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EMPAC is a building like no other. The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Center (EMPAC) is an extraordinary instrument for artists and researchers alike. With its concert hall, a theater and experimental black box studios, EMPAC bridges the ever-expanding potential of digital technology with the most refined details for acoustics, visual production and performing arts. EMPAC is designed, without compromise, for technology and the human experience, ranging from performances and new productions in time-based arts to the creation and navigation of large-scale immersive environments by researchers and engineers. On the campus of the oldest technological university in the U.S., the vision of EMPAC synthesizes a grand architectural gesture with the complex requirements of a true interdisciplinary enterprise for the 21st century. By using a series of essays, drawings, images and team insights, Professor Mark Mistur takes us through the collaborative process of a world-class team – led by Grimshaw Architects, Kirkegaard Associates, Fisher Dachs Associates, Buro Happold engineers and the Architect of Record Davis Brody Bond Aedas with the owner’s team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under its President Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson – from concept to completion. Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson’s forward describes a vision for a 21st century research university and EMPAC as one instrument to enhance the culture of a polytechnic institute and to provoke innovation. An essay from EMPAC director Johannes Goebel focuses on the human dimension and the senses and the frontier of time-based arts. Essays by Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, acoustician R. Lawrence Kirkegaard, theater design consultant Joshua Dachs and Grimshaw Architects’ partner involved in the project from beginning to end William Horgan, each examine the question of performance- based design integration and tell the stories of innovations that resulted from their various important points of view. The building and the book do more than promise results. Being in operation for two years at the conclusion of writing the Architecture of EMPAC, the book concludes with appendix complete with the events it has been home to, the artists who have been in residence and the new productions to date, parts of which are captured and included in a DVD.
What is the place of materiality—the expression or condition of physical substance—in our visual age of rapidly changing materials and media? How is it fashioned in the arts or manifested in virtual forms? In Surface, cultural critic and theorist Giuliana Bruno deftly explores these questions, seeking to understand materiality in the contemporary world. Arguing that materiality is not a question of the materials themselves but rather the substance of material relations, Bruno investigates the space of those relations, examining how they appear on the surface of different media—on film and video screens, in gallery installations, or on the skins of buildings and people. The object of visual studies, she contends, goes well beyond the image and engages the surface as a place of contact between people and art objects. As Bruno threads through these surface encounters, she unveils the fabrics of the visual—the textural qualities of works of art, whether manifested on canvas, wall, or screen. Illuminating the modern surface condition, she notes how façades are becoming virtual screens and the art of projection is reinvented on gallery walls. She traverses the light spaces of artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean, and Anthony McCall; touches on the textured surfaces of Isaac Julien’s and Wong Kar-wai’s filmic screens; and travels across the surface materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. In performing these critical operations on the surface, she articulates it as a site in which different forms of mediation, memory, and transformation can take place. Surveying object relations across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media, Surface is a magisterial account of contemporary visual culture.
In cultural history, the 1950s in Venezuela are commonly celebrated as a golden age of modernity, realized by a booming oil economy, dazzling modernist architecture, and nationwide modernization projects. But this is only half the story. In this path-breaking study, Lisa Blackmore reframes the concept of modernity as a complex cultural formation in which modern aesthetics became deeply entangled with authoritarian politics. Drawing on extensive archival research and presenting a wealth of previously unpublished visual materials, Blackmore revisits the decade-long dictatorship to unearth the spectacles of progress that offset repression and censorship. Analyses of a wide range of case studies—from housing projects to agricultural colonies, urban monuments to official exhibitions, and carnival processions to consumerculture—reveal the manifold apparatuses that mythologized visionary leadership, advocated technocratic development, and presented military rule as the only route to progress. Offering a sharp corrective to depoliticized accounts of the period, Spectacular Modernity instead exposes how Venezuelans were promised a radically transformed landscape in exchange for their democratic freedoms.
A new edition of this extensive visual analysis of horror tropes and their architectural analogues Horror in Architecture presents an unflinching look at how horror genre tropes manifest in the built environment. Spanning the realms of art, design, literature, and film, this newly revised and expanded edition compiles examples from all areas of popular culture to form a visual anthology of the architectural uncanny. Rooted in the Romantic and Gothic treatment of horror as a serious aesthetic category, Horror in Architecture establishes incisive links between contemporary horror media and its parallel traits found in various architectural designs. Through chapters dedicated to distorted and monstrous buildings, abandoned spaces, extremes of scale, and other structural peculiarities, and featuring new essays on insurgent natures, blobs, and architectural puppets, this volume brings together diverse architectural anomalies and shows how their unsettling effects deepen our fascination with the unreal. Intended for both horror fans and students of visual culture, Horror in Architecture turns a unique lens on the relationship between the human body and the artificial landscapes it inhabits. Extensively illustrated with photographs, film stills, and diagrams, this book retrieves horror from the cultural fringes and demonstrates how its attributes permeate the modern condition and the material world.
Cylinders, spheres and cubes are a small handful of shapes that can be defined by a single word. However, most shapes cannot be found in a dictionary. They belong to an alternative plastic world defined by trigonometry: a mathematical world where all shapes can be described under one systematic language and where any shape can transform into another. This visually striking guidebook clearly and systematically lays out the basic foundation for using these mathematical transformations as design tools. It is intended for architects, designers, and anyone with the curiosity to understand the link between shapes and the equations behind them.
What do outer space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common? Each is conceived as a closed system: a self-sustaining physical environment demarcated from its surroundings by a boundary that does not allow for the transfer of matter or energy. Contemporary discussions about global warming, recycling, and sustainability have emerged as direct conceptual constructs related to the study and analysis of closed systems. From the space program to countercultural architectural groups experimenting with autonomous living, this publication documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus in the form of a synthetic naturalism. It presents an archive of 39 historical living prototypes from 1928 to the present that put forth an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems. Prototypes are presented through unique discursive narratives with historical images, and each includes new analysis in the form of a feedback drawing that problematizes the language of environmental representation by illustrating loss, derailment, and the production of new substances and atmospheres.
This book examines the social, political, and cultural factors that have and continue to influence the evolution of the urban waterfront as seen through production created from art and design practices. Reaching beyond the disciplines of architecture and urban design, Occupation: Boundary distills the dual roles art and culture have played in relation to the urban waterfront, as mediums that have recorded and instigated change at the threshold between the city and the sea. At the moment in time that demands innovative approaches to the transformation of urban waterfronts, and strategies to foster of resilient boundaries, architect Cathy Simon recounts her career building at and around the water's edge and in service of the public realm. In so doing, the work of contemporary architects is presented, while the origins and principles of a guiding design philosophy are located in meditations on art and observations on coastal cities around the world. The port cities of New York and San Francisco emerge as case studies that structure the reflections and mediate a narrative that is at once a professional and personal memoir, richly illustrated with images and drawings. Comprising three parts, the first two corresponding parts of Occupation: Boundary draw connections between the past and present by tracing the rise and fall of urban, industrial ports and providing context--in the forms of textual and visual media--for their recent transformations. Such reinterpretations, achieved via design, often serve the public through environmentally conscious strategies realized through inventive approaches to cultural and recreational programs. The work of visual artists, both historical and contemporary, appears alongside architecture, poetry, and literary references that illustrate and draw connections between each of these sections. The third section features select architectural work by the author, framed by critic John King and the architect and urbanist Justine Shapiro-Kline. Introduced with a foreword by the prominent landscape architect Laurie Olin, Occupation: Boundary draws on artistic and cultural intuitions and the experience of an architect whose practice negotiates the boundary between urban contexts and the bodies of water that sustain them. Together, the instincts, reflections, and architectural production collected here evidence the role of art and design in the creation of an equitable and inviting public realm.
This compilation of work by Architect Gordon Gilbert explores the idea of transparency in architecture, ranging from an open physical transparency, to clarity of structure, to the dematerialization of the physical object, and further to evolving and expanding states of architectural awareness. This exploration is facilitated through a revealing juxtaposition of experimental drawing, subliminal texts, and constructed work.With essays by Michael Sorkin, Zvi Hecker, Lebbeus Woods, and Christian W. Thomsen.
Technological choices give us ways to bridge the gap between the technical and the cultural, immersing one within the other. The immersion creates a platform for innovation. The techniques that people generate through their use of technology exert pressure on technical refinement and enfold those refinements within culture. Technological choices define a world within which specific alternatives of uses emerge, and they define a subject who chooses among those alternatives. In the making of the world through technology, we simultaneously enact great cultural change. In order for architecture to remain relevant in the future and create a critique of the present it must operate within technology, developing technological practices and design methods that become intrinsic to technology as opposed to applying it to a previously conceived design. The scope and significance of this is potentially enormous. Asset Architecture 3 attempts to illustrate some of the concepts, directions, and practices that have taken on this challenge.
"Robert Venturi’s Rome is a guidebook to the city of Rome seen through the eyes of Robert Venturi and re-interpreted by two subsequent Rome Prize fellows and architect, Frederick Fisher and Stephen Harby. Published in 1966, Venturi viewed architecture, landscape, and art as different manifestations of common themes. Fundamental to the develo9pment of any young architects’ outlook on architecture, Venturi wrote this seminal publication following a two-year Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Many buildings in Rome serve as examples that illustrate his theories, underscoring the city’s profound influence on Venturi’s thinking: from the Pantheon, through works by his favorite artist, Michelangelo, and on to 20th century buildings by Armando Brasini and Luigi Moretti, Venturi reveals Rom as a complex and contradictory city." -- Book jacket.