The Charged Void Architecture

The Smithsons have also added contemporary commentary to provide a context for the work."--BOOK JACKET.

"British architects and urbanists Alison and Peter Smithson first rose to prominence in the 1950s. Many of their ideas, social, architectural, and urban, profoundly influenced generations of practitioners, students, and academics.... The Charged Void: Urbanism is the companion volume to The Charged Void: Architecture; the two comprise the complete works of Alison and Peter Smithson. The Charged Void: Urbanism collects the urban form projects from the Smithsons' extensive and prolific collaboration, as well as building projects with specific implications for urban form. The work is ordered thematically in fourteen chapters: cluster, cohesion, pavilion and route.... More than a collection of work, this book represents a record of a careful and highly focused thought process concerned with the qualities of urban life - a ... collection of observations, decipherings, commentaries, and recommendations for understanding and improving the complex nature of the city."--

The space between' is the third part of the intended collected works of Alison and Peter Smithson and complementary to the volumes 'The charged void. Architecture' and 'The charged void. Urbanism' respectively published in 2001 and 2005. While the 'Charged void' books deal with the built and unbuilt projects realised over the years provided with short comments, 'The space between' is a text book architects richly illustrated, mostly with drawings and photographs by the Smithsons themselves. It can be considered as a summary of their thinking as architects since the beginning of their career, mainly trying to grasp the identity of places by observations of daily life, developing what they liked to call "a sensibility of place."

The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture. Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monument and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’. Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s incomplete and broken forms expand architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the creativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing climate change.

Striving to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of post-war reconstruction, Alison and Peter Smithson were among the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century. As younger members of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and as founding members of Team 10 they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of Modern Architecture. Their polemics and designs - addressing issues such as the rising consumer society and the orientation of urban planning - laid the foundations for New Brutalism and the Pop Art Movement of the 1960s. An important adaptation made by the Smithsons and their generation was the rejection of modernism's machine aesthetics. The new notions of place and territory were juxtaposed to Le Corbusier's machine à habiter. To the Smithsons a house was a particular place, which should be suited to its location and able to meet the ordinary requirements of everyday life and to accommodate its inhabitants' individual patterns of use. This exhibition examines the evolution of the Smithsons' approach to this everyday "art of inhabitation." It does this by extensively documenting most of their designs for individual dwellings, especially their optimistic House of the Future of 1956 and the series of renovations of and additions to the fairy-tale-like Hexenhaus in Germany from the late 1980s onward

Since the Renaissance, books and drawings have been a primary means of communication among architects and their colleagues and clients. In this volume, 12 historians explore the use of books by architects in America in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a period when the profession of architecture was first emerging in the United States.

Alison (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003), two of the most influential and controversial architects of the latter half of the twentieth century, strove to adapt the progressive ideas of the pre-war modern movement to the specific human needs of the period of post-war reconstruction.As younger members of CIAM (Congrés Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne), and as founding members of Team 10, they were at the heart of the debate on the future course of modern architecture. The uncompromising modernity of their Hunstanton Secondary Modern School (1949-1954) heralded the Smithsons' role as the leading exponents of the New Brutalism and the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. In this book Risselada has collected together the most important published essays about the career of this partnership of British architects, from early contributions by Rayner Banham, Philip Johnson, Kenneth Frampton, and Peter Cook, to more recent texts by Peter Eisenmann, Christine Boyer, Beatriz Colomina, and Luisa Hutton.

The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.