Timo Carl presents alternatives to curtain wall facades and other flat boundaries creating autonomous spaces. He investigates facade typologies with multiple material layers to strategize the relationship between buildings and their environment. By revisiting Le Corbusier ́s seminal brise soleil an alternative reading of the modern project emerges: one that is not based on classical compositional rules, but instead on the dynamic relationships with environmental forces. Finally, an exciting series of project-based investigations sets out innovative ways in which novel deep skins combine energy-conscious performance with the poetics of architecture.

A companion to an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution from May to September 2002 illustrates designs relating to coverings that resemble, in some way or another human skin. Organics, artificial and digital skin, vessels and membranes, padding and protection, and warps and folds are among the dimensions explored. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Looks at deep veils in architecture through ten small scale projects of Erik L'Heureux and his design practice Pencil Office based in Singapore.

Dare experiments! The book documents the teaching philosophy developed at the chair of experimental design by Frank Stepper and his team at the University of Kassel. The approach places an emphasis on fostering and developing aesthetic and formal imagination through experimentation. Thinking the "impossible" helps to formulate architectural concepts that progress beyond predictable causalities and functional constraints. For the emergence of innovative designs and novel construction typologies analogue models are augmented with computational strategies and digital fabrication methods. 20 Years of teaching Experimental Architecture, from introductory to thesis level projects Experimental videos with QR code links With contributions by Hitoshi Abe, Marie Therese Harnancourt-Fuchs, Steffanie Hennecke and others

Elizabeth Bishop, who constructed poems of crystalline visual accuracy, is often regarded as the most painterly of twentieth-century American poets. In Deep Skin, Peggy Samuels explores Bishop's attraction to painters who experimented with dynamic interactions between surface and depth. She tells the story of the development of Bishop's poetics in relation to her engagement with mid-century art, particularly the work of Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters, and Alexander Calder.Contemporary conversations about the visual arts circulating among art historians and reviewers shaped Bishop's experience and illuminated aesthetic problems for which she needed to find solutions. The book explores in particular the closest intellectual context for Bishop, her friend Margaret Miller, who worked as a research associate and later associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Samuels traces a complex and rich four-way metaphor in her portrait of Bishop's methods: surface of verse, surface of painting, skin, and interface between mind and world.The visual arts helped Bishop to develop a new model for lyric: the surface of verse becomes a threshold that opens in two directions--to nature and to the interior of the poet. Bishop's poetics is very much about the touch of the materials of the mind and world inside the materiality of verse. Translating and revising some of the concepts from the visual arts in her own linguistic medium, she begins to experiment with modulation, absorption, and incorporation across multiple registers of experience.

Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination: The Harmony of Forms assesses the relationship between architectural and poetic innovation in the United States across the twentieth century. Taking the work of five key poets as case studies and drawing on the work of a rich range of other writers, architects, artists, and commentators, this study proposes that by examining the sustained and productive--if hitherto overlooked--engagement between the two disciplines, we enrich our understanding of the complexity and interrelationship of both. The book begins by tracing the rise of what was conceived of as 'modern' (and often 'international style') architecture and by showing how poetry and architecture in the early decades of the century developed in dialogue, and within a shared, and often transnational, context. It then moves on to examine the material, aesthetic, and social conditions that helped shape both disciplines, offering new readings of familiar poems and bringing other pertinent resources to light. It considers the uses to which poets of the period put the insights of architecture--and vice versa. In closing, Gill turns to modern and contemporary architects' written accounts of their own practice, in memoirs and other commentaries, and examines how they have assimilated, or resisted, the practice and vision of poetry.

The external facades of a building are more than a protective mantle, or an intelligent skin regulating temperature and light, they also determine its very appearance. By unusual choices of materials and the use of complex technology, facades have become increasingly significant in recent years. External surfaces are being perceived as an integral part of the building and are therefore being designed as such. This volume focuses on the wide-ranging aspects of facade design, from the selection and use of materials to the advanced technical possibilities now open to the architect. A wide array of carefully selected international examples show the theory in the practice. All plans, details, and large scale sections of the facades have been researched with the high degree of competence typical of the editorial staff from the review Detail. Expert authors provide the essential information needed to plan and design facades and elucidate on the latest developments in technology and materials.