Urban Structuring Studies Of Alison Peter Smithson

"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."--

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

Architects Alison and Peter Smithson kept a visual diary of a drive from their London office to their Wiltshire cottage. The contrast of their sleek Citroen DS 19 with the verdant landscape links the urban and the rural in a sensible continuum. It was originally published as A Sensibility Primer in 1983.

The famous British Brutalist architect discusses his work and the process of thinking about architecture with students in a question-and-answer format.

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