Surface Architecture

A study of the building surface, architecture's primary instrument of identity and engagement with its surroundings. Visually, many contemporary buildings either reflect their systems of production or recollect earlier styles and motifs. This division between production and representation is in some ways an extension of that between modernity and tradition. In this book, David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi explore ways that design can take advantage of production methods such that architecture is neither independent of nor dominated by technology. Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi begin with the theoretical and practical isolation of the building surface as the subject of architectural design. The autonomy of the surface, the "free facade," presumes a distinction between the structural and nonstructural elements of the building, between the frame and the cladding. Once the skin of the building became independent of its structure, it could just as well hang like a curtain, or like clothing. The focus of the relationship between structure and skin is the architectural surface. In tracing the handling of this surface, the authors examine both contemporary buildings and those of the recent past. Architects discussed include Albert Kahn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alejandro de la Sota, Robert Venturi, Jacques Herzog, and Pierre de Meuron. The properties of a building's surface—whether it is made of concrete, metal, glass, or other materials—are not merely superficial; they construct the spatial effects by which architecture communicates. Through its surfaces a building declares both its autonomy and its participation in its surroundings.

Surface components in fungal cells include cell wall molecules and, in certain cases, capsular structures. In pathogens, these components are responsible for key events during interaction with the host. These events include recognition of pathogens by the immune system and generation of damage to host cells and tissues. The molecular nature of surface structures in fungi is vast and may include (glyco)proteins, polysaccharides, lipids and pigments. Many of them have been strictly associated with the antifungal immune response, as well as with steps of fungal adhesion and dissemination during interaction with host cells. For many fungal pathogens, surface composition and architecture are determinant for either disease progression or control. The diversity of the composition of the cell surface and its molecular architecture are believed to include targets for the action of new antifungals, as well as immunogens with potential to interfere with fungal diseases in favor of the host.

Ornament is currently acquiring a renewed status in architecture. As contemporary technologies of design and fabrication introduce unprecedented opportunities to intertwine the constructive logics and expressive articulations of buildings, ornament has re-emerged as a means to explore the interactions between function and decoration, volume and surface, structure and envelope. This book gives a systematic account of the technologies employed in the production of ornament and the strategies of its application today, examining a range of international built examples. Architects with particularly advanced approaches to the question of ornament contribute reports and reflections on their experiences: Sam Jacob of Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT), London; Andreas Hild of Hild und K Architekten, Munich; and Alejandro Zaera-Polo of Foreign Office Architects (FOA), London.

Departing from the simple question Why do we heat and cool buildings with air?, this book focuses on the technique of thermally active surfaces. This technique uses water in building surfaces to heat and cool bodies - a method that is at once more efficient, comfortable, and healthy. This technique thus imbues the fabric of the building with a more poignant role: its structure is also its primary heating and cooling system. In doing so, this approach triggers a cascading set of possibilities for how well buildings are built, how well they perform, and how long they will last: pointing the way toward multiple forms of sustainability. The first section of the book contrasts the parallel histories of thermally active surfaces and air conditioning. These histories explain the material, social, marketing, and technical unfolding of building technology in the twentieth century as a means to explain why we build the way we do and why that will change in the new century. The next section of the book covers the physiological and thermodynamic basis of thermally active surfaces. This section is designed for engineers and architects to grasp the logic and advantages of this technique. This section also includes a chapter on the de-fragmentation of buildings and design practice that is inherent in building with thermally active surfaces. The final section covers a series of contemporary case studies that demonstrate the efficacy of this technique. The project list currently includes Kunsthaus in Bregenz by Peter Zumthor, Zollverein School of Management in Essen, Germany by SANAA, and Linked Hybrid in Beijing by Steven Holl, amongst others.

Since antiquity through to the present, architecture and the pictorial arts (paintings, photography, graphic arts) have not been rigidly separated but interrelated - the one informing the other, and establishing patterns of creation and reception. In the Classical tradition, the education of the architect and artist has always stressed this relationship between the arts, although modern scholarship has too often treated them as separate disciplines.

On Surface and Place is a rich and poetic exploration of surfaces which foregrounds their significance in our understanding and experience of place. Adopting weaving as its overarching metaphor, it departs from Gottfried Semper’s discussion of correspondences between architecture and textiles, and emerges from the reading of photographs, a swatch of Harris Tweed and curtain wall façade juxtaposed. In juxtaposing the fabric of the city with the weave of Harris Tweed the book charts an original course across a range of connected ideas and questions, combining many different themes, writers and disciplines. It presents integrated and innovative rethinkings on a number of fundamental relationships, including correlations between body and building, word and image, and between the rural and the metropolitan, and the hand-crafted and the mass-reproduced. In doing so, it seeks to foreground the very interrelationship of surface and place, as it makes a claim for the relational nature of the world in which we live.

This title was first published in 2002: Since antiquity through to the present, architecture and the pictorial arts (paintings, photography, graphic arts) have not been rigidly separated but interrelated - the one informing the other, and establishing patterns of creation and reception. In the Classical tradition the education of the architect and artist has always stressed this relationship between the arts, although modern scholarship has too often treated them as separate disciplines. These volumes explore the history of this exchange between the arts as it emerged from classical theory into artistic and architectural practice. Issues of visual representation, perspective, allegory, site specificity, ornamentation, popular culture, memorials, urban and utopian planning, and the role of treatises, manifestos, and other theoretical writings are addressed, as well as the critical reaction to these products and practices. This title represents a variety of methods, approaches, and diatectical interpretations - cases where architecture informs the themes and physical space of pictures, or pictorial concerns inform the design and construction of the built environment. The exchanges between architecture and pictures explored by these authors are found to be in all cases ideologically potent, and therefore significantly expressive of their respective social, political, and intellectual histories.