Perfect Acts Of 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.

Monika Mitasova interviewed an influential group of current American theorists, historians and practitioners proposing critical and projective architecture, respectively, which forms the first book that brings those perspectives together to show the state of current critical and projective theory, practice and new alternative actions of designing architecture. Interviewed theorists: Kenneth Frampton, K. Michael Hays, Mark Wigley, Mary Mcleod, Beatriz Colomina, Stan Allen, Joan Ockman, Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Michael Speaks, Jeffrey Kipnis, Sylvia Lavin.

"Pulsation in Architecture" highlights the paradigm shift in spatial perception due to the intense use of computational techniques and the ability to morph massive amounts of data into spatial patterns. This highly illustrative survey includes Kipnis, Eisenman, Lynn, UNStudio, and others.

The basic form of the American sports stadium has not changed much in the last century. But in an unexpected and controversial act of daring, the Arizona Cardinals football team selected awarding-winning architect and intellectual provocateur Peter Eisenman to design their stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Opened in the summer of 2006, Eisenman's latest work rejects all traditional and staid notions of the sports stadium. Inspired by and sectioned like a barrel cactus, its shell is composed of huge, steel paraboloid sections. The domed stadium boasts a steel-and-fabric retractable roof that allows lightto penetrate when closed while maintaining an airy feel inside. The most ground-breaking feature of the design is its grass roll-out field, which remains outside the stadium until game time, when it is rolled in on steel wheel sets powered by small electric motors. Eisenman Architects, the eighth volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at a contemporary masterpiece and a landmark of excellence in civic and sports architecture.

Dreams + Disillusions explores the plethora of ideas and ideologies that have shaped and reshaped cities in profound ways. However, unlike a conventional title on the history of urbanism and architecture, its research fluctuates between the world of concrete reality and the multiple universes that exist in lucid prose, poetic visions, and the outrageous imaginations of history’s greatest and most (in)famous minds. In their thoughts are the foundations for political trends and new civilisations, alternative mappings and unlikely phenomena. The six chapters reveal dreams that were fundamental to the origin of great cities, underpinning the stories of the many lives within; and how, through circumstance or manipulation, fortunate coincidence or planned perfection, desires are sometimes left defeated and disillusioned. Myth and belief. Tradition and logic. Revolution and marginalisation. Ignorance and hubris. Sins and excess. Seasons and climate. Continuously interacting, shifting to enlighten and to enrage, these themes combine critical thinking with deep-rooted influences and new agencies that are a true sign of the times. The 18 illustrated speculations provide an abundance of curious imaginings, diverse provocations and satirical criticism. While there are distinctions between dreams and disillusions, could virtues be made of sins, or sensitivity be borne from hubris? Could progress advocate tradition, or should we re-attempt revolutions formerly experienced as disillusionments? Whether by bold gestures or by subtle attrition, cities are continually re-written crucibles for the human condition. In this book, we develop a better understanding of the discourse of cities tailored to the determining factors of climate, resources, and humanity’s idiosyncrasies to address a world in crisis.

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.

This book explores the notion of mapping in architectural discourse. First locating, positioning and theorizing mapping, it then makes explicit the relationship between research and design in architecture through cartography and spatial analysis. It proposes three distinct modalities: tool, operation and concept, showing how these methods lead to discursive aspects of architectural work and highlighting mapping as an instrument in developing architectural form. It emphasizes the importance of place and time as fundamental terms with which to understand the role of mapping. An investigation into architectural discourse, this book will appeal to academics and researchers within the discipline with a particular interest in theory, history and cartography.

Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project suggests that space can become a storyteller: if so, plenty of fleeting stories can be read in the space of modernity, where repetition and the unexpected cross-pollinate. In Space as Storyteller, Laura Chiesa explores several stories across a wide range of time that narrate spatial jumps, from Benjamin's tangential take on the cityscape, the experimentalism of Futurist theatricality, the multiple and potential atlases narrated by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, and the posturban thought and practice of Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas/OMA. Space as Storyteller diverts attention from isolated disciplines and historical or geographical contexts toward transdisciplinary encounters that mobilize the potential to invent new spaces of comparison, a potential the author describes as "architecturability."