This series offers a range of heretofore unavailable writings in English translation on the subjects of art, architecture, and aesthetics. Camus's description of the French hotel argues that architecture should please the senses and the mind.

Is architecture an art, like literature or music? Or is it more akin to science or engineering? Can buildings be artworks, just like paintings and sculptures, or does their fundamentally functional nature mean they cannot be considered pure works of art? Questions of architecture, art, and aesthetics do not allow for simple answers. But by asking such questions, we can usefully reveal the ways in which the concepts and meanings of architecture have changed over the centuries, and how they continue to change in the contemporary era. Is Architecture Art? explores the key conceptual questions about the aesthetic appreciation of architecture and its persistently contested status as an artform. It engages the work of thinkers ranging from Hume and Kant to Adorno, Tafuri, and Rancière, and draws on accessible and thought-provoking accounts of historical and contemporary architectural and art theory. Taking novel approaches to issues that will be familiar to the practising architect, it shows how aesthetics and art theory can open up and illuminate architectural theory, issue by issue. Is Architecture Art? will provoke discussion and debate among architects and architectural theorists, and force a new understanding of the purpose of architectural practice in the contemporary era as the concepts of 'art', 'the arts', and of the creative economy have shifted and blurred as never before.

What is the role of design research in the types of insight and knowledge that architects create? That is the central question raised by this book. It acts as the introductory overview for Ashgate’s major new series, ’Design Research in Architecture’ which has been created in order to establish a firm basis for this emerging field of investigation within architecture. While there have been numerous architects-scholars since the Renaissance who have relied upon the interplay of drawings, models, textual analysis, intellectual ideas and cultural insights to scrutinise the discipline, nonetheless, until recently, there has been a reluctance within architectural culture to acknowledge and accept the role of design research as part of the discourse. However, in many countries around the world, one of the key changes in architecture and architectural education over the last decade has been the acceptance of design as a legitimate research area in its own right and this new series provides a forum where the best proponents of architectural design research can publish their work. This volume provides a broad overview on design research that supports and amplifies the different volumes coming out in the book series. It brings together leading architects and academics to discuss the more general issues involved in design research. At the end, there is an Indicative Bibliography which alludes to a long history of architectural books which can be seen as being in the spirit of design research.

The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design offers a compelling collection of original essays that seek to examine the shifting role of interior architecture and interior design, and their importance and meaning within the contemporary world. Interior architecture and interior design are disciplines that span a complexity of ideas, ranging from human behaviour and anthropology to history and the technology of the future. Approaches to designing the interior are in a constant state of flux, reflecting and adapting to the changing systems of history, culture and politics. It is this process that allows interior design to be used as evidence for identifying patterns of consumption, gender, identity and social issues. The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design provides a pioneering overview of the ideas and arrangements within the two disciplines that make them such important platforms from which to study the way humans interact with the space around them. Covering a wide range of thought and research, the book enables the reader to investigate fully the changing face of interior architecture and interior design, while offering questions about their future trajectory.

Intimate Metropolis explores connections between the modern city, its architecture, and its citizens, by questioning traditional conceptualizations of public and private. Rather than focusing purely on public spaces—such as streets, cafés, gardens, or department stores—or on the domestic sphere, the book investigates those spaces and practices that engage both the urban and the domestic, the public and the private. The legal, political and administrative frameworks of urban life are seen as constituting private individuals’ sense of self, in a wide range of European and world cities from Amsterdam and Barcelona to London and Chicago. Providing authoritative new perspectives on individual citizenship as it relates to both public and private space, in-depth case studies of major European, American and other world cities and written by an international set of contributors, this volume is key reading for all students of architecture.

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors explores how a diverse, pan-European group of eighteenth-century patrons - among them bankers, bishops, bluestockings, and courtesans - used architectural space and décor to shape and express identity. Eighteenth-century European architects understood the client's instrumental role in giving form and meaning to architectural space. In a treatise published in 1745, the French architect Germain Boffrand determined that a visitor could "judge the character of the master for whom the house was built by the way in which it is planned, decorated and distributed." This interdisciplinary volume addresses two key interests of contemporary historians working in a range of disciplines: one, the broad question of identity formation, most notably as it relates to ideas of gender, class, and ethnicity; and two, the role played by different spatial environments in the production - not merely the reflection - of identity at defining historical and cultural moments. By combining contemporary critical analysis with a historically specific approach, the book's contributors situate ideas of space and the self within the visual and material remains of interiors in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so, they offer compelling new insight not only into this historical period, but also into our own.