By the 1970s, CRS was a master at organizing complicated architectural undertakings and had earned a global reputation for sharing its insights with practitioners worldwide.".

"Offers an intense scholarly experience in its comprehensiveness, its variety of voices and its formal organization... the editors took a risk, experimented and have delivered a much-needed resource that upends the status-quo." - Architectural Histories, journal of the European Architectural History Network "Architectural theory interweaves interdisciplinary understandings with different practices, intentions and ways of knowing. This handbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to this challenging and shifting terrain, and will be of great interest to students, academics and practitioners alike." - Professor Iain Borden, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture "In this collection, architectural theory expands outward to interact with adjacent discourses such as sustainability, conservation, spatial practices, virtual technologies, and more. We have in The Handbook of Architectural Theory an example of the extreme generosity of architectural theory. It is a volume that designers and scholars of many stripes will welcome." - K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory, Harvard University The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, it examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/World/Spectacle History/Memory/Tradition Design/Production/Practice Science/Technology/Virtuality Nature/Ecology/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory. Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book is organized around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory.

In our architectural pursuits, we often seem to be in search of something newer, grander, or more efficient—and this phenomenon is not novel. In the spring of 1910 hundreds of workers labored day and night to demolish the Gillender Building in New York, once the loftiest office tower in the world, in order to make way for a taller skyscraper. The New York Times puzzled over those who would sacrifice the thirteen-year-old structure, “as ruthlessly as though it were some ancient shack.” In New York alone, the Gillender joined the original Grand Central Terminal, the Plaza Hotel, the Western Union Building, and the Tower Building on the list of just one generation’s razed metropolitan monuments. In the innovative and wide-ranging Obsolescence, Daniel M. Abramson investigates this notion of architectural expendability and the logic by which buildings lose their value and utility. The idea that the new necessarily outperforms and makes superfluous the old, Abramson argues, helps people come to terms with modernity and capitalism’s fast-paced change. Obsolescence, then, gives an unsettling experience purpose and meaning. Belief in obsolescence, as Abramson shows, also profoundly affects architectural design. In the 1960s, many architects worldwide accepted the inevitability of obsolescence, experimenting with flexible, modular designs, from open-plan schools, offices, labs, and museums to vast megastructural frames and indeterminate building complexes. Some architects went so far as to embrace obsolescence’s liberating promise to cast aside convention and habit, envisioning expendable short-life buildings that embodied human choice and freedom. Others, we learn, were horrified by the implications of this ephemerality and waste, and their resistance eventually set the stage for our turn to sustainability—the conservation rather than disposal of resources. Abramson’s fascinating tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent manifestations of sustainability, from adaptive reuse and historic preservation to postmodernism and green design, which all struggle to comprehend and manage the changes that challenge us on all sides.

"The idea for this book came about when architectural historian Kathryn O'Rourke and architect / photographer Ben Koush collaborated on a piece on postmodern architecture for Texas Architect. The two enjoyed working together--with O'Rourke writing and Koush providing visuals--and, together with UTP, developed the framework for a similarly rich, book-length treatment of modern architecture in Texas. Conceived to be accessible to a general readership, this project explores in photographs and words approximately fifty years of Texas modern architecture, from the 1930s to the 1980s. As O'Rourke writes, "In this period, modern architecture and Texas grew and changed at an astonishing pace. The state became a significant force in national and international affairs, chiefly as a consequence of the oil industry and the presence of politically powerful Texans in Washington, D.C. Major buildings, many designed by regionally and nationally-prominent architects, followed the money in the state as the influence and image of Texas grew. Relentless ambition, a forward-looking attitude, and a strong sense of place combined to make Texans particularly receptive to modern architecture's implication of newness, its future-oriented image, and its capacity to reinterpret historical forms in novel ways." While many books on Texas architecture focus on one building type (residential architecture, courthouses, and so on), this project adopts a broader lens. A dozen chapters presented under four thematic headings explore buildings through a variety of frameworks--there are the inescapable forces of heat and money, essential functions like caregiving and government, and groupings for leisure and multi-building sites such as museums and campuses. In each of these sections, the authors present a "constellation" of buildings, with one central example and several supporting ones. So, for instance, the "God" chapter presents O'Neil Ford's Little Chapel in the Woods in Denton as its main building, alongside the Antioch Baptist Church in San Antonio and the Congregation Rodef Shalom in Waco. This sort of geographical diversity, with big cities sitting alongside smaller and lesser studied places, runs through the volume as a whole"--

Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity. Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.

The Charrette Handbook is a step-by-step guide to successful charrettes -- those extended exercises that help citizens envision new possibilities for their communities. Based on a program developed by the National Charrette Institute, the book offers a three-phase approach to project management, describing how to organize for a charrette, how to conduct one, and how to put the resulting ideas into effect. The section on preparation has been extensively overhauled for this edition.

First published in 2007, this book examines the designs of seventeen architecture and design schools and answers questions such as: How has architectural education evolved and what is its future? Are architectural schools discernible types of designs and what are their effects on those who experience them? What lessons can be learned from evaluations of recently completed school buildings and what guidance do they provide for the design of future ones? Included in the multiple approaches to evaluation are examinations of the history of architectural education and building form; typologies of school for architecture; and the systematic user evaluations of the aesthetics, function, and technology which reveal the strengths to encourage and weaknesses to avoid in future designs. While offering specific guidelines for schools of design, it also includes findings that extend beyond the walls of design schools and can be applied to everything from the interiors of educational and campus buildings to planning offices and gathering places to build communities. This book will make readers more aware of problems in architectural interiors and suggest ways to make interiors work better for the building occupants.