"Paperback reissue, with a new introduction by the author."

Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture: Designing in Mixed Realities presents a curated selection of projects and texts contributed by leading international architects and designers who are using virtual reality technologies in their design process. It triggers discussion and debate on exploring the aesthetic potential and establishing its language as an expressive medium in architectural design. Although virtual reality is not new and the technology has evolved rapidly, the aesthetic potential of the medium is still emerging and there is a great deal more to explore. The book provides a comprehensive overview of the current use of virtual reality technologies in the architectural design process. Contributions are presented in six parts, fully illustrated with over 150 images. Recent projects presented are distributed in five themes: introduction to mixed realities; space and form; context and ambiguity; materiality and movement; body and social. Each theme includes richly illustrated essays by leading academics and practitioners, including those from Zaha Hadid Architects and MVRDV, detailing their design process using data-driven methodologies. Virtual Aesthetics in Architecture expands the use of technology per se and focuses on how architecture can benefit from its aesthetic potential during the design process. A must-read for practitioners, academics, and students interested in cutting-edge digital design.

This book deals with the aesthetic potentials of sustainable architecture and its practice. In contrast to the mechanistic model, the book attempts to open a new area of scholarship and debate on sustainability in the design and production of architecture. It traces and underscores how the consideration of environment and sustainability is directly connected to aesthetic propositions in architecture.

Originally published in 1995 as part of the Ethnoscapes: Current Challenges in the Environmental Social Sciences series, reissued now with a new series introduction, On the Aesthetics of Architecture is a result of an interdisciplinary study in architectural theory, psychology and philosophy and the author’s experience as a practicing architect. It tries to relate theories of aesthetics and recent advances in the psychology of visual perception to the practice of design. The text starts with an analysis of traditional and contemporary schools of thought in architectural theory, and then proceeds through the formulation of a general theory of aesthetics based on perceptual and cognitive information processing to a description of the actual conditions under which aesthetic experiences of buildings and cities take place. It exemplifies principles of aesthetic appropriateness through an analysis of architectural space and form. Weber’s book attempts to move the discussion of architectural aesthetics beyond the shifting doctrines of style and the often ambiguous dicta of critics. While the author makes no claim that his interpretation of psychological research will result in good architecture, he does insist on the need to bring the discussion of form back to more objective grounds. As such, it provided a valuable teaching resource and an important new contribution to the discussion among architects themselves, as well as between psychologists, philosophers and art theorists at the time.

Reality Modeled After Images: Architecture and Aesthetics after the Digital Image explores architecture’s entanglement with contemporary image culture. It looks closely at how changes produced through technologies of mediation alter disciplinary concepts and produce political effects. Through both historical and contemporary examples, it focuses on how conventions of representation are established, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Critical investigations are conjoined with inquiries into aesthetics and technology in the hope that the tensions between them can aid an exploration into how architectural images are produced, disseminated, and valued; how images alter assumptions regarding the appearances of architecture and the environment. For students and academics in architecture, design and media studies, architectural and art history, and related fields, this book shows how design is impacted and changed by shifts in image culture, representational conventions and technologies.

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment When buildings are deemed ugly, what are the consequences? In Ugliness and Judgment, Timothy Hyde considers the role of aesthetic judgment—and its concern for ugliness—in architectural debates and their resulting social effects across three centuries of British architectural history. From eighteenth-century ideas about Stonehenge to Prince Charles’s opinions about the National Gallery, Hyde uncovers a new story of aesthetic judgment, where arguments about architectural ugliness do not pertain solely to buildings or assessments of style, but intrude into other spheres of civil society. Hyde explores how accidental and willful conditions of ugliness—including the gothic revival Houses of Parliament, the brutalist concrete of the South Bank, and the historicist novelty of Number One Poultry—have been debated in parliamentary committees, courtrooms, and public inquiries. He recounts how architects such as Christopher Wren, John Soane, James Stirling, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe have been summoned by tribunals of aesthetic judgment. With his novel scrutiny of lawsuits for libel, changing paradigms of nuisance law, and conventions of monarchical privilege, he shows how aesthetic judgments have become entangled in wider assessments of art, science, religion, political economy, and the state. Moving beyond superficialities of taste in order to see how architectural improprieties enable architecture to participate in social transformations, Ugliness and Judgment sheds new light on the role of aesthetic measurement in our world.

A sophisticated but engaging look at the debates and ideas involved in the aesthetics of architecture - part of a major new series from Continuum's philosophy list.