DWELLING ON THE ROOF

Description

Dwelling on the Roof attempts to uncover the reasons behind this time-honoured impulse, to make sense of its historical periodisation and to analyse its formal expressions. The result is a hybrid essay involving theory, history and building design. The narrative thread places a particular emphasis on the period between 1850 and 1950, an epoch in which totally new techniques and aesthetic rules come to the fore, leading to the blossoming of a special concern with turning the roof into an inhabitable space.
The book ends with a selection of projects from the last fifty years which have continued to develop this theme, with works by modern architects such as Alejandro de la Sota and Giancarlo De Carlo, and contemporary ones like Foreign Office Architects and Kazuyo Sejima.

CONTENTS

Prologue

The precursors. Atemporality and artifice

• The vernacular as spontaneous response
• Classical myth

1850-1950. The blossoming of the turn of century

• The awakening of a technology
• From hygenism to eugenics
• The urban component
• The dispute about the flat roof (final hypothesis about form)
• The roof-terrace crusade

The drift towards contemporaneity

• The customary landscape
• The thick roof
• The pedestrian roof
• The green roof
• The stepped roof
• The platform roof
• The penthouse
• The playground
• The urban roof
• The roof as a work of art

208 pages, color & b&w ills / 20 x 20 cm / English