READING ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURE

Description

Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents
Architecture displays the values involved in its inhabitation, construction, procurement and design. It traces the thinking of the individuals who have participated in it, their relationships, and their involvement in the cultures where they lived and worked. In this way, buildings, their details, and the documents used to make them, can be read closely for cultural insights.
Introducing the idea of reading buildings as cultural artefacts, this book presents perceptive readings by eminent writers which demonstrate the power of this approach.
The chapters show that close readings of architecture and its materials can test commonplace assumptions, help architects to appreciate the contexts in which they work, and indicate ways to think more astutely about design. The readings collected in this innovative and accessible book address buildings, specifications and photographs. They range in time from the fifteenth century – examining the only surviving drawing made by Leon Battista Alberti – to the recent past – projects completed by Norman Foster in 2006 and Herzog and De Meuron in 2008. They range geographically from France to Puerto Rico to Kazakhstan. And they range in fame from buildings celebrated by critics to house extensions and motorway service areas.

CONTENTS

Introduction

• Adam Sharr: A Case for Close Reading

Opening

• David Leatherbarrow: Breathing Walls

Part I: Extraodrinary Buildings, Divergent Readings

• Adam Sharr: Introduction
• Adam Sharr: An Augury of Collapse: Herzog and De Meuron’s Caixa Forum, Madrid
• Edward Wainwright: Fostering Relations in Kazakhstan
• Suzanne Ewing: Reading the Site at Sverre Fehn’s Hamar Museum
• Jonathan Hill: A Hellish Cloud and a Very Clear Air: Industry, Nature and Weather in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Part II: Familiar Buildings, Unfamiliar Readings

• Adam Sharr: Introduction
• Flora Samuel: Extension Stories
• Samuel Austin: Lounge Space: The Home, the City and the Service Area
• Diana Periton: The Architecture of Urban Life: 67 rue des Meuniers
• Jane Rendell: The Settings and the Social Condenser: Transitional Objects in Architecture and Psychoanalysis

Part III: Redolent Details, Insightful Dcouments

• Adam Sharr: Introduction
• Michael Cadwell: Four Lines
• A Meeting Between Koolhaas and Mies Mhairi McVicar: ‘God is in the Details’/’The Detail is Moot’
• Katie Lloyd Thomas: Specifying Transparency: From ‘Best Seconds’ to ‘New Glass Performances’
• Paul Emmons and Jonathan Foote: Making Plans: Alberti’s Ichnography as Cultural Artefact
• Hugh Campbell: How the Mind Meets Architecture: What Photography Reveals

Epilogue

• Marco Frascari: An Architectural Good-life can be Built, Explained and Taught only Through Storytelling

272 pages, b&w ills / 17,5 x 24,5 cm / English