Occupying Architecture - Between the Architect and the User
Occupying Architecture focuses on the importance of the user of architecture. It emphasises the cross-currents between design, theory and use, and the need for a wider cross-cultural approach to architecture. Beginning with the architect, the book proceeds to explore models for architectural practice that actively engage the issue of use, and concludes with examination of the user. The authors draw on illustrations and examples from London, Las Vegas, Barcelona and Bruges to discuss how and why architecture ignores the user.
Nurturing Dreams - Collected Essays on Architecture and the City
Born in Tokyo, educated in Japan and the United States, and principal of an internationally acclaimed architectural practice, celebrated architect Fumihiko Maki brings to his writings on architecture a perspective that is both global and uniquely Japanese. Influenced by post-Bauhaus internationalism, sympathetic to the radical urban architectural vision of Team X, and a participant in the avant-garde movement Metabolism, Maki has been at the forefront of his profession for decades. This collection of essays documents the evolution of architectural modernism and Maki's own fifty-year intellectual journey during a critical period of architectural and urban history.
Architecture is expected to be solid, stable and reassuring-physically, socially and psychologically. Bound to each other, the architectural and the material are considered inseparable. Jonathan Hill, architect and architectural historian, argues that the immaterial is as important to architecture as the material and has as long a history and so "Immaterial Architecture" explores the often conflicting forces that draw architecture towards either the material or the immaterial.
The inspiration for this book came from numerous buildings, books and people. Two books that have remained with us since our student days — Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture and Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture — conveyed to us a sense of enjoyment of architecture that went beyond the spatial and stylistic. This was reinforced by the Cambridge Masters course in Environmental Design in Architecture, which we both attended, founded and coordinated at that time by Nick Baker and Dean Hawkes.
In the discussion of architecture, the prevailing sentiment of the past three decades has been that cultural production can no longer be understood to arise spontaneously, as a matter of social course, but is constructed through ever more self-conscious theoretical procedures. The development of interpretive modes of various stripes—poststructuralist, Marxian, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, as well as others dissenting or eccentric—has given scholars a range of tools for rethinking architecture in relation to other fields and for reasserting architecture's general importance in intellectual discourse.
