A beautifully designed guidebook to the unnoticed yet essential elements of our cities, from the creators of the wildly popular 99% Invisible podcast

Publisher Description

Publicatie n.a.v. de conferentie gehouden op 1 april 2006 op de faculteit Bouwkunde van de TU Delft over de huidige en toekomstige veranderingen rond de digitaal ontworpen architectuur- en designpraktijk.

The creation of new environments through the use of developments in Information Technology is significantly altering not only architecture itself but also the roles and tasks of the architects. Architecture can no longer be described in the terms we are familiar with since it no longer corresponds to the form of architecture as we know it: an inclusive and exclusive structure, clearly defined, with a single interior and a single exterior. For architects, the challenge of the future will increasingly lie in creatively coming to terms with hybrid environments, understanding and exploiting the design potential of digital spaces within the physical world, and redefining the role of architecture within a visually dominated culture. This volume presents a valuable and attractive contribution to the contemporary discussion on this subject.

The imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings and models, told through reminiscences, stories, conversations, letters, and monologues. Even when an architectural drawing does not show any human figures, we can imagine many different characters just off the page: architects, artists, onlookers, clients, builders, developers, philanthropists—working, observing, admiring, arguing. In Stories from Architecture, Philippa Lewis captures some of these personalities through reminiscences, anecdotes, conversations, letters, and monologues that collectively offer the imagined histories of twenty-five architectural drawings. Some of these untold stories are factual, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s correspondence with a Wisconsin librarian regarding her $5,000 dream home, or letters written by the English architect John Nash to his irascible aristocratic client. Others recount a fictional, if credible, scenario by placing these drawings—and with them their characters—into their immediate social context. For instance, the dilemmas facing a Regency couple who are considering a move to a suburban villa; a request from the office of Richard Neutra for an assistant to measure Josef von Sternberg’s Rolls-Royce so that the director’s beloved vehicle might fit into the garage being designed by his architect; a teenager dreaming of a life away from parental supervision by gazing at a gadget-filled bachelor pad in Playboy magazine; even a policeman recording the ground plans of the house of a murder scene. The drawings, reproduced in color, are all sourced from the Drawing Matter collection in Somerset, UK, and are fascinating objects in themselves; but Lewis shifts our attention beyond the image to other possible histories that linger, invisible, beyond the page, and in the process animates not just a series of archival documents but the writing of architectural history.

This book investigates the relationship architecture has with the underground. It provides a broad ranging historical and theoretical survey of, and critical reflection on, ideas pertaining to the creation and occupation of underground space. It overturns the classic dictates of construction on the surface and through numerous examples explores recoveries of existing voids, excavations, caves, quarries, grottos and burrows. The exploitation of land, especially in areas of particular value, has given rise to the need to reformulate the usual approach to building. If the development of urban sprawl, its infrastructure and its networks, generates increasingly compromised landscapes, what are the possible strategies to transform, expand and change the usual relationship between abuse of soil and unused subsoil? Psychological, philosophical, literary and cinematographic legacies of underground architecture are mixed with the compositional, typological and constructive expedients, to produce a rich, diverse and compelling argument for these spaces. As such, the book will appeal to architecture students, scholars and academics as well as those with an interest in literary theory, cinema and cultural studies.