Today, with the advent of digital media technologies and the ability to conceptualize, express and produce complex forms using digital means, the question of the status of the architectural form is once again under consideration. Indeed, the computer liberated architecture from the tyranny of the right angle and enabled the design and production of non-standard buildings, based on irregular geometry. Yet, the questions concerning the method of form expression in contemporary architecture, and its meaning, remain very much open. Performalism takes up this discussion, defines it and presents changes in form conception in architecture, followed by their repercussions. The book is supported by a wealth of case studies from some of the top firms across the globe and contributed to by some of the top names in this field. With a unique and insightful emphasis on professional practice this is essential reading for all architects, aspiring and practicing.

Fusion: The Performance of Architecture explores the work of award-winning, Boston-based architecture firm Payette, a leader in the design of complex settings for science and healthcare. Payette’s work embodies the integration of design and performance that is essential to the creation of humane and sustainable buildings of any type. To achieve this integration amidst the programmatic intricacy, technological complexity, and intense energy use of hospitals and laboratories, the firm draws on its almost ninety-year history of progressive innovation. It draws, as well, on an inclusive, collaborative, research-oriented culture that is a model for the profession. Fusion presents Payette’s philosophy and traces the firm’s contributions through concise histories of laboratory and hospital design. It explores the core principles that underlie its work—Identity and Transformation, Materiality and Craft, Taming Complexity and Measuring Performance—and digs deeply into seven of the firm’s most recent projects. Other chapters describe the process of nurturing the design excellence and practice culture that earned Payette the 2019 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The monograph’s 400 diagrams, drawings, and photographs reveal the firm’s principles and methods, along with the open-source tools it has developed to enable it to design, not “by the numbers,” but with the numbers. A gallery of architectural “fingerprints” presents plan views of more than 100 of Payette’s projects, drawn to a common scale. With a preface by Z Smith, Director of Sustainability and Building Performance at EskewDumezRipple, and an introduction from Kevin Sullivan, President of Payette, Fusion includes essays by Sullivan and partners James Collins, George Marsh, Leon Drachman, Andrea Love and Peter Vieira, as well as a critical reflection by Mark Lee, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Architecture is on the brink. It is a discipline in crisis. Over the last two decades, architectural debate has diversified to the point of fragmentation and exhaustion. What is called for is an overarching argument or set of criteria on which to approach the design and construction of the built environment. Here, the internationally renowned architect and educator Michael Hensel advocates an entirely different way of thinking about architecture. By favouring a new focus on performance, he rejects longstanding conventions in design and the built environment. This not only bridges the gap between academia and practice, but, even more significantly, the treatment of form and function in design. It also has a far-reaching impact on knowledge production and development, placing an important emphasis on design research in architecture and the value of an interdisciplinary approach. Though ‘performance’ first evolved as a concept in the humanities in the 1940s and 1950s, it has never previously been systematically applied in architecture in an inclusive manner. Here Michael Hensel offers Performance-Orientated Architecture as an integrative approach to architectural design, the built environment and questions of sustainability. He highlights how core concepts and specific traits, such as climate, material performance and settlement patterns, can put architecture in the service of the natural environment. A wide range of examples are cited to support his argument, from traditional sustainable buildings, such as the Kahju Bridge in Isfahan and the Topkapí Palace in Istanbul to more contemporary works by Cloud 9, Foreign Office Architects, Steven Holl and OCEAN.

For the past 50 years, the advancements of technology have equipped architects with unique tools that have enabled the development of new computer-mediated design methods, fabrication techniques, and architectural expressions. Simultaneously, in contemporary architecture new frameworks emerged that have radically redefined the traditional conceptions of design, of the built environment, and of the role of architects. Cybernetic Architectures argues that such frameworks have been constructed in direct reference to cybernetic thinking, a thought model that emerged concurrently with the origins of informatics and that embodies the main assumptions, values, and ideals underlying the development of computer science. The book explains how the evolution of the computational perspective in architecture has been parallel to the construction of design issues in reference to the central ideas fostered by the cybernetic model. It unpacks and explains this crucial relationship, in the work of digital architects, between the use of information technology in design and the conception of architectural problems around an informational ontology. This book will appeal to architecture students and scholars interested in understanding the recent transformations in the architectural landscape related to the advent of computer-based design paradigms.

The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory documents and builds upon some of the most innovative developments in architectural theory over the last two decades. Bringing into dialogue a range of geographically, institutionally and historically competing positions, the book examines and explores parallel debates in related fields. The book is divided into eight sections: Power/Difference/Embodiment Aesthetics/Pleasure/Excess Nation/Spectacle/Modernity History/Memory/Tradition Design/Practice/Production Technology/Science/Virtuality Nature/Landscape/Sustainability City/Metropolis/Territory Creating openings for future lines of inquiry and establishing the basis for new directions for education, research and practice, the book organizes itself around specific case studies to provide a critical, interpretive and speculative enquiry into the relevant debates in architectural theory. A methodical, authoritative and comprehensive addition to the literature, the Handbook is suitable for academics, researchers and practitioners in architecture, urban geography, cultural studies, sociology and geography.

Architecture and Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time examines the field of archi-choreographic experiments—unique interdisciplinary encounters and performed events generated through collaborations between architects and choreographers. Forty case studies spanning four decades give evidence of the range of motivations for embarking on these creative endeavors and diverse conceptual underpinnings, generative methods, objects of inquiry, and outcomes. Architecture and Choreography builds histories and theories through which to examine these works, the contexts within, and processes through which the works emerged, and the critical questions they raise about ways to work together, sites and citations, ethics and equity, control and agency. Three themes frame pairs of chapters. The first addresses disciplinarity through works that critically reflect upon their discipline’s tools, techniques, and conventions juxtaposed against projects that cite or use other art forms and cultural phenomena as source material. The second interrogates space and the role of spatial dispositifs, institutions, and sites, and their hidden and not-so-hidden conditions, as conceptual drivers and structures to subvert, trouble, unsettle, remember. The third asks who and what dances, finding a spectrum from mobilized architectural bodies to more-than-human cybarcorps. Modes of collaboration and the temporalities and life cycles of projects inform bookending chapters. Architecture and Choreography offers vital lessons not only for architects and choreographers but also for students and practitioners across design and performance fields.

Once condemned by Modernism and compared to a ‘crime’ by Adolf Loos, ornament has made a spectacular return in contemporary architecture. This is typified by the works of well-known architects such as Herzog & de Meuron, Sauerbruch Hutton, Farshid Moussavi Architecture and OMA. There is no doubt that these new ornamental tendencies are inseparable from innovations in computer technology. The proliferation of developments in design software has enabled architects to experiment afresh with texture, colour, pattern and topology. Though inextricably linked with digital tools and culture, Antoine Picon argues that some significant traits in ornament persist from earlier Western architectural traditions. These he defines as the ‘subjective’ – the human interaction that ornament requires in both its production and its reception – and the political. Contrary to the message conveyed by the founding fathers of modern architecture, traditional ornament was not meant only for pleasure. It conveyed vital information about the designation of buildings as well as about the rank of their owners. As such, it participated in the expression of social values, hierarchies and order. By bringing previous traditions in ornament under scrutiny, Picon makes us question the political issues at stake in today’s ornamental revival. What does it tell us about present-day culture? Why are we presently so fearful of meaning in architecture? Could it be that by steering so vehemently away from symbolism, contemporary architecture is evading any explicit contribution to collective values?