The first book to look architectural narrative in the eye Since the early eighties, many architects have used the term "narrative" to describe their work. To architects the enduring attraction of narrative is that it offers a way of engaging with the way a city feels and works. Rather than reducing architecture to mere style or an overt emphasis on technology, it foregrounds the experiential dimension of architecture. Narrative Architecture explores the potential for narrative as a way of interpreting buildings from ancient history through to the present, deals with architectural background, analysis and practice as well as its future development. Authored by Nigel Coates, a foremost figure in the field of narrative architecture, the book is one of the first to address this subject directly Features architects as diverse as William Kent, Antoni Gaudí, Eero Saarinen, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, and FAT to provide an overview of the work of NATO and Coates, as well as chapters on other contemporary designers Includes over 120 colour photographs Signposting narrative's significance as a design approach that can aid architecture to remain relevant in this complex, multi-disciplinary and multi-everything age, Narrative Architecture is a must-read for anyone with an interest in architectural history and theory.

Narrative Architecture explores the postmodern concept of narrative architecture from four perspectives: thinking, imagining, educating, and designing, to give you an original view on our postmodern era and architectural culture. Authors Sylvain De Bleeckere and Sebastiaan Gerards outline the ideas of thinkers, such as Edmund Husserl, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, and Peter Sloterdijk, and explore important work of famous architects, such as Daniel Libeskind and Frank Gehry, as well as rather underestimated architects like Günter Behnisch and Sep Ruf. With more than 100 black and white images this book will help you to adopt the design method in your own work.

Conceptual ordering, spatial and social narrative are fundamental to the ways in which buildings are shaped, used and perceived. This intriguing book explores the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings.

Narrative Architecture' reveals a stream of remarkable architectural and urban visions in the twentieth century that culminated in the construction of one of the most powerful, misunderstood and underutilized weapons of architectural and urban critique, thinking and representation.00This historical genealogy in three parts weaves inseparable modern architecture and narrative critique through never before seen images of half a century of utopian, heroic, commercial, ironic and critical projects by Le Corbusier, Team 10, Constant, Victor Gruen, Yona Friedman, Archizoom, Superstudio and Rem Koolhaas.00Alluding to Diogenes, the ancient kynic who wandered with a lantern in search of an honest man, through narrative, archival and provocative images and texts, the book lays the groundwork in search of an honest architecture able to question the pressing challenges of our times.

A characteristic trait of the maritime museums is that they are often located in a contemporary and/or historical environment from which the collections and narratives originate. The museum can thereby be directly linked to the site and its history. It is therefore vital to investigate the maritime museums in terms of relationships between landscape, architecture, museum and collections. This volume unravels the kinds of worlds and realities the Nordic maritime museums stage, which identities and national myths they depict, and how they make use of both the surrounding maritime environments and the architectural properties of the museum buildings.

‘When a work reaches its maximum intensity,’ wrote Le Corbusier, ‘a phenomenon of ineffable space occurs.’ The ultimate quality of architecture would reside, therefore, in the resistance to its description. However, to tell us this, and much more, the Swiss master has published more than seventy books and his so compelling formula in supporting the ineffable also shows how words are able to grasp it. This brief essay investigates the multiple intersections between discourse and design: the way buildings try to ‘talk’ with their own specific means; how architects are trying to remain relevant without building; the paradoxes of architecture description after its completion; the modes of communication during the project processes; the capacity of narrative to act before the project operations start and infiltrate the collective perception, making possible innovative approaches...

Chronicling the last radical architectural group of the twentieth century – NATØ (Narrative Architecture Today) – who emerged from the Architectural Association at the start of the 1980s, this book explores the group’s work which echoed a wider artistic and literary culture that drew on the specific political, social and physical condition of 1980s London. It traces NATؒs identification with a particular stream of post-punk, postmodern expression: a celebration of the abject, an aesthetic of entropy, and a do-it-yourself provisionality. NATØ has most often been documented in reference to Nigel Coates (the instigator of NATØ), which has led to a one-sided, one-dimensional record of NATؒs place in architectural history. This book sets out a more detailed, contextual history of NATØ, told through photographs, drawings, and ephemera, restoring a truer polyvocal narrative of the group’s ethos and development.