Meta Realism In Architecture

Renato Severino, architect, graduated in the Fifties at the University of Florence with Adalberto Libera, started a shining career very young, thanks to his high-level skill that made him enter the upper range of italian architectural teams of that period. He worked with Adalberto Libera and Pier Luigi Nervi and, in 1964, at just 34 years old, he designed the Sub-Saharan Africa’s largest university campus in Cape Coast, Ghana. His interest in light technology led him to build the Italsider’s resort of Cesana Torinese (1963), one of the first responsive high-tech architecture in Italy. In the United States, where he moved in 1968, his professional activity gained a worldwide extension, with works in America, Latin America, Africa and Europe. He published and researched extensively on sustainability and industrialized systems. In 1970 he wrote Equipotential Space. Freedom in Architecture, a passionate vision of architecture and technology as a means to enable society to shape and control the environment. Severino’s architecture and his research into new urban configurations make him an architect ahead of his time, who has envisaged many ongoing and future concerns. His work and his vision of the future enrich the history of architecture with yet another protagonist who has challenged Modernism beyond the boundaries of its time. This is his first autobiography that revisits all his work, revealing the development of a period of great changes.

For almost two decades the work of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti has remained at the forefront of theoretical production. Their rigorously detailed and exquisitely drawn projects characterize an attitude of aesthetic realism towards materials, construction, function, and the cultural role of architecture. Yet the conditions they address, and the effects they produce, are unprecedented. Their projects synthesize seemingly incompatible images, uses, and typologies. Unprecedented Realism is not an illustration of theory. Rather, what emerges is a constructive theory of architecture that understands the process of design itself as a distinct mode of knowledge—as theoretical research that is still irreducibly architectural. Unprecedented Realism presents both buildings and urban infrastructures: Steps of Providence, RI; Entrance for Cranbrook, Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; Carnegie-Mellon University Center, Pittsburgh; Pershing Square, Los Angeles; and Times Square, New York City. Along with the analytic text of K. Michael Hays, the volume includes critical essays by Alan Colquhoun, George Baird, Fars el-Dahdah, and Rodolphe el-Khoury (please see the Table of Contents).

Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces studies the performative aspects of the early modern stage, paying special attention to the overlooked complexities of audience experience. Examining the period's philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.

This book proposes a new critical relationship between computation and architecture, developing a history and theory of representation in architecture to understand and unleash potential means to open up creativity in the field. Historically, architecture has led to spatial representation. Today, computation has established new representational paradigms that can be compared to spatial representations, such as the revolution of perspective in the Renaissance. Architects now use software, robotics, and fabrication tools with very little understanding and participation in how these tools influence, revolutionize, and determine both architecture and its construction today. Why does the discipline of architecture not have a higher degree of authorship in the conception and development of computational technologies that define spatial representation? This book critically explores the relationship between history, theory, and cultural criticism. Lorenzo-Eiroa positions new understandings through parallel historical sections and theories of many revolutionary representational architecture canons displaced by conventional spatial projection. He identifies the architects, artists, mathematicians, and philosophers that were able to revolutionize their disciplines through the development of new technologies, new systems of representation, and new lenses to understand reality. This book frames the discussion by addressing new means to understand and expand architecture authorship in relation to the survey, information, representation, higher dimensional space, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence – in the pursuit of activating an architecture of information. This will be important reading for upper-level students and researchers of architecture and architectural theory, especially those with a keen interest in computational design and robotic fabrication.

Have industrial-age technologies and visual discourses transformed us into spectators of the real, and can realist fiction make that transformation visible to us? This book brings Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and an array of cultural criticism into dialogue with novels by Hardy, Forster, Woolf, Rushdie, Carey and Barnes to foreground literary realism’s critique of visual culture, including Gothic architectural revival, neoclassicism, tourism, historical pageantry, postcolonial cinema and photography, museums, preservationism, urbanism and artisanal neo-folk movements. Barnaby advances the concept of meta-spectacle to distinguish realist fiction that engages ethically with visual discourses from realist-ic fiction that reproduces the visible veneer of reality for aesthetic consumption. He highlights the limitations of artistic critiques of spectacle, considers their resilience toward a culture industry that continuously repackages iconoclasm as iconicity, and reflects upon the process of reorienting the reader to comprehend realist gestures. By heightening the capacity to recognize our own immersion within objectified representations of the real, Realist Critiques of Visual Culture demonstrates how literary realism remains vital within a society that is so deeply invested in visually replicating and archiving lived experience.

The Future of Information Architecture examines issues surrounding why information is processed, stored and applied in the way that it has, since time immemorial. Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many scholars in human history, the recurrent debate on the explanation of the most basic categories of information (eg space, time causation, quality, quantity) has been misconstrued, to the effect that there exists some deeper categories and principles behind these categories of information - with enormous implications for our understanding of reality in general. To understand this, the book is organised in to four main parts: Part I begins with the vital question concerning the role of information within the context of the larger theoretical debate in the literature. Part II provides a critical examination of the nature of data taxonomy from the main perspectives of culture, society, nature and the mind. Part III constructively invesitgates the world of information network from the main perspectives of culture, society, nature and the mind. Part IV proposes six main theses in the authors synthetic theory of information architecture, namely, (a) the first thesis on the simpleness-complicatedness principle, (b) the second thesis on the exactness-vagueness principle (c) the third thesis on the slowness-quickness principle (d) the fourth thesis on the order-chaos principle, (e) the fifth thesis on the symmetry-asymmetry principle, and (f) the sixth thesis on the post-human stage.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th METAVERSE 2022 conference, held as part of the Services Conference Federation, SCF 2022, in December 2022 in Honolulu, USA. The 7 full papers and 3 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. The papers cover topics in the field of Advertising Services, Banking Services, Broadcasting & Cable TV Service, Business Services, Communications Services, Government Services, Real Estate Operations Services, Schools and Education Services, Healthcare Services, and much more.