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The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance
by Douglas SpencerThe Architecture of Neoliberalism pursues an uncompromising critique of the neoliberal turn in contemporary architecture. This book reveals how a self-styled parametric and post-critical architecture serves mechanisms of control and compliance while promoting itself, at the same time, as progressive. Spencer's incisive analysis of the architecture and writings of figures such as Zaha Hadid, Patrik Schumacher, Rem Koolhaas, and Greg Lynn shows them to be in thrall to the same notions of liberty as are propounded in neoliberal thought. Analysing architectural projects in the fields of education, consumption and labour, The Architecture of Neoliberalism examines the part played by contemporary architecture in refashioning human subjects into the compliant figures - student-entrepreneurs, citizen-consumers and team-workers - requisite to the universal implementation of a form of existence devoted to market imperatives.
The Architecture of Nothingness: An Explanation of the Objective Basis of Beauty in Architecture and the Arts
by Frank LyonsIt is a common enough assumption that good buildings make us feel good just as poor ones can make us feel insecure, depressed or even threatened. We may instantly decide that we ‘like’ one building more than another, in the same way that without thinking we choose one work of art or music over another. But what is going on when we make these instant decisions? The process is so complex that it remains an area rarely examined, often considered unfathomable, or for some mysterious, bordering even on the spiritual. Frank Lyons seeks to unpick the complex relationships that go to make up great works of architecture, to reveal a set of principles that are found to apply not only to architecture but also to art, music and culture in general. One of the major complications at the heart of culture is that because the arts are generated subjectively, it is assumed that the finished cultural artefact is also subjective. This is a myth that this book seeks to dispel. The arts are indeed created from the personal subjective space of an individual but what that individual has to say will only be shareable if expressed in coherent (objective) form. In a nutshell, the book reverses two generally accepted positions, that the arts are subjective and that meaning is objective and therefore shared. The reversal of these seemingly common sense, but mistaken positions enables two important issues to be resolved, firstly it explains how the arts communicate through objectivity and secondly how the meaning of an object of art is never shared but always remains private to the individual. The combination of these two positions ultimately helps us to understand that beauty is a subjective appreciation of an objectively arranged form. Furthermore, this understanding enables the author to explain how a sublimely arranged form can open us to the ineffable; to a field of NOTHINGNESS, or to what some might call the spiritual realm of our own being.
The Architecture of Nothingness: An Explanation of the Objective Basis of Beauty in Architecture and the Arts
by Frank LyonsIt is a common enough assumption that good buildings make us feel good just as poor ones can make us feel insecure, depressed or even threatened. We may instantly decide that we ‘like’ one building more than another, in the same way that without thinking we choose one work of art or music over another. But what is going on when we make these instant decisions? The process is so complex that it remains an area rarely examined, often considered unfathomable, or for some mysterious, bordering even on the spiritual. Frank Lyons seeks to unpick the complex relationships that go to make up great works of architecture, to reveal a set of principles that are found to apply not only to architecture but also to art, music and culture in general. One of the major complications at the heart of culture is that because the arts are generated subjectively, it is assumed that the finished cultural artefact is also subjective. This is a myth that this book seeks to dispel. The arts are indeed created from the personal subjective space of an individual but what that individual has to say will only be shareable if expressed in coherent (objective) form. In a nutshell, the book reverses two generally accepted positions, that the arts are subjective and that meaning is objective and therefore shared. The reversal of these seemingly common sense, but mistaken positions enables two important issues to be resolved, firstly it explains how the arts communicate through objectivity and secondly how the meaning of an object of art is never shared but always remains private to the individual. The combination of these two positions ultimately helps us to understand that beauty is a subjective appreciation of an objectively arranged form. Furthermore, this understanding enables the author to explain how a sublimely arranged form can open us to the ineffable; to a field of NOTHINGNESS, or to what some might call the spiritual realm of our own being.
An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940 - 1970 (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Christine WallThis book is unique in describing the history of post war reconstruction from an entirely new perspective by focusing on the changing relationship between architects and building workers. It considers individual, as well as collective, interactions with technical change and in doing so brings together, for the first time, an extraordinary range of sources including technical archives, oral history and visual material to describe the construction process both during and in the decades after the war. It focuses on the social aspects of production and the changes in working life for architects and building workers with increasing industrialization, in particular analysing the effect on the building process of introducing dimensionally co-ordinated components. Both architects and building workers have been accused of creating a built environment now popularly discredited: architects responsible for poor design and building workers for poor workmanship. However, many of the structures and ideas underpinning this period of rapid change were revolutionary in their commitment to a complete transformation of the building process. An Architecture of Parts adds to the growing literature on changes in the building world during and immediately after the Second World War. It is significant, both empirically and historically, in its examination of the ideas, technology and relationships that fired industrialization of the building process in mid-century Britain.
An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers and Industrialisation in Britain 1940 - 1970 (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Christine WallThis book is unique in describing the history of post war reconstruction from an entirely new perspective by focusing on the changing relationship between architects and building workers. It considers individual, as well as collective, interactions with technical change and in doing so brings together, for the first time, an extraordinary range of sources including technical archives, oral history and visual material to describe the construction process both during and in the decades after the war. It focuses on the social aspects of production and the changes in working life for architects and building workers with increasing industrialization, in particular analysing the effect on the building process of introducing dimensionally co-ordinated components. Both architects and building workers have been accused of creating a built environment now popularly discredited: architects responsible for poor design and building workers for poor workmanship. However, many of the structures and ideas underpinning this period of rapid change were revolutionary in their commitment to a complete transformation of the building process. An Architecture of Parts adds to the growing literature on changes in the building world during and immediately after the Second World War. It is significant, both empirically and historically, in its examination of the ideas, technology and relationships that fired industrialization of the building process in mid-century Britain.
The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France
by Iris MoonAs the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine’s desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.
The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France
by Iris MoonAs the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine’s desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.
The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use
by David Fannon Michelle Laboy Peter WiederspahnThe Architecture of Persistence argues that continued human use is the ultimate measure of sustainability in architecture, and that expanding the discourse about adaptability to include continuity as well as change offers the architectural manifestation of resilience. Why do some buildings last for generations as beloved and useful places, while others do not? How can designers today create buildings that remain useful into the future? While architects and theorists have offered a wide range of ideas about building for change, this book focuses on persistent architecture: the material, spatial, and cultural processes that give rise to long-lived buildings. Organized in three parts, this book examines material longevity in the face of constant physical and cultural change, connects the dimensions of human use and contemporary program, and discusses how time informs the design process. Featuring dozens of interviews with people who design and use buildings, and a close analysis of over a hundred historic and contemporary projects, the principles of persistent architecture introduced here address urgent challenges for contemporary practice while pointing towards a more sustainable built environment in the future. The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use offers practitioners, students, and scholars a set of principles and illustrative precedents exploring architecture’s unique ability to connect an instructive past, a useful present, and an unknown future.
The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use
by David Fannon Michelle Laboy Peter WiederspahnThe Architecture of Persistence argues that continued human use is the ultimate measure of sustainability in architecture, and that expanding the discourse about adaptability to include continuity as well as change offers the architectural manifestation of resilience. Why do some buildings last for generations as beloved and useful places, while others do not? How can designers today create buildings that remain useful into the future? While architects and theorists have offered a wide range of ideas about building for change, this book focuses on persistent architecture: the material, spatial, and cultural processes that give rise to long-lived buildings. Organized in three parts, this book examines material longevity in the face of constant physical and cultural change, connects the dimensions of human use and contemporary program, and discusses how time informs the design process. Featuring dozens of interviews with people who design and use buildings, and a close analysis of over a hundred historic and contemporary projects, the principles of persistent architecture introduced here address urgent challenges for contemporary practice while pointing towards a more sustainable built environment in the future. The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use offers practitioners, students, and scholars a set of principles and illustrative precedents exploring architecture’s unique ability to connect an instructive past, a useful present, and an unknown future.
The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City
by Libero Andreotti Nadir LahijiIn a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.
The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City
by Libero Andreotti Nadir LahijiIn a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively ‘mediated’ city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city’s historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city. Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present ‘tele-technological-capitalist’ society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.
An Architecture of Place: Topology in Practice
by Randall S. LindstromChallenging mainstream architecture’s understandings of place, this book offers an illuminating clarification that allows the idea’s centrality, in all aspects of everyday design thinking, to be rediscovered or considered for the first time.Rigorous but not dense, practical but not trivialising, the book unfolds on three fronts. First, it clearly frames the pertinent aspects of topology—the philosophy of place—importantly differentiating two concepts that architecture regularly conflates: place and space. Second, it rejects the ubiquitous notion that architecture “makes place” and, instead, reasons that place is what makes architecture and the built environment possible; that place “calls” for and to architecture; and that architecture is thus invited to “listen” and respond. Finally, it turns to the matter of designing responses that result not just in more places of architecture (demanding little of design), nor merely in architecture with some “sense of place” (demanding little more), but, rising above those, responses that constitute an architecture of place (demanding the greatest vigilance but offering the utmost freedom).Opening up a term regarded as so common that its meaning is seldom considered, the author reveals the actual depth and richness of place, its innateness to architecture, and its essentiality to practitioners, clients, educators, and students—including those in all spatial disciplines.
An Architecture of Place: Topology in Practice
by Randall S. LindstromChallenging mainstream architecture’s understandings of place, this book offers an illuminating clarification that allows the idea’s centrality, in all aspects of everyday design thinking, to be rediscovered or considered for the first time.Rigorous but not dense, practical but not trivialising, the book unfolds on three fronts. First, it clearly frames the pertinent aspects of topology—the philosophy of place—importantly differentiating two concepts that architecture regularly conflates: place and space. Second, it rejects the ubiquitous notion that architecture “makes place” and, instead, reasons that place is what makes architecture and the built environment possible; that place “calls” for and to architecture; and that architecture is thus invited to “listen” and respond. Finally, it turns to the matter of designing responses that result not just in more places of architecture (demanding little of design), nor merely in architecture with some “sense of place” (demanding little more), but, rising above those, responses that constitute an architecture of place (demanding the greatest vigilance but offering the utmost freedom).Opening up a term regarded as so common that its meaning is seldom considered, the author reveals the actual depth and richness of place, its innateness to architecture, and its essentiality to practitioners, clients, educators, and students—including those in all spatial disciplines.
The Architecture of Pleasure: British Amusement Parks 1900–1939 (Ashgate Studies in Architecture)
by Josephine KaneThe amusement parks which first appeared in England at the turn of the twentieth century represent a startlingly novel and complex phenomenon, combining fantasy architecture, new technology, ersatz danger, spectacle and consumption in a new mass experience. Though drawing on a diverse range of existing leisure practices, the particular entertainment formula they offered marked a radical departure in terms of visual, experiential and cultural meanings. The huge, socially mixed crowds that flocked to the new parks did so purely in the pursuit of pleasure, which the amusement parks commodified in exhilarating new guises. Between 1906 and 1939, nearly 40 major amusement parks operated across Britain. By the outbreak of the Second World War, millions of people visited these sites each year. The amusement park had become a defining element in the architectural psychological pleasurescape of Britain. This book considers the relationship between popular modernity, pleasure and the amusement park landscape in Britain from 1900-1939. It argues that the amusement parks were understood as a new and distinct expression of modern times which redefined the concept of public pleasure for mass audiences. Focusing on three sites - Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Dreamland in Margate and Southend's Kursaal - the book contextualises their development with references to the wider amusement park world. The meanings of these sites are explored through a detailed examination of the spatial and architectural form taken by rides and other buildings. The rollercoaster - a defining symbol of the amusement park - is given particular focus, as is the extent to which discourses of class, gender and national identity were expressed through the design of these parks.
The Architecture of Pleasure: British Amusement Parks 1900–1939 (Ashgate Studies in Architecture)
by Josephine KaneThe amusement parks which first appeared in England at the turn of the twentieth century represent a startlingly novel and complex phenomenon, combining fantasy architecture, new technology, ersatz danger, spectacle and consumption in a new mass experience. Though drawing on a diverse range of existing leisure practices, the particular entertainment formula they offered marked a radical departure in terms of visual, experiential and cultural meanings. The huge, socially mixed crowds that flocked to the new parks did so purely in the pursuit of pleasure, which the amusement parks commodified in exhilarating new guises. Between 1906 and 1939, nearly 40 major amusement parks operated across Britain. By the outbreak of the Second World War, millions of people visited these sites each year. The amusement park had become a defining element in the architectural psychological pleasurescape of Britain. This book considers the relationship between popular modernity, pleasure and the amusement park landscape in Britain from 1900-1939. It argues that the amusement parks were understood as a new and distinct expression of modern times which redefined the concept of public pleasure for mass audiences. Focusing on three sites - Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Dreamland in Margate and Southend's Kursaal - the book contextualises their development with references to the wider amusement park world. The meanings of these sites are explored through a detailed examination of the spatial and architectural form taken by rides and other buildings. The rollercoaster - a defining symbol of the amusement park - is given particular focus, as is the extent to which discourses of class, gender and national identity were expressed through the design of these parks.
Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World
by Liane Lefaivre Alexander TzonisThe definitive introductory book on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization, this text addresses issues of identity, community, and sustainability along with a selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world. Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre give a readable, vivid, scholarly account of this major conflict as it relates to the design of the human-made environment. Demystifying the reasons behind how globalization enabled creativity and brought about unprecedented wealth but also produced new wastefulness and ecological destruction, the book also looks at how regionalism has also tended to confine, tearing apart societies and promoting destructive consumerist tourism.
Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World
by Liane Lefaivre Alexander TzonisThe definitive introductory book on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization, this text addresses issues of identity, community, and sustainability along with a selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world. Alex Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre give a readable, vivid, scholarly account of this major conflict as it relates to the design of the human-made environment. Demystifying the reasons behind how globalization enabled creativity and brought about unprecedented wealth but also produced new wastefulness and ecological destruction, the book also looks at how regionalism has also tended to confine, tearing apart societies and promoting destructive consumerist tourism.
Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World
by Liane Lefaivre Alexander TzonisThis book remains the definitive introductory text on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization. It addresses issues of identity, diversity, community, inequality, geopolitics, and sustainability. From the authors who coined the concept of Critical Regionalism, this new edition enhances the understanding of the complex evolution of regionalism and its rival, unchecked globalization. Covering a rich selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, who introduced the concept of Critical Regionalism to architecture, present an enlightening, concise historical analysis of the endurance of regionalism and the ceaseless drive for globalization. New case studies include current cutting-edge projects in Japan, Africa, China, and the United States. Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization offers undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, geography, history, environmental studies, and other related fields an accessible, vivid, and scholarly perspective of this major conflict as it relates to the design and to the future of the human-made environment.
Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World
by Liane Lefaivre Alexander TzonisThis book remains the definitive introductory text on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization. It addresses issues of identity, diversity, community, inequality, geopolitics, and sustainability. From the authors who coined the concept of Critical Regionalism, this new edition enhances the understanding of the complex evolution of regionalism and its rival, unchecked globalization. Covering a rich selection of the most outstanding examples of design from all over the world, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, who introduced the concept of Critical Regionalism to architecture, present an enlightening, concise historical analysis of the endurance of regionalism and the ceaseless drive for globalization. New case studies include current cutting-edge projects in Japan, Africa, China, and the United States. Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization offers undergraduate and graduate students of architecture, geography, history, environmental studies, and other related fields an accessible, vivid, and scholarly perspective of this major conflict as it relates to the design and to the future of the human-made environment.
Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (Design Research in Architecture)
by Yara SharifArchitecture of Resistance investigates the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author reinterprets the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to expose the hidden dynamic topography born out of everyday Palestine. It applies a hybrid approach of research through design and visual documentary, through text, illustrations, mapping techniques and collages, to capture the absent local narrative as an essential component of spatial investigation.
Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (Design Research in Architecture)
by Yara SharifArchitecture of Resistance investigates the relationship between architecture, politics and power, and how these factors interplay in light of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It takes Palestine as the key ground of spatial exploration, looking at the spaces between people, boundary lines, documents and maps in a search for the meaning of architecture of resistance. Stemming from the need for an alternative discourse that can nourish the Palestinian spaces of imagination, the author reinterprets the land from a new perspective, by stripping it of the dominant power of lines to expose the hidden dynamic topography born out of everyday Palestine. It applies a hybrid approach of research through design and visual documentary, through text, illustrations, mapping techniques and collages, to capture the absent local narrative as an essential component of spatial investigation.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future
by Jonathan HillThe Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture. Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monument and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’. Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s incomplete and broken forms expand architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the creativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing climate change.
The Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future
by Jonathan HillThe Architecture of Ruins: Designs on the Past, Present and Future identifies an alternative and significant history of architecture from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first century, in which a building is designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin. This design practice conceives a monument and a ruin as creative, interdependent and simultaneous themes within a single building dialectic, addressing temporal and environmental questions in poetic, psychological and practical terms, and stimulating questions of personal and national identity, nature and culture, weather and climate, permanence and impermanence and life and death. Conceiving a building as a dialogue between a monument and a ruin intensifies the already blurred relations between the unfinished and the ruined and envisages the past, the present and the future in a single architecture. Structured around a collection of biographies, this book conceives a monument and a ruin as metaphors for a life and means to negotiate between a self and a society. Emphasising the interconnections between designers and the particular ways in which later architects learned from earlier ones, the chapters investigate an evolving, interdisciplinary design practice to show the relevance of historical understanding to design. Like a history, a design is a reinterpretation of the past that is meaningful to the present. Equally, a design is equivalent to a fiction, convincing users to suspend disbelief. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be delineated in drawing, cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The architect is a ‘physical novelist’ as well as a ‘physical historian’. Like building sites, ruins are full of potential. In revealing not only what is lost, but also what is incomplete, a ruin suggests the future as well as the past. As a stimulus to the imagination, a ruin’s incomplete and broken forms expand architecture’s allegorical and metaphorical capacity, indicating that a building can remain unfinished, literally and in the imagination, focusing attention on the creativity of users as well as architects. Emphasising the symbiotic relations between nature and culture, a building designed, occupied and imagined as a ruin acknowledges the coproduction of multiple authors, whether human, non-human or atmospheric, and is an appropriate model for architecture in an era of increasing climate change.
The Architecture of San Juan de Puerto Rico: Five centuries of urban and architectural experimentation (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Arleen Pabon-CharnecoAs San Juan nears the 500th anniversary of its founding, Arleen Pabón-Charneco explores the urban and architectural developments that have taken place over the last five centuries, transforming the site from a small Caribbean enclave to a sprawling modern capital. As the oldest European settlement in the United States and second oldest in the Western Hemisphere, San Juan is an example of the experimentation that took place in the American "borderland" from 1519 to 1898, when Spanish sovereignty ended. The author also investigates post-1898 examples to explore how architectural ideas were exported from the mainland United States. Pabón-Charneco covers the varied architectural periods and styles, aesthetic theories and conservation practices of the region and explains how the development of the architectural and urban artifacts reflect the political, cultural, social and religious aspects that metamorphosed a small military garrison into a urban center of international significance.
The Architecture of San Juan de Puerto Rico: Five centuries of urban and architectural experimentation (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Arleen Pabon-CharnecoAs San Juan nears the 500th anniversary of its founding, Arleen Pabón-Charneco explores the urban and architectural developments that have taken place over the last five centuries, transforming the site from a small Caribbean enclave to a sprawling modern capital. As the oldest European settlement in the United States and second oldest in the Western Hemisphere, San Juan is an example of the experimentation that took place in the American "borderland" from 1519 to 1898, when Spanish sovereignty ended. The author also investigates post-1898 examples to explore how architectural ideas were exported from the mainland United States. Pabón-Charneco covers the varied architectural periods and styles, aesthetic theories and conservation practices of the region and explains how the development of the architectural and urban artifacts reflect the political, cultural, social and religious aspects that metamorphosed a small military garrison into a urban center of international significance.