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This is a writing reference book for designers. Whether you're an architect, landscape architect, interior architect, or an industrial designer, the text shows you the interdependence of writing and design. The authors present typical writing assignments and explain principles of effective writing.
How Architects Write shows you the interdependence of writing and design in both student and professional examples. This fully updated edition features more than 50 color images, a new chapter on online communication, and sections on critical reading, responding to requests for proposals, the design essay, storyboarding, and much more. It also includes resources for how to write history term papers, project descriptions, theses, proposals, research reports, specifications, field reports, client communications, post-occupancy evaluations, and emailed meeting agendas, so that you can navigate your career from school to professional practice.
Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
For ages, architects have been criticized for speaking an insular language, known to some as "archispeak." Writing Architecture considers the process, methods, and value of architecture writing based on Carter Wiseman’s 30 years of personal experience in writing, editing, and teaching in young architects how to write. This book creatively tackles a problematic issue that Wiseman considers to be a crucial characteristic of successful architecture writing: clarity of thinking and expression. He argues that because we live our lives within the built environment, architecture is the most comprehensive and complex of all art forms. Even brilliantly inspired and complex architectural structures would only amount to misunderstood abstractions without the support and reinforcement of the clear explanation. Written as a primer for both college level students and practitioners, Writing Architecture acknowledges and explores the boundaries between different techniques of architecture writing from myriad perspectives and purposes. A poetic description of the beauty and impact of a bridge will not illuminate the mechanical knowledge housed in the structure, but at the same time, dense architectural theory will not encourage individuals experiencing and supporting the bridge to perceive significance and usefulness in the design. Using excerpts and from writers in different genres and from different historical periods, Wiseman offers a unique and authoritative perspective on comprehensible writing skills needed for success.
There are a lot of good books available to help people write better. They include dictionaries, usage guides, and various types of writers’ manuals – and professional writers ought to have many of those books on their bookshelves. But most architects and other design and construction professionals are not professional writers. Instead, they are people who spend a large part of their professional lives writing. That’s a big difference, and that’s where this book will help. The Architect’s Guide to Writing has been written not by an English major, but by Bill Schmalz, an architect who knows the kinds of documents his fellow professionals routinely have to write, and understands the kinds of technical mistakes they often make in their writing. This book is designed to meet the specific needs of design and construction professionals. It’s not going to waste their time with the things that most educated professionals know, but it will help them with the things they don’t know or are unsure of. It’s not a Chicago Manual-sized encyclopaedic reference that includes everything any writer would ever need to know, because architects don’t need to know everything. But what they do need to know – and what they use every day in their professional lives – has been assembled in this book.
Over the past two decades, scholarship in architectural history has transformed, moving away from design studio pedagogy and postmodern historicism to draw instead from trends in critical theory focusing on gender, race, the environment, and more recently global history, connecting to revisionist trends in other fields. With examples across space and time—from medieval European coin trials and eighteenth-century Haitian revolutionary buildings to Weimar German construction firms and present-day African refugee camps—Writing Architectural History considers the impact of these shifting institutional landscapes and disciplinary positionings for architectural history. Contributors reveal how new methodological approaches have developed interdisciplinary research beyond the traditional boundaries of art history departments and architecture schools, and explore the challenges and opportunities presented by conventional and unorthodox forms of evidence and narrative, the tools used to write history.
Letters to Architects presents letters addressed to architects practicing throughout the world, many of them contemporaries with Frank Lloyd Wright during the first half of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, this selection of letters aims at revealing an underlying unity of purpose: the growth of his work and the unquestionable magnitude of influence it engendered in the world of architecture. The letters are organized into five sections. Section One presents the first publication ever to be made of the letters between Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis H. Sullivan. Section Two traces Wright's concern, through letters addressed to both European and American architects, that his work be understood as the cornerstone of an American Culture. In Section Three, correspondence has been selected to include three specific persons: Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Lewis Mumford, and Howard Myers. These men offered Wright a special forum from which he could speak to the profession as a whole, most particularly through the medium of publication. Section Four narrates, by means of letters to various architects concerned with the assembling and exhibition of the largest one man architectural exhibition ever to be produced, the details, trials, problems, and results of such a large undertaking. Section Five recounts the honors bestowed on Frank Lloyd Wright first in England, in 1941, and then in his own country, in 1949. It shows his concern for the profession of architecture in the moving address he gave at the occasion of his receiving the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.
“Becoming an Architect will inspire futurearchitects, career consultants, and human resources professionalsalike, providing all the information you’ll need to makeintelligent decisions about careers in architecture.”—From the Foreword by Helene Combs Dreiling, FAIA, 2014AIA National President Starting a career as an architect is an exciting prospect, butit's important to do your research before you take the plunge. Thethird edition of Becoming an Architect is an update to thebest-selling guide and highlights the risks and rewards on the pathto a career as an architect. You'll find new insight and tons ofhelpful resources, as well as a complete outline of the trajectoryof an architect's early career, from higher education throughinternship and licensure. More than thirty-two new interviews andprofiles from architecture students, emerging, and establishedprofessionals give the resource a truly personal feel, and help getyou acquainted with real-life scenarios from architects fromvarying backgrounds and specialties. With a highly accessible approach, this guide provides acomplete overview of the profession, including educationalrequirements, design specialties, registration requirements, andthe paths of a career in architecture. Whether you're a high schoolstudent, a college undergraduate, a career counselor, or a humanresource professional, Becoming an Architect offersmuch-needed advice and information to anyone interested in careerdevelopment for architects. Covers recent changes to the Intern Development Program(IDP) Provides advice on obtaining professional experience whilestudying to be an architect Considers career paths in a myriad of work environments, suchas government agencies, education, and research Includes helpful appendixes with resources for furtherinformation, such as career-related associations, websites, andrecommended reading Obtain a solid introduction to a career as an architect, andplan your own path with the guidance and advice of dozens of otherswho have already started this process.
How Architects Write shows you the interdependence of writing and design in both student and professional examples. This fully updated edition features more than 50 color images, a new chapter on online communication, and sections on critical reading, responding to requests for proposals, the design essay, storyboarding, and much more. It also includes resources for how to write history term papers, project descriptions, theses, proposals, research reports, specifications, field reports, client communications, post-occupancy evaluations, and emailed meeting agendas, so that you can navigate your career from school to professional practice.
Conditional design is the sequel to Operative Design. This book will further explore the operative in a more detailed, intentional, and perhaps functional manner. Spatially, the conditional is the result of the operative. It is not a blind result however. Both terms work together to satisfy a formal manipulation through a set of opportunities for elements such as connections and apertures.
