Download Free Perspecta Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Perspecta and write the review.

Atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged. A literal no-place, atopia represents the spatial end-product of a society seemingly flattened by supra-territorial flows of information and material. It expresses both a physical artifact and condition of mass culture, and like the global systems of production and consumption from which it is conceived, atopia is both nowhere and everywhere at once. For the contributors of Perspecta 54, the ephemeral conditions of atopia are also an invitation to an equally unconstrained critical practice. Blurred boundaries—geopolitical, virtual, technical, disciplinary—offer sites for transgressive speculation and critique from beyond the limits of traditional design agency. What results is a form of design practice that ambiguously straddles impossibility and hyperreality. Atopia rejects both the escapist fantasy of utopia and the nihilism of dystopia, favoring instead a conceptual middle ground from which real-world conditions can be productively engaged and challenged. Architecture’s traditional objectives of critical inquiry—particularly the location of modes of complicity, agency, and resistance within larger structures—are mediated and reframed through nontraditional strategies of speculative design and fiction. For a profession that is routinely asked to navigate extreme complexity with limited tools, this approach suggests an expanded operational domain and possibilities for reinvigorated creative thought. From urban crises and climate emergencies to border disputes and geopolitics, Perspecta 54 examines atopia as both the site of architecture’s critical confrontation with hegemonic systems and the theoretical space in which its own processes can be challenged.
This study analyzes experimental data generated by human subjects using the Perspecta 3D Volumetric Display and a 2D flat screen liquid crystal display (LCD). The analysis reveals differences in how experiment participants used the display technologies.
Investigating money's ambiguous position in architecture, with reflections on topics that range from the aesthetics of austerity to the underwriting of large-scale art projects.
Considering a redefinition of global space. As much as it is a neoclassical compositional principle, the ensemble today is shifting into a new critical focus: it is a central figure in nascent developments in probabilistic mathematics and a critical logic in the development of artificial intelligence algorithms. Statistical ensembles are a specific adaptation of Markov processes. They produce and are produced by a highly circumscribed definition of creativity—that of a predictive state inherently based on a chain of linked, given events, thus a computational intelligence predicated on the established patterns of the database. Are these mathematical ensembles different from those of neoclassical composition? How are the new ensembles characterized and materialized relative to their conceptual tradition? This fifty-second issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—is a projective art history of ensemble as form and politics. It uses theories of ensemble to propose both alternative extensive stagings of design objects, as well as other resistant assemblies of the corps of architects. Ensemble is posed a lens to theorize object-parts and states of motion at once, together: an architecture of the city. The volume includes a new photographic essay on the contemporary city of Bengali by American and Indian artists. A collection of essays by interdisciplinary contributors interweave this new creative work, pointing toward a compositional project for an architecture that is multiple, extensive, spontaneous, collective, durational, temporary. Contributors Charlotte Algie, Hayden Bassett, Anya Bokov, Kim Bowes, Alex Bremner, Matteo Burioni, Swati Chattopadhyay, Jean-Louis Cohen, Mark Crinson, Arko Datto, Samia Henni, Heyward Hart, Mark Jarzombek, Vladimir Kulić, Jimenez Lai, Hannah Le Roux, John Loring, Zahra Malkani and Shahana Rajani, Emily Mann, Christina Maranci, Edward Mitchell, Brian Norwood, Itohan Oyasimwese, Cristina Osswald, Curtis Roth, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Hans Tursack, Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest
Exploring architecture as a form of concealment and obfuscation in engendering new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, and reshaping the world. Architecture is the perfect form of camouflage. As buildings recede into the background of everyday life, the myriad forces that shape our natural, social, and political landscapes hide in plain sight. Embedded within the spatial and material organizations of the built environment are ideas of value, hierarchy, and control that tilt the ground and influence perception in the name of endless competing interests. Operating across multiple scales and mediums, architectural camouflage gives familiar form to obscure objectives. Design transforms and encodes our shared environments, from domestic domains to digital territories, through its material practices, aesthetics, and discourses. Immanent in the periphery, architecture’s images are internalized as forms for understanding and reshaping the world. Camouflage, in turn, dwells in the architecture of our collective subconscious. Latent within architecture’s deceptions is a profound capacity to reflect the elusive intentions and surreal ambiguities of our ecological entanglements. In masking hierarchies and shifting sensitivities to what escapes perception, architecture can engender vital questions around the agency and significance of its world-making practices. Mediating with and within the background, architecture can awaken new modes of attention to material and social layers previously unimagined or hidden and engage directly with the mirrored frameworks that define reality. This issue of Perspecta considers the complexities and potentialities of architectural concealment, obfuscation, and mimicry; of the power inherent in architecture’s expanding capacity as media. In the veiled extents of our physical and digital worlds, what is still not found? Contributors APRDELESP and Xavier Nueno Guitart, Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann, Esther M. Choi, feminist architecture collaborative, Marianela D’Aprile and Douglas Spencer, Theo Deutinger and Christopher Clarkson, DESIGN EARTH, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Linda Gordon, Noah Kalina, Dana Karwas, Andrew Economos Miller, M.C. Overholt and Alex Whee Kim, Trevor Paglen, Lukas Pauer, Nina Rappaport, David Sadighian, Matthew Soules, Jerome Tryon, Michael Young
Essays and projects illuminate the nature of error and its creative possibilities for architecture. Architecture never goes entirely according to plan. Every project deviates from its designers' expectations, and wise architects learn to anticipate, mitigate, and sometimes celebrate the errors along the way. Perspecta 46 argues that error is part of architecture's essence: mistranslations, contradictions, happy accidents, and wicked problems pervade our systems of design and building, almost always yielding surprising aberrations. Today, with increasingly complex projects underpinned by layers of computer code, small errors can proliferate rapidly, and the dream of errorless architecture seems more utopian than ever. This issue of Perspecta—the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America—considers the challenge of defining error, the difficulty of diagnosing and managing it, and the promise (and peril) of following its lead. Essays and projects illuminate error's ambiguous agency both in reality and in the architectural imagination, covering topics that range from Dante's cosmos of divine justice and Michelangelo's architectural “abuses” to Dada urbanism and the warped skyscrapers of Google Earth.
Amid the tricks and trompe l'oeils of contemporary practices, architecture is now, more than ever, in pursuit of the real. It is often suggested that architecture is more "real" than the other arts, more grounded and definitive. Yet even the most fundamental and concrete elements of architecture are often designed to conceal. This issue of Perspecta--the oldest and most distinguished student-edited architectural journal in America--embraces the paradoxical nature of the real, presenting it as a lens that magnifies the strategies and tactics of architecture, past, present, and future. How does architecture create real effects, change our built environment, and respond to crises? What are the tricks and trompe l'oeils of contemporary practice? Amid fake Europes, shape-shifting materials, and underwater asylums, Perspecta 42 navigates architecture's disciplinary boundaries to locate the real in the most unlikely of places. The real has been central to our understanding of architecture for the last hundred years, even if the discussion has been couched in other terms. While architecture anxiously situates itself between building and discourse, it never fully capitulates to either side. Through historical inquiry, theoretical writing, and contemporary projects, Perspecta 42 asserts that now, more than ever, architecture is in search of the real. The issue revolves around three encounters with the real. First, the physical: texts, projects, and conversations that relate to issues of material properties and our bodily surroundings--thoughts on such topics as sensory environments, smart materials, and the floor as a landscape of logistics. Second, authenticity: explorations of representation and hybrid realities, including the digital and the surreal. And, finally, institutional failures and man-made or natural crises: considerations of war, the current economic calamity, and racial politics. Contributors Michelle Addington, Lucia Allais, Alejandro Aravena, Mario Ballesteros, BIG, Andrew Blauvelt, Keller Easterling, Olafur Eliasson and Kurt Forster, Hal Foster, Lorens Holm, Jiang Jun, L.E.FT., Armin Linke, Metahaven, Spyros Papapetros, Emmanuel Petit, Antoine Picon, Bill Rankin, Damon Rich, Francois Roche, Matthew Stadler, Albena Yaneva, Yoon+Howeler, Andrew Zago, Mirko Zardini