Materials Form And Architecture

"First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Laurence King Publishing Ltd, London."--T.p. verso.

Composed of a series of essays, this book deals with the broad issues affecting the nature of architectural materials and provides a focused review of the state of the art materials. It also provides designers with the tools they need to evaluate and select from the thousands of different materials that are available to them. The book is organized into three sections; ‘Time’ looks at how the materials used in architectural design have changed over the years showing how we have come to use the materials we do in contemporary design. ‘Materials’ covers all five material families; metals, polymers, ceramics, composites and natural materials giving in depth information on their properties, behavior, origins and uses in design. It also introduces a review of the cutting edge research for each family. ‘Systems’ outlines the technical design-orientated research that uncovers how new architectural assemblies can be designed and engineered. All of this practical advice is given along with many real case examples illustrating how this knowledge and information has been, and can be, used in architectural design.

Architecture.

Blaine Brownell s best-selling Transmaterial series has introduced designers to hundreds of emergent materials that have the potential to transform our built environment. In our new Architecture Brief, Material Strategies, Brownell shows architects how creative applications of these materials achieve such transformations. Chapters based on fundamental material categories examine historical precedents, current opportunities, and future environmental challenges. Case studies featuring detailed illustrations showcase pioneering buildings from today s most forward-thinking architectural firms.

A superb visual reference to the principles of architecture Now including interactive CD-ROM! For more than thirty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has been the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated Third Edition features expanded sections on circulation, light, views, and site context, along with new considerations of environmental factors, building codes, and contemporary examples of form, space, and order. This classic visual reference helps both students and practicing architects understand the basic vocabulary of architectural design by examining how form and space are ordered in the built environment.? Using his trademark meticulous drawing, Professor Ching shows the relationship between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultural boundaries. By looking at these seminal ideas, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order encourages the reader to look critically at the built environment and promotes a more evocative understanding of architecture. In addition to updates to content and many of the illustrations, this new edition includes a companion CD-ROM that brings the book's architectural concepts to life through three-dimensional models and animations created by Professor Ching.

The third book in the series from Columbia University is focused on metals. Metals, as surface or structure as the generators of space play a role in nearly every strain of modernization in architecture. They define complete geographies of work, production, and political life. Non-architectural metals delivered in automobiles, and hard goods in the United States and worldwide have all been sourced as the engines of the sprawling late twentieth-century city in all of its forms. But in the received aspects of architectural history, metals, and in particular steel, remain less diluted; they are presented as intrinsic to the profession as material precedes concepts they are carriers of architectural meaning. Few concepts are as central in structural engineering as the ability of a material to sustain plastic deformation under tensile stress the standardization of historically known deformation limits or ductile properties in most materials allows architects and engineers to keep the analysis of structure within known parameters of finite element analysis rather then materials science. If the goal is avoid fracture, the boundaries are set and the limits of ductility are observed. Post-Ductility refers to the literal aspects of material behavior in this case of metals but also of aspects of architectural and urban space that are measured by less verifiable but nonetheless real quotients of stress and strain. It is the tension and compression of space that gives form or coherence to form. In either the case of engineering and architecture, formerly daunting degrees of risk seem to have been diminished; new levels of sophistication in calculation lower the risk tolerance for fracture, while more metaphoric readings of limits in architectural and urban space seem to have been long surpassed, at times with abandon. The counter-effort has been quite strong if not successful: there are those that want to recreate dense cities by means of compression and there are immense forces of spatial extension by way of economics, communication and transit. Space is pulled to elastic limits and made thin as highly malleable materials such as gold or lead as it is also often re-compressed as forms of urban density. If metals are a significant origin for architecture and indeed whole cities—from buildings to automobiles and labor, then what are the limits or equations that offer a new evaluation of both metals, but also of material in a wider sense, as a determining component of the built world? What does an engineer and architect bring to this arena in both local and global circumstances?

This volume illuminates both the interaction of these technologies and the role of materiality in research, design and practice, and provides an overview of representative design projects and relevant theories.

Material Imagination in Architecture draws on history and the visual arts, and contemporary architecture to explore this popular theme in architectural practice and education. In the context of a discipline increasingly driven by digital production, this text explores architecture and making and the diverse influences on the material reality of architectural form: it argues that the crafts, fabrication and assemblage of its making remain vital elements of contemporary architectural language. This broad-ranging text bridges the gap between a technical or otherwise fragmentary knowledge of materials of the specialist, and the tacit or instinctive understanding of materials that the artist, sculptor or architect may have. It identifies key material themes pertinent to contemporary architectural debate and develops a discourse about future practice that is framed by environmental imperatives and grounded in a historical understanding of the meaning and use of materials. Material iconology in architecture is a well-established tradition and this book draws on that background to investigate the possibilities, and limits, of using materials in contemporary design to communicate the themes and contexts of an architectural project, a material’s relationship to context, and to the history of practices that belong to the traditions of making buildings. Each theme is explored in case studies from twelve countries around the world, including the UK, USA, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia and China.