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Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a “global style” of architecture—as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano—analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies. More than any art, today’s global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the “art-architecture complex” provides invaluable insight into broader social and economic trajectories in urgent need of analysis.

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

In this compilation, the authors begin with a description of fractal geometry, its property of self-similarity, and how its processes of bifurcation can appear in the arts and architecture. These fractal features are common in different cultures and in different architectural styles. Next, the role of algebraic curves in painting, sculpture, and architecture is discussed. These shapes acted as sources of inspiration for artistic themes in many of the geometrical forms of Modern Art. Today, these beautiful shapes can be easily constructed by computers. The authors discuss an art world devoted to the entanglement phenomenon through modifying the perception of space, approaching new horizons educational fields. An investigation of the function and characteristics of fog in various paintings by famous artists of different art movements (in which the presence of fog significantly affects the visual experience) is provided. Following this, the authors describe where fractality appears in architecture and in urban organization, opening new opportunities in virtual architecture and hyperarchitecture. An additional paper presents a study on complexity in architecture. Complexity is the property of a real world system that is manifested in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all of its properties. Continuing, the authors present a study shows that germs of fractals exist in old Indian literature, e.g., fractal architecture in Indian temples and fractal weapons, with the goal of collecting a few examples from old Indian history and presenting their fractal aspects. A paper is presented including some examples of industrial design objects analysed using complexity and fractal geometry. Complex and fractal components appeared in the industrial design after the development of materials, for example, the introduction of float glass. Afterwards, this book aims to show how and where the concept of time can be applied in architecture, maintaining that time is a parameter which architects seldom consider in their projects. The authors go on to illustrate some properties using Markov matrices, open symbolic dynamic nets, and fields on Julia sets, finding find both symmetrical and spiral patterns on local regions of Julia sets, and discontinuous series in the dynamics of some region that are recordable in the neurophysiology of intermittent consciousness. Synchronization can also be called self-similarity, in induced noncommutative geometry. In the next paper, new Koch curves are generated by dividing the initiator into unequal parts. With the increase in size of the set of Koch curves also comes a need for classification. Superior iterations in the study of Julia sets for rational maps are introduced, showing how new Sierpinski curve Julia sets are effectively different from those obtained by other means. Production rules to draw the new Hilbert curves are discussed, as well as production rules to draw the conventional Hilbert Curve. Later, a paper on Mandelbrot and Julia sets rendered in 3 dimensions is presented. In this paper, new Julia sets have been generated for zn+c, n 4 in superior orbit, and modelled in 3 dimensions. The authors examine the Gingko leaf, commonly referred to as a living fossil, that has been declared as tree of the millennium. This chapter aims to show that there are many ways to generate Gingko leaf. In conclusion, techniques to generate Sierpinski Gasket and Sierpinski Carpet as 3- variable and as 4-variable fractals respectively using superior iterates for contractive operators are described.

Examines the influence of twentieth-century avant-garde movements on the contemporary architectural landscape through the work of “disruptors” such as Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid. With an irregular format designed by celebrated graphic designer Abbott Miller of Pentagram. In Architecture Unbound, noted architecture critic Joseph Giovannini proposes that our current architectural landscape ultimately emerged from transgressive and progressive art movements that had roiled Europe before and after World War I. By the 1960s, social unrest and cultural disruption opened the way for investigations into an inventive, antiauthoritarian architecture. Explorations emerged in the 1970s, and built projects surfaced in the 1980s, taking digital form in the 1990s, with large-scale projects finally landing on the far side of the millennium. Architecture Unbound traces all of these developments and influences, presenting an authoritative and illuminating history not only of the sources of contemporary currents in architecture but also of the twentieth-century avant-garde and the twenty-first-century digital revolution in form-making, and profiling the most influential practitioners and their most notable projects, including Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall, Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House, Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for the World Trade Center, Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Tower, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing.

Zaha Hadid's highly inventive and seemingly unbuildable designs have defied conventional ideas of architectural space and construction. The BMW Central Building in Leipzig, Germany, is no exception. It is the heart of the BMW factory complexthe dynamic focal point of the entire plant that visually, physically, and experientially sustains a sense of animation and motion. With an audacious and abstracted geometry of forms and lines, the BMW Central Building challenges the notion of building as static and is definitive evidence of architecture as art. Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, the seventh volume in the Source Books in Architecture series, provides a comprehensive look at this instant modern masterpiece.

Foreword by Arthur Drexler. Introduction by Vincent Scully.