eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Edited by Veronique Patteeuw. Essays by Aaron Betsky, Okwui Enwezor, Neal Leach, Matthew Stadler, Bart Verschaffel, H.J.A. Hofland and Bruce Sterling. Excerpts by Michael Sorkin, Jean Attali, Anthony Vidler, Fredric Jameson, et al.
4e de couv. : "The activities of Rem Koolhaas and his numerous collaborators have been widely discussed, even before the foundation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975. The work of OMA, including Koolhaas's written oeuvre, is at the root of an important part of the Western discourse on architecture from the past half century. The book compiles about 150 texts - interviews, essays, articles, reviews, letters, introductions, polemics, appraisals, and competition reports - that in many cases have been translated for the first time. As a reader covering the work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas from Delirious New York to S, M, L, XL, it provides a fresh and critical view on one of the most complex architectural oeuvres of recent times. At the same time, the book presents an account of the debates on architecture and the city that remain significative today."
The most incisive texts on Rem Koolhaas / OMA The activities of Rem Koolhaas and his staff were widely discussed even before the foundation of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975. Today, many contributions on the work of OMA can be found in the international architectural press, including Koolhaas’ own writings. The book contains about 150 selected texts—interviews, feature articles, essays, lead articles, reviews, letters, introductions, appraisals, and competition reports that have been compiled for the first time. This compilation not only provides a fresh and critical view of the oeuvre of one the most important contemporary architects, but also represents an account of the debate on architectural and urban design in recent decades. The most incisive texts on the work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas, with many articles that have never before been translated into English An overview of notions, ideas, and debates in architectural discourse, theory, and criticism, from the 1970s until 2000, that remain relevant today Illustrated with more than 100 cover shoots
Montage has been hailed as one of the key structural principles of modernity, yet its importance to the history of modern thought about cities and their architecture has never been adequately explored. In this groundbreaking new work, Martino Stierli charts the history of montage in late 19th-century urban and architectural contexts, its application by the early 20th-century avant-gardes, and its eventual appropriation in the postmodern period. With chapters focusing on photomontage, the film theories of Sergei Eisenstein, Mies van der Rohe's spatial experiments, and Rem Koolhaas's use of literary montage in his seminal manifesto Delirious New York (1978), Stierli demonstrates the centrality of montage in modern explorations of space, and in conceiving and representing the contemporary city. Beautifully illustrated, this interdisciplinary book looks at architecture, photography, film, literature, and visual culture, featuring works by artists and architects including Mies, Koolhaas, Paul Citroen, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, and Le Corbusier.
The paradoxical logic of transparency and mediation Transparency is the metaphor of our time. Whether in government or corporate governance, finance, technology, health or the media – it is ubiquitous today, and there is hardly a current debate that does not call for more transparency. But what does this word actually stand for and what are the consequences for the life of individuals? Can knowledge from the arts, and its play of visibility and invisibility, tell us something about the paradoxical logics of transparency and mediation? This Obscure Thing Called Transparency gathers contributions by international experts who critically assess the promises and perils of transparency today.
Focusing on six leading contemporary architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Bernard Tschumi, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Steven Holl, this book puts forward a unique and insightful analysis of "neo-avant-garde" architecture. It discusses the spectacle and excess which permeates contemporary architecture in reference to the present aesthetic tendency for image making, but does so by applying the tectonic of theatricality discussed by the 19th-century German architect Gottfried Semper. In doing so, it breaks new ground by opening up a dialogue between the study of the past and the design of the present. The work of each discussed architect is seen as addressing a historiographical problem. To this end, and this is the second important aspect of this book, the chosen buildings are discussed in terms of the thematic of the culture of building (the tectonic of column and wall for example) rather the formal, and this through a discussion that is informed by the latest available theories. Having set the aesthetic implication of the processes of the digitalization of architecture, the book's conclusion highlights "strategies" by which architecture might postpone the full consequences of digitalization, and thus the becoming of architecture as ornament on its own right.
The Dissertation is one of the most demanding yet potentially most stimulating components of an architectural course. This classic text provides a complete guide to what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and what the major pitfalls are. This is a comprehensive guide to all that an architecture student might need to know about undertaking the dissertation. The book provides a plain guide through the whole process of starting, writing, preparing and submitting a dissertation with minimum stress and frustration. The third edition has been revised throughout to bring the text completely up-to-date for a new generation of students. Crucially, five new and complete dissertations demonstrate and exemplify all the advice and issues raised in the main text. These dissertations are on subjects from the UK, USA, Europe and Asia and offer remarkable insights into how to get it just right.
This book examines architecture, image, and media relationships as productive for architecture and architectural discourses. By arguing that the relationships between architecture and media cannot be dismissed via linear criticism of architecture and media or image, these relations are instead seen as a part of a sphere (a mediasphere) of complex relationships. In lieu of anything like a consensus on the contemporary condition of architecture (referring to the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries), the starting point of this book is that the relationships between architecture, media, and images continue to multiply, owing to continuous technological advancements. Contemporary architecture considered in this book is related to the selected circumstances of high visibility, where architectural images are propelled into visibility and conflated with non-architectural images. This takes architecture outside of architectural-only discourse and into the public realm. By granting higher visibility to both the architectural images and architecture in the public realm, architecture can also be influenced by the various perceptions of the general public and can enter public consciousness via non-architectural media. With increased visibility, architecture’s far-reaching presence calls for more structured analysis of its nature and potential. As the analysed architecture in this book is associated with the discourses outside of architecture (some of which relate to terrorism, natural disaster, and branding and consumption), the limits of contemporary architectural discipline are questioned and extended. This book is written for academics and students in architectural history, theory, and criticism, particularly those interested in visual and media studies.
Summary: The book presents an ethnographic account of the design rhythm in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Written as a collection of short stories, it draws on the mundane trajectories of models and architects at the OMA. Includes photo documentation on various projects: the Seattle Public Library, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), la Casa da Musica in Porto, etc.
