The last book from Marco Frascari Strong introduction by Federica Goffi makes the book more accessible to the student audience Marco’s sketchbooks are faithfully reproduced in full colour

Where is the space for dreaming in the twenty-first century? Lofty thoughts, like dreams, are born and live overhead, just as they have been represented in Renaissance paintings and modern cartoons. Ceilings are often repositories of stories, events and otherwise invisible oneiric narratives. Yet environments that inspire innovative thinking are dwindling as our world confronts enormous challenges, and almost all of our thinking, debating and decision-making takes place under endless ceiling grids. Quantitative research establishes that spaces with taller ceilings elicit broader, more creative thoughts. Today, ceilings are usually squat conduits of technology: they have become the blind spot of modern architecture. The twenty essays in this book look across cultures, places and ceilings over time to discover their potential to uplift the human spirit. Not just one building element among many, the ceiling is a key to unlock the architectural imagination. Ceilings and Dreams aims to correct this blind spot and encourages architects and designers, researchers and students, to look up through writings organized into three expansive categories: reveries, suspensions and inversions. The contributors contemplate the architecture of levity and the potential of the ceiling, once again, as a place for dreaming.

Drawing Imagining Building focuses on the history of hand-drawing practices to capture some of the most crucial and overlooked parts of the process. Using 80 black and white images to illustrate the examples, it examines architectural drawing practices to elucidate the ways drawing advances the architect’s imagination. Emmons considers drawing practices in the Renaissance and up to the first half of the twentieth century. Combining systematic analysis across time with historical explication presents the development of hand-drawing, while also grounding early modern practices in their historical milieu. Each of the illustrated chapters considers formative aspects of architectural drawing practice, such as upright elevations, flowing lines and occult lines, and drawing scales to identify their roots in an embodied approach to show how hand-drawing contributes to the architect’s productive imagination. By documenting some of the ways of thinking through practices of architectural handdrawing, it describes how practices can enrich the ethical imagination of the architect. This book would be beneficial for academics, practitioners, and students of architecture, particularly those who are interested in the history and significance of hand-drawing and technical drawing.

This text offers 11 servings of 'slow food' for the architectural imagination as opposed to the tasteless 'fast food' that dominates many drawing tables or digital tablets.

Architectural drawings and models are instruments of imagination, communication, and historical continuity. The role of drawings and models, and their ownership, placement, and authorship in a ubiquitous digital age deserve careful consideration. Expanding on the well-established discussion of the translation from drawings to buildings, this book fills a lacuna in current scholarship, questioning the significance of the lives of drawings and models after construction. Including emerging, well-known, and world-renowned scholars in the fields of architectural history and theory and curatorial practices, the thirty-five contributions define recent research in four key areas: drawing sites/sites of knowledge construction: drawing, office, construction site; the afterlife of drawings and models: archiving, collecting, displaying, and exhibiting; tools of making: architectural representations and their apparatus over time; and the ethical responsibilities of collecting and archiving: authorship, ownership, copyrights, and rights to copy. The research covers a wide range of geographies and delves into the practices of such architects as Sir John Soane, Superstudio, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wajiro Kon, Germán Samper Gnecco, A+PS, Mies van der Rohe, and Renzo Piano.

With the continued growth of PhD programs in architecture and the simultaneous broadening of approaches, InterVIEWS: Insights and Introspection on Doctoral Research in Architecture begins a timely survey into contemporary research at academic institutions internationally, in the context of the expanding landscape of architectural inquiry. The eighteen interviews with scholars who direct or contributed to doctoral research programs in areas of architecture history and theory, theory and criticism, design research, urban studies, cross-disciplinary research, and practice-based research expose a plurality of positions articulating a range of research tactics. Renowned scholars narrated the stories, the experiences, and the research that shaped and are shaping doctoral education worldwide, providing an invaluable knowledge resource from which readers may find inspiration for their work. InterVIEWS acknowledges the diversity in approaches to research to evidence meaningful differences and the range of contributions in academic institutions. The relevance of this self-reflection becomes apparent in the exposition of vibrant and at times divergent viewpoints that offer a thought-provoking opportunity to consider the openness and breadth of a field that is unrelenting in redefining its boundaries along with the probing questions.