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In the pre-modern age in Europe, the architect built not merely with imagination, bricks and mortar, but with time, using vast quantities of duration as the means to erect monumental buildings that otherwise would have been impossible to achieve. Virtually all the great cathedrals of France and the rest of Europe were built by this deliberate practice, here given the name "Building-in-Time." It places an entirely new light on the major works of pre-modern Italy, from the Pisa cathedral group to the cathedrals of Milan, Venice and Siena, and from the monuments of fourteenth-century Florence to the new St Peter's. Even as this temporal regime was flourishing, the fifteenth-century Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti proposed a new one for architecture, in which time would ideally be excluded from the making of architecture ("Building-outside-Time"). Planning and building, which had always formed one fluid, imbricated process, were to be sharply divided, and the change that always came with time was to be excluded from architectural making.
Set on a hillside near Cluny, in a region associated with religious institutions and sacred architecture (including Le Corbusier's La Tourette), Le Carmel de la Paix, designed by José Luis Sert, remains tranquilly unvisited and quietly erased from architectural history. Why? This unusual convent falls outside the standard categories of Sert's architecture and has been overlooked in most publications about his work. As J.K. Birksted explains, the design and construction process for this building proved nightmarish, resulting in a building which, at first sight, appears to be 'ineloquent'. This first detailed examination of this building shows how the convent and the story of its creation offer valuable and important new insights into Sert, his architecture and his life. However, the study also opens up discussions on wider subjects such as the relationships between modernist architecture and ecclesiastical architecture. The design and construction of the Carmel de la Paix (1968-1972) followed the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962-1965), which introduced fundamental changes and proposals for renewing the relationship between the Church and the changing modern world and the convent provides an interesting illustration of this period. In addition, it offers insights into the fascinating world of the Carmelite order and its specific liturgical requirements, and, reflecting on the nuns' active involvement in the design and construction process, it also explores wider issues of women in architecture.
The Architecture of Survival: Setting and Politics in Apocalypse Films offers a compelling exploration of how popular films and TV series from the past two decades use architectural spaces to comment on socio-political issues. The authors harness varied theoretical perspectives to demonstrate how, through set design, these works suggest that certain kinds of architecture support human development, community, and freedom, while other kinds separate us from our fellow humans and make democratic politics impossible. The clean lines of modernist design serve in films such as Contagion and Ex Machina as a metaphor for the sanitized, sterile politics that drive disaster. In The Walking Dead apocalypse survivors favor traditional architectural styles when rebuilding society, a choice that symbolically affirms their democratic principles. The massive walls and super-gentrification as seen in Elysium and Army of the Dead divide humanity, with those on one side wielding illegitimate power. Empty streetscapes intensify loneliness, alienation, and the destruction of civil norms. "Smart cities," offering a blend of high-tech surveillance and big data, erode social capital and community in Her and Transcendence. The book concludes with a somewhat hopeful glimpse into architecture’s potential to mitigate the catastrophic adverse effects of climate change, as seen in films like Zootopia.
"This book has been published in conjunction with the exhibition Ralph Walker: Architect of the Century, Walker Tower, New York City, 2012"--T.p. verso.
Utopian thought, though commonly characterized as projecting a future without a past, depends on golden models for re-invention of what is. Through a detailed and innovative re-assessment of the work of three architects who sought to represent a utopian content in their work, and a consideration of the thoughts of a range of leading writers, Coleman offers the reader a unique perspective of idealism in architectural design. With unparalleled depth and focus of vision on the work of Le Corbusier, Louis I Kahn and Aldo van Eyck, this book persuasively challenges predominant assumptions in current architectural discourse, forging a new approach to the invention of welcoming built environments and transcending the limitations of both the postmodern and hyper-modern stance and orthodox modernist architecture.
Drawing on cultural theory, phenomenology and concepts from Asian art and philosophy, this book reflects on the role of interpretation in the act of architectural creation, bringing an intellectual and scholarly dimension to real-world architectural design practice. For practising architects as well as academic researchers, these essays consider interpretation from three theoretical standpoints or themes: play, edification and otherness. Focusing on these, the book draws together strands of thought informed by the diverse reflections of hermeneutical scholarship, the uses of digital media and studio teaching and practice.
This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it. Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.
Architecture and environmental design are among the last professional fields to develop a sustained and nuanced discussion concerning ethics. Hemmed in by politics and powerful clients on one side and the often unscrupulous practices of the construction industry on the other, environmental designers have been traditionally reluctant to address ethical issues head on. And yet the rapid urbanization of the world's population continues to swell into new megacities, each less healthy, welcoming, secure, or environmentally sustainable than the next. Green, carbon-reduced, and sustainable building practices are important ways architects have recently responded to the symptoms of the crisis, but are these efforts really addressing the core issues? Taking the Dine (Navajo) "Hogan Song"--a song used to protect and nourish the personhood of newly constructed dwellings--as their inspiration, the architects, philosophers, poets, and other contemporary scholars contributing to this volume demonstrate that a deeper, more radical change in our relationship to the built world needs to occur. While offering a careful critique of modernist, corporate, or techno-enthralled design practices, these essays investigate an alternative "relational ecology" whose wisdom draws from ancient and often-marginalized voices, if not the whisperings of the earth itself. Contributors include: Richard Kearney, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karsten Harries, Edward Casey, Susan Stewart, David Abram, Stacy Alaimo, Jace and Laura Weaver, Philip Sheldrake, and Sebnem Yucel Young.
In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness -- a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown (The Soul Is Not a Smithy). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity by delineating the office politics surrounding a magazine profile of an artist who produces miniature sculptures in an anatomically inconceivable way (The Suffering Channel). Or capture the ache of love's breakdown in the painfully polite apologies of a man who believes his wife is hallucinating the sound of his snoring (Oblivion). Each of these stories is a complete world, as fully imagined as most entire novels, at once preposterously surreal and painfully immediate.