Presenting a collection of exploratory ideas, this book offers an understanding of buildings, people and settlements through concepts of flow. The metaphorical term 'the space of flows' was coined by the sociologist Manuel Castells. This book addresses this topic and the interest in processes that flow across traditional boundaries from the person to the building, from the sense of self to the settlement, from economics to identity.

Traditionally, architecture has been preoccupied with the resolution of form. That concern helps to make photogenic buildings, which have received a great deal of attention. This book looks instead at the idea of the flows, which connects things together and moves between things. It is more difficult to discuss, but more necessary, because it is what makes things work. Architects have to think about flow – the flow of people through buildings, the flow of energy into buildings, and waste out of them – but usually the effects of flow do not find expression. The essays gathered here present a collection of exploratory ideas and offer an understanding of buildings, people and settlements through concepts of flow.

A superb visual reference to the principles of architecture Now including interactive CD-ROM! For more than thirty years, the beautifully illustrated Architecture: Form, Space, and Order has been the classic introduction to the basic vocabulary of architectural design. The updated Third Edition features expanded sections on circulation, light, views, and site context, along with new considerations of environmental factors, building codes, and contemporary examples of form, space, and order. This classic visual reference helps both students and practicing architects understand the basic vocabulary of architectural design by examining how form and space are ordered in the built environment.? Using his trademark meticulous drawing, Professor Ching shows the relationship between fundamental elements of architecture through the ages and across cultural boundaries. By looking at these seminal ideas, Architecture: Form, Space, and Order encourages the reader to look critically at the built environment and promotes a more evocative understanding of architecture. In addition to updates to content and many of the illustrations, this new edition includes a companion CD-ROM that brings the book's architectural concepts to life through three-dimensional models and animations created by Professor Ching.

Can architecture help us find our place and way in today's complex world? Can it return individuals to a whole, to a world, to a community? Developing Giedion's claim that contemporary architecture's main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time, philosopher Karsten Harries answers that architecture should serve a common ethos. But if architecture is to meet that task, it first has to free itself from the dominant formalist approach, and get beyond the notion that its purpose is to produce endless variations of the decorated shed. In a series of cogent and balanced arguments, Harries questions the premises on which architects and theorists have long relied—premises which have contributed to architecture's current identity crisis and marginalization. He first criticizes the aesthetic approach, focusing on the problems of decoration and ornament. He then turns to the language of architecture. If the main task of architecture is indeed interpretation, in just what sense can it be said to speak, and what should it be speaking about? Expanding upon suggestions made by Martin Heidegger, Harries also considers the relationship of building to the idea and meaning of dwelling. Architecture, Harries observes, has a responsibility to community; but its ethical function is inevitably also political. He concludes by examining these seemingly paradoxical functions.

"This new edition ensures that the book will continue to be internationally acknowledged as the standard work on the development of modern architecture." -Walter Gropius "A remarkable accomplishment. . . one of the most valuable reference books for students and professionals concerned with the reshaping of our environment. " -José Luis Sert A milestone in modern thought, Space, Time and Architecture has been reissued many times since its first publication in 1941 and translated into half a dozen languages. In this revised edition of Sigfried Giedion’s classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations. The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new material on the later development of Frank Lloyd Wright and the more recent buildings of Walter Gropius, particularly his American Embassy in Athens. In his discussion of Le Corbusier, Mr. Giedion provides detailed analyses of the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Le Corbusier’s only building in the United States, and his Priory of La Tourette near Lyons. There is a section on his relations with his clients and an assessment of his influence on contemporary architecture, including a description of the Le Corbusier Center in Zurich (designed just before his death), which houses his works of art. The chapters on Mies van der Rohe and Alvar Aalto have been brought up to date with examples of their buildings in the sixties. There is an entirely new chapter on the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, whose work, as exemplified in his design for the Sydney Opera House, Mr. Giedion considers representative of post–World War II architectural concepts. A new essay, “Changing Notions of the City,” traces the evolution of the structure of the city throughout history and examines current attempts to deal with urban growth, as shown in the work of such architects as José Luis Sert, Kenzo Tange, and Fumihiko Maki. Mr. Sert’s Peabody Terrace is discussed as an example of the interlocking of the collective and individual spheres. Finally, the conclusion has been enlarged to include a survey of the limits of the organic in architecture.

A radical shift is taking place in the way that society is thinkingabout cities, a change from the machine metaphors of the 20thcentury to mathematical models of the processes of biological andnatural systems. From this new perspective, cities are regarded notsimply as spatially extended material artefacts, but as complexsystems that are analogous to living organisms, exhibiting many ofthe same characteristics. There is an emerging view that the designof the thousands of new cities needed for an expanding worldpopulation are to be founded on intelligent and inhabitedinfrastructural systems or ‘flow architectures’ ofurban metabolisms. The physical arrays of the flow architecture ofthe city are intimately connected to the networks of subsidiarysystems that collect and distribute energy, materials andinformation. They animate the city, and should therefore beintimately coupled to the spatial and cultural patterns of life inthe city, to the public spaces through which people flow, andshould unite rather than divide urban morphological and ecologicalsystems. Featured architects: AMID(cero9), Buro Happold, Foster +Partners, Groundlab and SOM. Contributors include: Joan Busquets, Kate Davies and Liam Young,Mehran Gharleghi, Evan Greenberg and George Jeronimidis, MarinaLathouri, Wolf Mangelsdorf, Daniel Segraves, Jack Self, RicardSolé and Sergi Valverde, and Iain Stewart.