The Genius Of Architecture Or The Analogy Of That Art With Our Sensations

Camus's description of the French hotel argues that architecture should please the senses and the mind.

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.

If architectural judgment were a city, a city of ideas and forms, then it is a very imperfect city. When architects judge the success or failure of a building, the range of ways and criteria which can be used for this evaluation causes many contentious and discordant arguments. Proposing that the increase in number and intensity of such arguments threatens to destabilize the very grounds upon which judgment is supposed to rest, this book examines architectural judgment in its historical, cultural, political, and psychological dimensions and their convergence on that most expressive part of architecture, namely: architectural character. It stresses the value of reasoned judgment in justifying architectural form -a judgment based on three sets of criteria: those criteria that are external to architecture, those that are internal to architecture, and those that pertain to the psychology of the architect as image-maker. External criteria include, philosophies of history or theories of modernity; internal criteria include architectural character and architectural composition; while the psychological criteria pertain to 'mimetic rivalry', or rivaling desires for the same architectural forms. Yet, although architectural conflicts can adversely influence judgment, they can at the same time, contribute to the advancement of architectural culture.

The book explores the historical connections between the notions of architectural interior, subjective space, human interiority, and represented space including virtual space. In the 18th century the notion of "interiority" understood as a paradigm of human subjectivity came to be articulated in a sustained way in architectural and visual, rather than only literary forms. While the notion of the interior and the processes of "interiorization" were, as Walter Benjamin demonstrated, the defining features of 19th-century bourgeois culture, it is the different forms of conceptual assault on, or deconstruction of interiority that define the approach to space and self in the 20th and 21st centuries. The book examines models of understanding "interiority" as these were developed in relation to notions of space and spatial experience.

This acclaimed translation of Michel Delon's Dictionnaire Europen des Lumires contains more than 350 signed entries covering the art, economics, science, history, philosophy, and religion of the Enlightenment. Delon's team of more than 200 experts from around the world offers a unique perspective on the period, providing offering not only factual information but also critical opinions that give the reader a deeper level of understanding. An international team of translators, editors, and advisers, under the auspices of the French Ministry of Culture, has brought this collection of scholarship to the English-speaking world for the first time.

This title was first published in 2002: In the second half of the 18th century, philosophy provided the fundamental characteristics of architechture. The architects of the 19th century then introduced the empirical comparative study of buildings. This phenomenon has usually been regarded exclusively in terms of historicism, but this is to underestimate the fact that they were architects. The problems for which they sought solutions did not belong to the past, but were part of their own age or the future. The architecture of the past was, to the 19th-century architect, significant to a large degree as a silent witness of a bygone era - a representation of beauty. Historical architecture provided study material for their inquiries into the aesthetic "laws" that they hoped would give the 19th century a splendid contemporary architecture. The art of building, as a way of visibly edifying society, was the most important of all the arts, with architectural theory showing the way to this lofty purpose. This book takes this as a starting point. Focusing on place as well as time, the text discusses the Dutch architects who contributed to this idea, discussing several of the most important, but ultimately seeing their activities, not as the cause, but the expression of movements that continuously changed the face of architecture. The particularly "Dutch" nature of architecture took "visual beauty" to result from the visible success of technical intelligence and creativity rather than philosophy and aesthetics. The grand-19th century themes discussed in the book are, the author suggests, somewhat "un-Dutch", originating as they did from an idealist, intellectual tradition.

Weather Architecture further extends Jonathan Hill’s investigation of authorship by recognising the creativity of the weather. At a time when environmental awareness is of growing relevance, the overriding aim is to understand a history of architecture as a history of weather and thus to consider the weather as an architectural author that affects design, construction and use in a creative dialogue with other authors such as the architect and user. Environmental discussions in architecture tend to focus on the practical or the poetic but here they are considered together. Rather than investigate architecture’s relations to the weather in isolation, they are integrated into a wider discussion of cultural and social influences on architecture. The analysis of weather’s effects on the design and experience of specific buildings and gardens is interwoven with a historical survey of changing attitudes to the weather in the arts, sciences and society, leading to a critical re-evaluation of contemporary responses to climate change.