Laughing At Architecture

Author : Michela Rosso
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350022764
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Laughing at Architecture written by Michela Rosso and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a media-saturated world, humour stands out as a form of social communication that is especially effective in re-appropriating and questioning architectural and urban culture. Whether illuminating the ambivalences of metropolitan life or exposing the shock of modernisation, cartoons, caricature, and parody have long been potent agents of architectural criticism, protest and opposition. In a novel contribution to the field of architectural history, this book outlines a survey of visual and textual humour as applied to architecture, its artefacts and leading professionals. Employing a wide variety of visual and literary sources (prints, the illustrated press, advertisements, theatrical representations, cinema and TV), thirteen essays explore an array of historical subjects concerning the critical reception of projects, buildings and cities through the means of caricature and parody. Subjects range from 1750 to the present, and from Europe and the USA to contemporary China. From William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Osbert Lancaster, Adolf Loos' satire, and Saul Steinberg's celebrated cartoons of New York City, graphic and descriptive humour is shown to be an enormously fruitful, yet largely unexplored terrain of investigation for the architectural and urban historian.

Author : Michela Rosso
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350022756
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Laughing at Architecture written by Michela Rosso and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a media-saturated world, humour stands out as a form of social communication that is especially effective in re-appropriating and questioning architectural and urban culture. Whether illuminating the ambivalences of metropolitan life or exposing the shock of modernisation, cartoons, caricature, and parody have long been potent agents of architectural criticism, protest and opposition. In a novel contribution to the field of architectural history, this book outlines a survey of visual and textual humour as applied to architecture, its artefacts and leading professionals. Employing a wide variety of visual and literary sources (prints, the illustrated press, advertisements, theatrical representations, cinema and TV), thirteen essays explore an array of historical subjects concerning the critical reception of projects, buildings and cities through the means of caricature and parody. Subjects range from 1750 to the present, and from Europe and the USA to contemporary China. From William Hogarth and George Cruikshank to Osbert Lancaster, Adolf Loos' satire, and Saul Steinberg's celebrated cartoons of New York City, graphic and descriptive humour is shown to be an enormously fruitful, yet largely unexplored terrain of investigation for the architectural and urban historian.

Author : Leon Krier
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262512939
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Drawing for Architecture written by Leon Krier and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawings, doodles, and ideograms argue with ferocity and wit for traditional urbanism and architecture. Architect Léon Krier's doodles, drawings, and ideograms make arguments in images, without the circumlocutions of prose. Drawn with wit and grace, these clever sketches do not try to please or flatter the architectural establishment. Rather, they make an impassioned argument against what Krier sees as the unquestioned doctrines and unacknowledged absurdities of contemporary architecture. Thus he shows us a building bearing a suspicious resemblance to Norman Foster's famous London “gherkin” as an example of “priapus hubris” (threatened by detumescence and “priapus nemesis”); he charts “Random Uniformity” (“fake simplicity”) and “Uniform Randomness” (“fake complexity”); he draws bloated “bulimic” and disproportionately scrawny “anorexic” columns flanking a graceful “classical” one; and he compares “private virtue” (modernist architects' homes and offices) to “public vice” (modernist architects' “creations”). Krier wants these witty images to be tools for re-founding traditional urbanism and architecture. He argues for mixed-use cities, of “architectural speech” rather than “architectural stutter,” and pointedly plots the man-vehicle-landneed ratio of “sub-urban man” versus that of a city dweller. In an age of energy crisis, he writes (and his drawings show), we “build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, densities, and heights, and for the wrong number of dwellers”; a return to traditional architectures and building and settlement techniques can be the means of ecological reconstruction. Each of Krier's provocative and entertaining images is worth more than a thousand words of theoretical abstraction.

Author : Paul Emmons
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1317162285
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Confabulations : Storytelling in Architecture written by Paul Emmons and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction framing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory and practice of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.

Author : Mike Ma
Publisher : Independently Published
ISBN 13 : 9781795641494
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Harassment Architecture written by Mike Ma and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-04-27 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "At a glance, Mike comes off like a 1980s teen movie bully on downers." - Playboy Magazine"...Mike Ma bragged about crashing a White House press conference." - The Huffington PostNow, you can read his long-awaited first book. Harassment Architecture has been described as an almost plotless and violent march against what the author calls the "lowerworld". It's the story of a man, sick on his surrounds, bound by them, but still seeking the way out.

Author : Reinier de Graaf
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674982762
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Four Walls and a Roof written by Reinier de Graaf and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Architects, we like to believe, shape the world as they please. Reinier de Graaf draws on his own tragicomic experiences to present a candid account of what it is really like to work as an architect. To achieve anything, he notes, architects must serve the powers they strive to critique, finding themselves in a perpetual conflict of interest.

Author : Francois Blanciak
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262370956
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tokyoids written by Francois Blanciak and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-09-13 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A photographic survey of the robotic face of Tokyo buildings and an argument that robot aesthetics plays a central role in architectural history. In Tokyoids, architect François Blanciak surveys the robotic faces omnipresent in Tokyo buildings, offering an architectural taxonomy based not on the usual variables—size, material, historical style—but on the observable expressions of buildings. Are the eyes (windows) twinkling, the mouth (door) laughing? Is that balcony a howl of distress? Investigating robot aesthetics through his photographs of fifty buildings, Blanciak argues that the robot face originated in architecture—before the birth of robotics—and has played a central role in architectural history. Blanciak first puts the robot face into historical perspective, examining the importance of the face in architectural theory and demonstrating that the construction of architecture’s emblematic portraits triggered the emergence of a robot aesthetics. He then explores the emotions conveyed by the photographed buildings’ robot faces, in chapters titled “Awe,” “Wrath,” “Mirth,” “Pain,” “Angst,” and “Hunger.” As he does so he considers, among other things, the architectural relevance of Tokyo’s ordinary buildings; the repression of the figural in contemporary architecture; an aesthetic of dismemberment, linked to the structure of the Japanese language and local building design; and the influence of automation technology upon human interaction. Part photographic survey, part theoretical inquiry, Tokyoids upends the usual approach to robotics in architecture by considering not the automation of architectural output but the aesthetic properties of the robot.

Author : Steen Eiler Rasmussen
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262680028
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Experiencing Architecture, second edition written by Steen Eiler Rasmussen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1964-03-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A classic examination of superb design through the centuries. Widely regarded as a classic in the field, Experiencing Architecture explores the history and promise of good design. Generously illustrated with historical examples of designing excellence—ranging from teacups, riding boots, and golf balls to the villas of Palladio and the fish-feeding pavilion of Beijing's Winter Palace—Rasmussen's accessible guide invites us to appreciate architecture not only as a profession, but as an art that shapes everyday experience. In the past, Rasmussen argues, architecture was not just an individual pursuit, but a community undertaking. Dwellings were built with a natural feeling for place, materials and use, resulting in “a remarkably suitable comeliness.” While we cannot return to a former age, Rasmussen notes, we can still design spaces that are beautiful and useful by seeking to understand architecture as an art form that must be experienced. An understanding of good design comes not only from one's professional experience of architecture as an abstract, individual pursuit, but also from one's shared, everyday experience of architecture in real time—its particular use of light, color, shape, scale, texture, rhythm and sound. Experiencing Architecture reminds us of what good architectural design has accomplished over time, what it can accomplish still, and why it is worth pursuing. Wide-ranging and approachable, it is for anyone who has ever wondered “what instrument the architect plays on.”

Author : Richard T. Bynum, Jr.
Publisher : Academy Press
ISBN 13 : 9780470854068
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Archi-Toons written by Richard T. Bynum, Jr. and published by Academy Press. This book was released on 2003-06-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These original cartoons explore the lighter side of architecture, design and the construction industry. From the Far Side to Dilbert and from lawyer jokes to political humour, we have always been able to have a laugh at each other, ourselves and our professions. However, the design community has never really had a cartoon to call its own....until now! The cartoons cover all members of the construction industry and the book is irreverent in its wit. Clearly composed by someone who has been in the business for many years Bynum's observations demonstrate an extensive understanding of the entire business, without being one sided or vitriolic.

Author : Alain De Botton
Publisher : McClelland & Stewart
ISBN 13 : 1551993872
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.74/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Architecture of Happiness written by Alain De Botton and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2010-12-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.