and family members and illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, this book documents the uniquely American rise of a poor immigrant to the pinnacle of the international architectural world. It illuminates the richly diverse personal relationships Kahn had with such clients as Jonas Salk and Paul Mellon, and the romantic entanglements that mystified even those closest to him. While celebrating the genius of Kahnís art, the book provides an invaluable portrait of the man who created it.