How do we create the new from the old? The Architecture of Influence explores this fundamental question by analyzing a broad swath of twentieth-century architectural works—including some of the best-known examples of the architectural canon, modern and postmodern—through the lens of influence. The book serves as both a critique of the discipline’s long-standing focus on "genius" and a celebration of the creative act of revisioning and reimagining the past. It argues that all works of architecture not only depend on the past but necessarily alter, rewrite, and reposition the traditions and ideas to which they refer. Organized into seven chapters—Replicas, Copies, Compilations, Generalizations, Revivals, Emulations, and Self-Repetitions—the book redefines influence as an active process through which the past is defined, recalled, and subsequently redefined within twentieth-century architecture.

Taking inspiration from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists and Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence, this book elucidates the theory and practice of a selected group of key Japanese architects by situating them within a wider cultural context of art, technology, literature, and politics. Illustrated with rarely seen images and interspersed with previously untranslated texts, the book uses biographical profiles and comparative analyses to trace the evolution of spatial, aesthetic, and behavioral concepts in Japanese architecture over the postwar decades. In particular, the political activism of architects in the 1960s and the social criticism of architects in the 1970s provide a vital source of inspiration for the protean creativity of the Japanese architectural world today.

"Influence is not easily quantified. It is elusive, even when we casually admit to it as we ogle images on the internet, or feel ourselves softening our resolve on an important issue in light of a beautifully crafted piece of rhetoric; or as the mass-media drone imperceptibly rewires some of our most fundamental desires."--Page 23.

This book examines the mutual influence of architecture and human action during a key period of history: the Hellenistic age. During this era, the profound transformations in the Mediterranean's archaeological and historical record are detectable, pointing to a conscious intertwining of the physical (landscape, architecture, bodies) and social (practice) components of built space. Compiling the outcomes of a conference held in Kiel in 2018, the volume assembles contributions focusing on Hellenistic architecture as an action context, perceived in movement through built space. Sanctuaries, as a particularly coherent kind of built space featuring well-defined sets of architecture combined with ritual action, were chosen as the general frame for the analyses. The reciprocity between this sacred architecture and (religious) human action is traced through several layers starting from three specific case studies (Messene, Samothrace, Pella), extending to architectural modules, and finally encompassing overarching principles of design and use. As two additional case studies on caves and agorai show, the far-reaching entanglement of architecture and human action was neither restricted to highly architecturalised nor sacred spaces, but is characteristic of Hellenistic built space in general.

This is the eagerly-anticipated revision to one of the seminal books in the field of software architecture which clearly defines and explains the topic.

Authorship -- Transfer -- Rights -- Reenactments