Visual Planning and the Picturesque PDF Download

Author: Nikolaus Pevsner
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606060015
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A previously unpublished work by Nikolaus Pevsner, much of which was published as journal articles in the Architectural Review in the 1940s and 1950s during Pevsner's term as editor.

Author: John Macarthur
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134956975
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
In this fresh and authoritative account John Macarthur presents the eighteenth century idea of the picturesque – when it was a risky term concerned with a refined taste for everyday things, such as the hovels of the labouring poor – in the light of its reception and effects in modern culture. In a series of linked essays Macarthur shows: what the concept of picture does in the picturesque and how this relates to modern theories of the image how the distaste that might be felt today at the sentimentality of the picturesque was already at play in the eighteenth century how visual values such as ‘irregularity’ become the basis of modern architectural planning; how the concept of appropriating a view moves from landscape design into urban design why movement is fundamental to picturing the stillness of buildings, cities and landscapes. Drawing on examples from architecture, art and broader culture, John Macarthur's account of this key topic in cultural history, makes engaging reading for all those studying architecture, art history, cultural history or visual studies.

Author: John Pendlebury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317698657
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The history of post Second World War reconstruction has recently become an important field of research around the world; Alternative Visions of Post-War Reconstruction is a provocative work that questions the orthodoxies of twentieth century design history. This book provides a key critical statement on mid-twentieth century urban design and city planning, focused principally upon the period between the start of the Second World War to the mid-sixties. The various figures and currents covered here represent a largely overlooked field within the history of 20th century urbanism. In this period while certain modernist practices assumed an institutional role for post-war reconstruction and flourished into the mainstream, such practices also faced opposition and criticism leading to the production of alternative visions and strategies. Spanning from a historically-informed modernism to the increasing presence of urban conservation the contributors examine these alternative approaches to the city and its architecture.

Author: Jonathan Hill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429770561
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
The 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.

Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262620017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.

Author: Harding McGregor Dunnett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351390937
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The Festival of Britain is perhaps best known for its South Bank Exhibition promoting British science and art to the post-war world, but one of the most important elements was the Architecture Exhibition, based in Poplar in East London. This exhibition was used to demonstrate the principles of modern town planning that had been laid out by Abercrombie, in particular in his County of London Plan. The project was named after George Lansbury, the Labour MP, London County Council (LCC) member and Poplar councillor. It was an effective demonstration of planning ideas adopted since the 1930s by influential planners, taking the village as a model and retaining the terraced house as a housing option among medium rise flats. Small squares and open spaces were favoured, with paved pedestrian spaces, all at lower than pre-war densities. The guide is revealing of the broader thinking in English planning in the mid century. It provides an opportunity for looking at conflicts among advocates of different planning ideas in the period of reconstruction and the move by architects to regain control of LCC housing from the Valuer’s Department. It offers the model of integrated professional specialisms that was seen as central to Modernism’s mission. It is also an opportunity to describe in more detail the interaction of different professions, including, for example, a sociologist, employed by the LCC in the creation of a model for reconstruction.

Author: Caroline O'Donnell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317548469
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Niche Tactics aligns architecture's relationship with site with its ecological analogue: the relationship between an organism and its environment. Bracketed between texts on giraffe morphology, ecological perception, ugliness, and hopeful monsters, architectural case studies investigate historical moments when relationships between architecture and site were productively intertwined, from the anomalous city designs of Francesco de Marchi in the sixteenth century to Le Corbusier’s near eradication of context in his Plan Voisin in the twentieth century to the more recent contextualist movements. Extensively illustrated with 140 drawings and photographs, Niche Tactics considers how attention to site might create a generative language for architecture today.

Author: Mira Engler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317535588
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
During the post-war era, the emerging consumer economy radically changed both the discourse and practice of architecture. It was a time where architecture became a mainstream commodity whose products sold through mass media; a time in which Thomas Gordon Cullen came to be one of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century architectural draftsmen. Despite Cullen’s wide acclaim, there has been little research into his life and work; particularly his printed images and his methods of operation. This book examines Cullen’s drawings and book design and also looks into his process of image making to help explain his considerable popularity and influence which continues to this day. It presents the lessons Cullen had to offer in today’s design culture and practice and looks into the post-war consumerist design strategies that are still used today.

Author: Yeseung Lee
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135013046X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Surface is one of the most intensely debated topics in recent arts, humanities and social science scholarship. The changing technologies which manufacture the actual and virtual surfaces of today are radically altering our perception of thresholds and borders. In contrast to the responses to preceding industrial revolutions, contemporary concerns with surface seem preoccupied with its function of mediation or passage, rather than with that of separation or boundary. In Surface and Apparition, each chapter explores a different meaning and function of the material and immaterial qualities of 'surface'. Case studies include various surfaces from computer screens, 'artisanal' engines and glass architecture to gauzy veils, the planetary surface of supply chain capitalism, and spatial embodiment in street markets. International scholars of design, architecture, film, media, fine art, fashion, textiles, silversmithing, woodworking and archival practices account for how the material and the immaterial draw attention to each other in both their everyday and artistic practice. Each chapter addresses particular systems (from the human body to manually operated tools and machines); materials (for instance cloth, wood and light); modes of attention, movement and engagement. 'Surface' therefore functions in this book as a multidisciplinary method for attending to critical issues concerning human creative and technological endeavours.

Author: Jonathan Hill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317528581
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Architecture can be analogous to a history, a fiction, and a landscape. We expect a history or a novel to be written in words, but they can also be cast in concrete or seeded in soil. The catalyst to this tradition was the simultaneous and interdependent emergence in the eighteenth century of new art forms: the picturesque landscape, the analytical history, and the English novel. Each of them instigated a creative and questioning response to empiricism’s detailed investigation of subjective experience and the natural world, and together they stimulated a design practice and lyrical environmentalism that profoundly influenced subsequent centuries. Associating the changing natural world with journeys in self-understanding, and the design process with a visual and spatial autobiography, this book describes journeys between London and the North Sea in successive centuries, analysing an enduring and evolving tradition from the picturesque and romanticism to modernism. Creative architects have often looked to the past to understand the present and imagine the future. Twenty-first-century architects need to appreciate the shock of the old as well as the shock of the new.