Product Description: "When le Corbusier assembled Vers Une Architecture," write the Smithsons, "he gave to young architects everywhere a way of looking at the emergent machine-served society, and from that, a way of looking at antiquity and a rationale to support his personal aesthetic...read more

Product Description: book is in very good condition with slight shelf wear. Dust jacket has slight smudges and one small tear.

Product Description: Book by Reineking, James

This collection of studies, reviews, and recollections focuses on music and the visual arts deals with Arcimboldo, Erte, the American artist Cy Twombley, Greek theater, and romantic art song

Considers the problem of stylistic change in art, arguing that art is not reducible to external political, social, or economic determinants (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this book selected contemporary architects and critics focus on the theme of rigor in architecture. They investigate the difficulties in sustaining the clarity of a design idea from its inception to the final details and the corresponding difficulty the critic has in tracing this process...read more

Product Description: Offers a new method to address the crucial problem of the definition of a scriptural style in Indian culture.

Product Description: The second volume in the "Design in the 20th Century" series, this book explains and then challenges the notion that a form in architecture and product design is derived solely from practical functions. The text sets the role of function in a historical perspective, quoting extensively from the writings of theorists and designers...read more

According to N. J. Habraken, intimate and unceasing interaction between people and the forms they inhabit uniquely defines built environment. The Structure of the Ordinary, the culmination of decades of environmental observation and design research, is a recognition and analysis of everyday environment as the wellspring of urban design and formal architecture. The authors central argument is that built environment is universally organized by the Orders of Form, Place, and Understanding. These three fundamental, interwoven principles correspond roughly to physical, biological, and social domains. Historically, "ordinary" environment was the background against which architects built the "extraordinary." Drawing upon extensive examples from archaeological and contemporary sites worldwide, the author illustrates profound recent shifts in the structure of everyday environment. One effect of these transformations, Habraken argues, has been the loss of implicit common understanding that previously enabled architects to formally enhance and innovate while still maintaining environmental coherence. Consequently, architects must now undertake a study of the ordinary as the fertile common ground in which form- and place-making are rooted. In focusing on built environment as an autonomous entity distinct from the societies and natural environments that jointly create it, this book lays the foundation for a new dialogue on methodology and pedagogy, in support of a more informed approach to professional intervention. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Provocative Form in Plato, Kant, Nietzsche (and Others) seeks (1) to liberate form from its primary affiliation with intellect and with its putative structural function; and (2) to relocate it as the correlate of imagination and desire...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In the eighty years since Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a copy of the Mona Lisa, the dissolving of cultural forms has intensified to the point that there is no longer an absolute, a “proper” form, anywhere. This generalized breakdown is evident in social and moral codes, in gender distinctions and personal relationships, in politics and economics, in literature, music, dance, painting, and architecture, in our concepts of reality itself. Is there any sense to be made of this seeming chaos? And if so, can any single theory adequately account for all aspects of the phenomenon? Physicists and mathematicians have informed us that reality is irreducibly complex and plural, unable to be exhausted by any one system of description. Following their lead, Mary Settegast has explored several different ways of looking at the reality of dissolving forms, seeing it as the result of global consumer capitalism; environmental deterioration; the end of a cycle of time; the beginning of a new cycle; a shift in the evolution of human consciousness; and finally, seeing the dissolution of form as a cause for celebration. Each of these six perspectives is theoretically “correct” in its ability to explain the breakdown, and each can be supported by the work of twentieth-century artists. Readers are asked to forego the impulse to choose which view they believe to be true and encouraged instead to practice the simultaneous holding of multiple perspectives: “Like the Cubist painters of the early twentieth century, who were among the first to recognize the error in a single point of view, we will be trying in these pages to portray our subject from all sides in hopes of capturing it whole.”

(view table of contents)