Virtual Aesthetics In Architecture

Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture: Designing in Mixed Realities presents a curated selection of projects and texts contributed by leading international architects and designers who are using virtual reality technologies in their design process. It triggers discussion and debate on exploring the aesthetic potential and establishing its language as an expressive medium in architectural design. Although virtual reality is not new and the technology has evolved rapidly, the aesthetic potential of the medium is still emerging and there is a great deal more to explore. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the current use of virtual reality technologies in the architectural design process. Contributions are presented in six parts, fully illustrated with over 150 images. Recent projects presented are distributed in five themes: introduction to mixed realities; space and form; context and ambiguity; materiality and movement; body and social. Each theme includes richly illustrated essays by leading academics and practitioners, including those from Zaha Hadid Architects and MVRDV, detailing their design process using data-driven methodologies. Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture expands the use of technology per se and focuses on how architecture can benefit from its aesthetic potential during the design process. A must-read for practitioners, academics, and students interested in cutting-edge digital design.

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

Every thing we encounter has for us meaning. It is what we infer as a particular understanding of the thing. But we also provide meaning by how we live and what we produce. This implies process and result, also in architecture. Decision making is involved with judgments on theoretical and practical issues. The activities are driven by factors of purpose, context and realization. This text proceeds from explaining philosophical foundations of meaning to interpreting physical designs of architecture. At the center is design thinking which has rational and emotional components, making it profoundly aesthetic. The concept of design narratives is developed as the dialog between the content and the form of projects. The text is profusely supported by illustrations in color and hyperlinked with extensive references.

By analyzing ten examples of buildings that embody the human experience at an extraordinary level, this book clarifies the central importance of the role of function in architecture as a generative force in determining built form. Using familiar twentieth-century buildings as case studies, the authors present these from a new perspective, based on their functional design concepts. Here Grabow and Spreckelmeyer expand the definition of human use to that of an art form by re-evaluating these buildings from an aesthetic and ecological view of function. Each building is described from the point of view of a major functional concept or idea of human use which then spreads out and influences the spatial organization, built form and structure. In doing so each building is presented as an exemplar that reaches beyond the pragmatic concerns of a narrow program and demonstrates how functional concepts can inspire great design, evoke archetypal human experience and help us to understand how architecture embodies the deeper purposes and meanings of everyday life.

One of the most interesting questions in architectural history is why modern architecture emerged from the war-ravaged regions of central Europe and not the United States, whose techniques of mass production and mechanical products so inspired the first generation of modern architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. In From Autos to Architecture, sociologist David Gartman offers a critical social history that shows how Fordist mass production and industrial architecture in America influenced European designers to an extent previously not understood. Drawing on Marxist economics, the Frankfurt School, and French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, From Autos to Architecture deftly illustrates the different class structures and struggles of America and Europe. Examining architecture in the context of social conflicts, From Autos to Architecture offers a critical alternative to standard architectural histories focused on aesthetics alone.

"This title was first published in 2002: In everyday life, most people do not reflect seriously on the impacts of architecture and environmental aesthetics on their well-being and health. This intriguing volume brings together professionals working in architecture, planning, urban design and social policy with academics from both humanities and social sciences to provide a broad-based and insightful discussion on how aesthetics affect us emotionally and physically. The essays help us understand our cultural and individual preferences related to the quality of the environment and challenge the common belief that environmental beauty is a matter of personal taste. A wide range of concepts are discussed such as place identity, multi-sensuous and emotional processes, geometrical order and controlled space, architectural plasticity, aesthetically real and virtual values, participative design processes, ethics in architecture, and beauty and happiness. The book highlights the importance for today's society to engage more in aesthetic ethics and to understand the significance of creating aesthetically pleasing environments."--Provided by publisher.

This book highlights aesthetics as pertaining to the structural component in architectural design. This less explored aspect of architecture is discussed and explains the enduring qualities of ten specific buildings from architectural history to present day due to their structural aesthetics. Based on comprehensive research, a critical analysis is presented of the constraints and other influences on architectural and structural design, such as culture, patronage, geometry, available resources and technologies.

Beauty in architecture matters again. This issue of AD posits that after 80 years of aggressive suppression of engagement with aesthetics, the temporarily dormant preoccupation with beauty is back. This is evidenced by a current cultural shift from the supposedly objective to an emerging trust in the subjective – a renewed fascination for aesthetics supported by new knowledge emanating simultaneously from disparate disciplines. Digital design continues to influence architectural discourse, not only due to changes in manufacturing but also through establishing meaning. The very term 'post-digital' was introduced by computational designers and artists, who accept that digital gains in architectural design are augmented by human judgement and cognitive intuition. The issue takes an interdisciplinary approach to this re-emerging interest in beauty across neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, mathematics, philosophy and architecture, while discussing the work of the international architects, in both practice and academe, who are generating new aesthetics. Contributors: Alisa Andrasek,Izaskun Chinchilla, Marjan Colletti, Peter Cook, Robbert Dijkgraaf, Winka Dubbeldam, David Garcia, Graham Harman, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, Alan Powers, Gilles Retsin, Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger, Fleur Watson and Martyn Hook and Semir Zeki. Featured architects: Archi-Tectonics, ecoLogicStudio, NaJa & deOstos, Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, soma architecture, Studio Gang, John Wardle Architects and Tom Wiscombe Architecture.