This book is a compilation of lectures given to students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on the work of contemporary architects.

This book examines the central decades of Peter Eisenman’s work through a formal and thematic analysis of key architectural projects and writings, revealing underlying characteristics and arguing for their productive continuity and transformative role. The book explores Eisenman’s approach to architectural form generation and thinking. It does this through a thematic and formal analysis of projects and writings from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Following an introductory chapter addressing the theme of potentialities, the book is organised in two parts. The first part focuses on key period writings of Eisenman, framing the close reading around a practice of resistance, the architect’s approach to history as analysis, and the transformative conceptualisation of time. In the second part, the book undertakes an analysis of select projects from the 1980s and 1990s. Three formal preoccupations and conceptual orientations – ground manipulations, figuration, and spatial events – organise this part of the book. Previously unpublished material from the Peter Eisenman fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, provides primary source material. A concluding chapter addresses Eisenman’s teaching, its relation to his larger project, and possible legacies for educators, practitioners, scholars, and theorists.

This monograph contains many designs for homes, for museums, high-rise buildings, and various applications of their PRO/con and PRO/dek prefab work.

Judging from the debates taking place in both education and practice, it appears that architecture is deeply in crisis. New design and production techniques, together with the globalization of capital and even skilled-labour, have reduced architecture to a commodified object, its aesthetic qualities tapping into the current pervasive desire for the spectacular. These developments have changed the architect’s role in the design and production processes of architecture. Moreover, critical architectural theories, including those of Breton, Heidegger and Benjamin, which explored the concepts of technology, modernism, labour and capital and how technology informed the cultural, along with later theories from the 1960s, which focused more on the architect’s theorization of his/her own design strategies, seem increasingly irrelevant. In an age of digital reproduction and commodification, these theoretical approaches need to be reassessed. Bringing together essays and interviews from leading scholars such as Kenneth Frampton, Peggy Deamer, Bernard Tschumi, Donald Kunze and Marco Biraghi, this volume investigates and critically addresses various dimensions of the present crisis of architecture. It poses questions such as: Is architecture a conservative cultural product servicing a given producer/consumer system? Should architecture’s affiliative ties with capitalism be subjected to a measure of criticism that can be expanded to the entirety of the cultural realm? Is architecture’s infusion into the cultural the reason for the visibility of architecture today? What room does the city leave for architecture beyond the present delirium of spectacle? Should the thematic of various New Left criticisms of capitalism be taken as the premise of architectural criticism? Or alternatively, putting the notion of criticality aside is it enough to confine criticism to the production of insightful and pleasurable texts?

This handbook, representing the collaboration of 40 scholars, provides a multi-faceted exploration of roughly 6,000 years of Chinese architecture, from ancient times to the present. This volume combines a broad-spectrum approach with a thematic framework for investigating Chinese architecture, integrating previously fragmented topics and combining the scholarship of all major periods of Chinese history. By organizing its approach into five parts, this handbook: Traces the practices and traditions of ancient China from imperial authority to folk culture Unveils a rich picture of early modern and republican China, revealing that modernization was already beginning to emerge Describes the social, intellectual, ideological, and formal enterprises of socialist architecture Frames a window on a complex and changing contemporary China by focusing on autonomy, state practices, and geopolitics of design, ultimately identifying its still evolving position on the world stage Examines the existing cultural and political theories to highlight potential avenues for future transformations in Chinese architecture that also retain Chinese identity Providing a pioneering combination of ancient and modern Chinese architecture in one coherent study, this book is a must-read for scholars, students, and educators of Chinese architecture, architectural history and theory, and the architecture of Asia.

Looking back over the twentieth century, Hartoonian discusses the work of three major architects: Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi, in reference to their theoretical positions and historicizes present architecture in the context of the ongoing secularization of the myths surrounding the traditions of nineteenth century architecture in general, and, in particular, Gottfried Semper's discourse on the tectonic. Providing a valuable contribution to the current debates surrounding architectural history and theory, this passionately written book makes valuable reading for any architect.